It would
truly take talent for the Democrats to lose this election (although Democrats
have never hurt for talent). Seventy percent
of Americans tell pollsters that the country is on the “wrong track.” The
Republican president’s approval ratings have hovered around 30 percent for two
years. For the first time since 1992, the majority of Americans answer in the
negative to Ronald Reagan’s electoral litmus test (“Are you better off than you
were four years ago?”). In presidential match-ups, independents overwhelmingly
prefer generic Democrats to generic Republicans. And most voters trend strongly
Democratic on the vast majority of issues confronting the country, particularly
when offered messages designed to be compelling (as opposed to the more
“neutral” language of so much polling, which asks people to rate statements
such as “Global warming should be one of the government’s top priorities.”)
Independents’ attitudes tend to be far closer to Democrats’ than Republicans’
views on health care, the economy, energy independence, Iraq, and even
the Republicans’ most recent wedge issue, immigration. But with the circular
firing squad among Democrats beginning to take its toll, John McCain is now matching
up remarkably well in polls against his two potential rivals for November--and with
their nomination process in suspended animation, the Democrats are in danger of
employing the best strategy for losing in November: Waiting until the
Democratic primary contest is over to start a full-fledged branding campaign
against the presumptive Republican nominee.
The reason
that is a losing strategy is as much neurological as political. As explained in
greater length in my book, The Political
Brain: The Role of Emotion In Deciding the Fate of the Nation), much of
our brain consists of networks of associations--thoughts, images, ideas,
memories, and emotions--that become connected with each other over time, so
that activating one part of a network activates the rest (including the
gut-level feelings associated with a candidate that “summarize” voters’
judgments about the candidate and are among the best predictors in the voting
booth). The more times a network is activated, the harder it is to change, for
reasons both physiological and psychological.
Physiologically,
the more two neurons are activated together, the more likely one is to trigger
the other, as chemical changes in the cells themselves and the actual growth of
physical links between them bind them together. Pragmatically speaking, that
means that the more times voters hear John McCain described as a war hero and a
strong potential commander-in-chief—instead of, for example, a man with such
poor judgment on national security that he would support an endless
continuation of an ill-fated war much like the one he suffered through despite his own personal experience--the
harder it will be to deactivate that network and inhibit those neural links. Similarly,
from a psychological standpoint, the longer voters hear the story that McCain
is a “straight talker,” the more they will filter out and actively resist
disconfirming information, such as his involvement
in the Keating Five, his fall off the wagon of the Straight Talk Express when
it seemed expedient to wrap his arms around George W. Bush and Jerry Falwell,
his embrace of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy when he knew--and stated clearly
when he initially voted against them--that they were both fiscally unwise and
unfair to middle class Americans.