Vibes in Politics

What are vibes?

Most fundamentally, “vibes” is the idea that politics is rooted in and governed by mass psychology, which makes political behavior intrinsically difficult (and sometimes impossible) to model as a series of quantifiable inputs and predictable outputs, the approach favored by econometrically-inclined disciplines.

Like any system in which many actors can mutually affect each other, the group psychology of politics leads to a lot of hard-to-predict, chaotic outcomes. It’s easy to end up with feedback loops in public opinion, or booms, bubbles, manias, and crashes. Shifts can occur gradually and incrementally, or can take hold abruptly for reasons that are hard to observe or explain. It’s an inherently unstable environment, one in which cause and effect is frequently difficult to ascertain, even in retrospect. Instead of a chaotic three-body problem in physics, American politics is in some sense a 330-million-body problem.

Of course, that’s not to say public opinion is purely random. Even if the effects aren’t linear or easily predictable, there are clearly forces at work in politics, forces that move voters. There are clear, observable shifts in public opinion — as if a gust had occurred and pushed everyone one direction all at once — and something causes those shifts. The question is what.

On some level, the answer is obviously “a lot of things” or maybe even “pretty much anything.” But what makes sense — and often seems to track everyday experience — is that the forces that are going to have the strongest, most immediate, and most linear effect are those that act most directly, most unambiguously, and are least vulnerable to reinterpretation. This seems to exclude most things experienced in day-to-day life, because interpretation of those events is easily distorted by a person’s preconceived notions of the world. (Think about the COVID pandemic and associated difficulties in daily life. Do voters blame incumbent politicians? Do they think, if not for incumbents, things would be worse? Maybe they blame some foreign country or a shadowy conspiracy! Interpretation of events depends significantly on their prior framing.) While this is not a complete obstacle to information passing to voters through daily experience, it typically takes quite a lot of indirect evidence for someone to revisit core assumptions.

In other words, if you treat politics as a psychological process, it’s easy to quickly arrive at the conclusion that the forces that are going to have the strongest effect on voters are the barrage of direct messages they receive — messages that, more or less, directly tell people what to believe. Whatever used to be true, almost unquestionably the largest source of direct messaging for most modern voters is going to be the constant media signals that are delivering them political information about the world. (The term media is being used broadly here, to mean traditional, partisan, and social media — basically any outside communication people are receiving about politics.) In the past, I’ve called that combined media message the “main signal” but you can really call it whatever you want. The point is that there are mechanical reasons to believe these messages are the primary variable input that affects political behavior.

The problem is that even if you know what the input is, the output is hard to predict, because, again, the collective psychology of voters is complex and chaotic. In other words, one implication of “vibes” is that anything can affect politics — but most of the time, very few things do. The takeaways from this become a little complicated. A few that I care about, in no particular order:

First, it means that political contests are not necessarily determined by clear quantitative inputs like economic fundamentals, gas prices, or crime rates. They’re not necessarily even determined by obvious campaign choices, like policy proposals, ideological positioning, or subject-matter focus. That’s because these factors are either vulnerable to subjective reinterpretation, or won’t reach voters except through the media main signal and are thus vulnerable to being reframed in the process. In this respect, they stand on equal footing with countless smaller, more subtle, more subjective, and often bizarre factors. Often, these other factors can include a candidate’s personality or likeability or a party’s overarching brand (their own “vibes,” as many people use the term). But it can also include controversies or events which might strike a traditionally-inclined observer as trivial or silly or unrelated to politics at all.

Second, it means modern candidates and parties will likely struggle to persuade with a series of fine-tuned, narrow-band political messages, individually designed to target a small subset of voters. Because this messaging almost always gets subsumed into a firehose of other direct media messages that are being used to update people’s internal political beliefs, its effect is easily obliterated by everything else. Also, fine-tuned messaging often relies on nuance — but these nuances are likely going to be lost when the appeal is just one small component of a much broader media signal.

Third, because politics is mass psychology, you have to think about the psychology of people! Thinking about the psychology of people has a lot of implications, but one of the major ones is that it means thinking about emotions, instead of reducing voters to rationally self-interested economic actors. People are driven by emotions, and a lot of what we do is a pretext for expressing or resolving emotional states or urges that lie a lot deeper than our conscious rationales. “Winning the argument,” a popular tactic especially among liberals, seems unlikely to be productive because it doesn’t actually affect these emotional drivers. Often, people will just seek another rationale, or find an excuse to ignore a counterargument, and continue to believe whatever expresses their feelings the best. A better approach for politicians is to try to instill different feelings with emotionally potent messaging — or failing that, find ways to redirect the emotions that are motivating people towards a different set of ends.

(It’s important to clarify that thinking about the psychology of people does not mean treating large groups of people like they have a coherent motive. That’s not how crowds work: they don’t reason through things step-by-step. Their own internal dynamics are complex and not rational.)

Fourth, it means that, for the purposes of political persuasion, candidates and parties are better off focusing on trying to change the messages people hear, than indirectly appealing to people by changing their real circumstances. I think this conclusion seems instinctively wrong to a lot of people, especially liberals, who tend to favor “structural” models of politics in which persuasion requires changing tangible realities. But people only interpret their real circumstances through their internal perception of the world. So it’s more efficient and reliable to target that perception directly. (Admittedly, changing perceptions might be easier if your messages align with real-world phenomena, in part because people can more easily confirm what you’re saying, and in part because it will make media more likely to repeat what you’re saying. But there are plenty of real-world examples of people being persuaded to vote based on perceptions that are objectively false.)

Ultimately, the shortest route to political persuasion is commandeering the media main signal. That’s tough, especially for Democrats, who, unlike the right, do not control a massive media apparatus of their own that can directly insert a preferred narrative into traditional mainstream media. Social media is mostly too diffuse to control directly and, in any event, a lot of what appears on it trickles down from partisan and traditional media. That means the best option for Democrats is commandeering the traditional media signal, but that’s tough since the focus of traditional media is not directed from the top down. Instead, coverage priorities are heavily determined by complex internal dynamics in the industry, a kind of combination of groupthink, self-perpetuating narratives, and echo chambers, combined with an incentive to seem novel, savvy, contrarian, or new. Trying to implant any new narrative in this system is a bit like trying to start an avalanche. And there’s more than one way to do it: you can throw carefully-targeted stones in an effort to trigger a chain reaction, or you can just set off a truckload of dynamite right at the top. There’s no particular reason politicians shouldn’t try both, but with limited tools and limited foresight, the sledgehammer often works better than the scalpel. In other words, instead of relying on subtle policy or rhetorical appeals, or actual policies, politicians should default to tactics that, in polite society, many may find annoying: repetition, emotion, volume. Fill all the space available to you with the most potent messages possible.

In summation, political actors are faced with a vast array of levers for changing minds. “Vibes” means ditching old thinking about which of these levers connect to each other, which connect to voters, and which aren’t hooked up to anything at all. Many politicians, Democrats in particular, have spent many years pulling levers called “the economy,” “kitchen-table issues,” and “bipartisanship,” with very little to show for it. They’d do better to pull the levers that are more directly hooked into media signals — essentially by trying to run people who are attractive to Americans, going hard on the offense against the GOP, and dumping out as much high-volume, broadband pro-Democratic rhetoric as possible in the hopes of changing the main media signal. Politics isn’t a fencing match, it’s a boxing match. Throw punches. It’s not guaranteed to work, but it’s the tool you’ve got.