Are Voters Locked In to Their Candidate?
Despite months of campaigning, this year’s presidential election seems deadlocked with each candidate’s support staying pretty much the same. Candidates go to great lengths to convince voters to change their minds but do any of their efforts work? For example, one study found that efforts to change voters’ choice of a candidate through mailed literature produced just a 0.2 percent switch.
Voters are very devoted to their candidate, following her or his lead even when the candidate seems to flip-flop on issues. BYU political science professors Michael Barber and Jeremy Pope in a survey of 1,300 Americans found that liberals were more amenable to endorsing a conservative view if told their chosen Democratic candidate supported it. The same was true for conservative and strong Republicans if they were told that a Republican candidate had endorsed a Democratic policy, such as raising the minimum wage to over $10 an hour. An earlier study by Yale’s Geoffrey Cohen found that conservatives preferred a more generous welfare reform proposal when told it came from a Republican and liberals preferred a less generous proposal when told it came from a Democrat.
Voters even seem unfazed when they know their favored politician is lying. Rice University’s Minjae Kim and his colleagues at MIT and Carnegie Mellon used online surveys from 2018-2023. They found that supporters of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden who acknowledged these politicians said things that were factually wrong about the 2020 election and COVID vaccination, respectively, were willing to justify the lies because their candidate was after a more important “moral truth.” In short, the voters felt the end justified the means.
Can voters be moved to re-consider their views on issues even if their candidate has not? Research suggests it’s difficult. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla at UC, Berkeley and Yale paid 304 regular Fox News viewers $15 an hour to watch up to seven hours of CNN for a week during September 2020. Viewers were given regular news quizzes to make sure they were doing so. By the end of the month, compared to a control group of Fox News watchers, those who had been paid were less critical of liberal views and less convinced of fears about Joe Biden concerning issues related to Black Lives Matter protests and policing. It’s not clear how lasting the effect was, however. Once they were no longer paid, participants went back to watching Fox News.
What research does suggest is that a diverse group using a deliberate approach to discussion can reach consensus. This is most common in jury deliberations where a random group is expected to consider facts, listen to each other and reach a verdict. As reported in an article by Chris Woolston, a noted example of the use of what is called “deliberative democracy” came before the 2018 Irish referendum on legalizing abortion. Parliament created a deliberative group that consisted of one-third members of the legislature and two-thirds random citizens. Their deliberations resulted in a consensus referendum that passed by about a 2-1 margin. How to create such conversations in a deeply polarized America is the problem.
The power of diversity in changing minds also showed up in a study by Michael Baker and Francoise Detienne of pairs of people from England and France who were asked to fact-check social media tweets about selected topics. When the pairs were French-French or English-English, their efforts consisted mostly of finding confirming evidence for what they already believed about the topic (which nation produces more varieties of cheese or in which nation people are more likely to shower daily). But with French-English pairs people were more willing to consider and discuss evidence and change their initial beliefs.
Two additional findings point to what will not work. A study by Arizona State University professor Nathan Ballantyne of 600 U.S. participants engaged in discussion of topics concerning politics, faith and well-being suggests one barrier. People can experience what is called “persuasion fatigue” when discussion with someone intent on changing their mind lasts too long. People back away and blame the failure on the other party. What a person thinks about the intent of the source providing them with evidence can also be a barrier. In a study by Boston College’s Liane Young, 1,181 participants were given factual claims and the actual truthful evidence. Asked to rate each claim as true or false, participants were more likely to judge a truthful claim as false if they thought the source was trying to deceive them, even when handed the literal truth about the claim by the researcher. They were more likely to accept the veracity of the claim if they thought the source’s intent was just to inform them.
Some voters of course do change their minds. Their numbers may be small but these studies suggest that more reasoned decisions about candidates depend on voters who come to see the fault lines in their own decision making and the limited opportunities they give themselves to engage thoughtfully with differing views.
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