Why do Democrats keep losing Presidential Elections?

Democrats bombard voters with laundry lists

of issues, facts, figures, and policy positions

Republicans offer emotionally compelling appeals

to voters' values, principles, or prejudices

A dispassionate mind that makes decisions

by weighing the evidence and reasoning

to the most valid conclusions

bears no relation to how the mind

and brain actually work

When Political strategists start

from this vision of mind,

their candidates typically lose

What Ails Democrats?

Democrats have been silent or defensive on virtually every "wedge" issue that has divided our nation for much of the last 30 years.

When the Republicans tried to play the hate card again in 2006, this time under the cover of immigration reform, Democrats scrambled to pull together a "policy" on immigration, instead of simply asking, "What's the matter, gays aren't working for you anymore?"

So how did we find ourselves where we are today, with an electorate that has finally figured out that the once larger-than-life Wizard of Terror was nothing but a projection on a screen -- and an opposition party that can't seem to find its heart, its brain, or its courage, and instead wonders what's the matter with Kansas?

And most importantly, how do we find our way back home?

Psychology professor and author Drew Westen has an interesting theory about Democratic candidates' brains.

In his book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Perseus, 2007) Westen has investigated why it is that in election after election when Democrats have consistently led by huge margins on the issues they've somehow managed to lose national presidential elections.

Westen believes it's the role emotion can play and the fact that candidates from Mondale to Kerry were too dispassionate for the American public's tastes.

Different groups of voters may have radically different associations to the same thing (whether to guns, gays, abortion, or immigrants).

Unfortunately, these are just the kinds of issues that arouse the most passion and, hence, have the biggest impact on both voting and get-out-the-vote efforts. And they are generally the issues Democrats try to avoid.

If you cede the contentious issues, you cede passion to the other side. And given that people vote with their "guts," if you cede passion, you ultimately concede elections.

Democrats Avoid Passion

Behind every campaign lies a vision of mind -- often implicit, rarely articulated, and generally invisible to the naked eye. Traces of that vision can be seen in everything a campaign does or doesn't do.

The vision of mind that has captured the imagination of Democratic strategists for much of the last 40 years -- a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions -- bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. When strategists start from this vision of mind, their candidates typically lose.

Democrats typically bombard voters with laundry lists of issues, facts, figures, and policy positions, while Republicans offer emotionally compelling appeals, whether to voters' values, principles, or prejudices.

As a result, we have seen only one Democrat elected and reelected to the White House since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Clinton, who, like Roosevelt, understood how to connect with voters emotionally) and only one Republican fail to do so (George Bush Senior, who ran like a Democrat and paid for it).

Our brains are nothing but vast networks of neurons. Of particular importance for understanding politics are "networks of associations" -- bundles of thoughts, feelings, sounds, images, memories, and emotions that have become linked through experience.

People can't tell you much about what's in those networks, or about what's likely to change them (which happen to be the central determinants of voting behavior).

They can't tell you because they don't have conscious access to them, any more than they can tell you what's going on in their pancreas. And if you ask them, they often get it wrong.

In polls and focus groups, voters told John Kerry's consultants that they didn't like "negativity," so the consultants told Kerry to avoid it.

To what extent those voters just didn't know the power of negative appeals on their own networks, or didn't want to admit it, is unclear.

What is clear is that George W. Bush won the election by spending 75 percent of his budget on negativity against a candidate whose refusal to fight back projected nothing but weakness in the face of aggression -- precisely the narrative Bush was constructing about Kerry.

If you start with the assumption of a dispassionate mind -- of voters who weigh the utility of each candidate's stand on a range of issues and calculate which candidate has the greater utility -- you inevitably turn to pollsters as oracles to divine which issues are up, which are down, and which are best avoided.

The vision of the dispassionate mind represents public opinion in one dimension -- a straight line, from up to down, high to low, pro-choice to anti-abortion, anti-gun to pro-gun.

But this is a one-dimensional rendering of three-dimensional data. If you start with networks, you think very differently about campaigns, from the way you interpret polling data to the way you handle the wedge issues that have run Democratic campaigns into the ground for decades.

On virtually every contentious political issue -- abortion, welfare, gay marriage, tax cuts, and, yes, guns -- polls show a seemingly "mixed" pattern of results, with the electorate endorsing what seem like contradictory positions.

The vast majority of Americans support gun regulations but also support the right to bear arms. So are Americans pro-gun or anti-gun?

That's the wrong question. And it inevitably leads Democratic strategists to the wrong answer: "Take the issue off the table -- it's radioactive."

This kind of one-dimensional thinking fails to appreciate that voters may be of two minds about an issue.

The same issue often activates two or more networks that lead to different feelings in the same person.

For example, concern about guns in the hands of criminals, and support for the rights of law-abiding citizens to protect their families.

Different groups of voters may have radically different associations to the same thing (whether to guns, gays, abortion, or immigrants).

Unfortunately, these are just the kinds of issues that arouse the most passion and, hence, have the biggest impact on both voting and get-out-the-vote efforts. And they are generally the issues Democrats try to avoid.

If you cede the contentious issues, you cede passion to the other side. And given that people vote with their "guts," if you cede passion, you ultimately concede elections.

Republicans go straight for these gut issues, and they now have the confidence that they can do so even when support for their position is in the range of 30 percent.

As is the case with their absolutist stance on abortion (that abortion is murder and should be illegal under all circumstances) and guns (that the right to bear arms is inviolable, no matter what the death toll).

Democrats usually don't contest them, the public never hears a compelling counter narrative, and public opinion gradually shifts to the right.

If you understand how networks work, you understand that candidates should never avoid anything -- particularly when the other side is talking about it.

Doing so gives the opposition exclusive rights to the networks that create and constitute public opinion. Drew Westen