The Two Psychological Principles Tearing Democratic Digital Fundraising Apart
Maybe you heard, but Terry McAuliffe was blowing it in the run-up to this month’s gubernatorial election in Virginia. Or at least that was what his campaign was telling you if you were on their digital fundraising lists going back to last summer.
The funny thing is, McAuliffe really did end up blowing it. (Well, maybe not that funny if you’re one of the people who will now suffer from cruel and destructive Republican policies in Virginia.) So it’s pretty natural to wonder, did all those annoying, doom-and-gloom messages become a self-fulfilling prophecy, depressing or alienating the key base voters the McAuliffe campaign needed to win?
What we’re seeing here, what’s really tearing apart defenders of these techniques and their increasingly loud critics, is a spectacular, high-speed collision between two of the most powerful psychological forces in politics when it comes to explaining how voters interact with campaigns: loss aversion and the bandwagon effect.
It seems pretty clear from anecdotal observation that a lot of Democratic digital fundraisers are getting the balance wrong here, so it’s worth understanding. Loss aversion explains why the doom-and-gloom raises so much—but the bandwagon effect helps explain why it may be counterproductive.
Loss Aversion
Loss aversion is one of the most fundamental insights in the world of behavioral economics:
Loss aversion is… encapsulated in the expression “losses loom larger than gains” (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). It is thought that the pain of losing is psychologically about twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. People are more willing to take risks (or behave dishonestly; e.g. Schindler & Pfattheicher, 2016) to avoid a loss than to make a gain. (emphasis added)
Telling Democratic partisans (who would be the core audience for any digital fundraising universe) that they could lose the election is a textbook example of loss aversion. These partisans are bought into the successes and failures of the Democratic Party and its candidates, and the thought of losing races is mentally or emotionally painful for them. To resolve the pain (at least temporarily), they can make a quick donation. Bingo, pain of loss soothed!
It’s an incredibly powerful motivational concept — to the tune of about $16,000,000 in McAuliffe’s case, per the report cited below from his fundraising team. But by definition it only works on those who are already bought in enough to feel like they stand to lose something from a bad outcome in the election.
What about the swing voters or Dem-aligned voters who are deciding whether to even bother turning out? For them, the prospect of McAuliffe losing doesn’t necessarily represent the prospect of a painful personal loss. Instead, raising that prospect risks costing these voters’ support because of the bandwagon effect.
Bandwagon Effect
This concept refers to people’s desire to join the winning team, be a part of what other people are doing simply because they’re doing it and it looks more fun. Hey, check it out over here, the music and dancing are infectious!
In politics, the bandwagon effect might cause citizens to vote for the person who appears to have more popular support because they want to belong to the majority. The term “bandwagon” refers to a wagon that carries a band through a parade. During the 19th century, an entertainer named Dan Rice traveled the country campaigning for President Zachary Taylor. Rice’s bandwagon was the centerpiece of his campaign events, and he encouraged those in the crowd to “jump on the bandwagon” and support Taylor.
So who wants to jump on a bandwagon that’s playing funeral dirges?
Answer: nobody, and certainly not people who aren’t experiencing loss aversion. The people you can’t count on to vote for you (i.e. the voters will decide whether you win or lose) are much more likely to want to join up with you if it doesn’t look like you’re destined to lose.
Balancing Loss Aversion Money Against Bandwagon Effect Alienation
Most of us in Democratic digital fundraising have memorized the way this argument typically plays out by now: defenders of doom-and-gloom fundraising point to all the money it raises, while critics point to all the people it alienates. The critics’ argument makes logical sense, but has trouble landing the decisive blow because it’s so easy to measure money raised yet so hard to measure negative impact. And sure enough, that’s how it played out here.
After receiving copious criticism, the McAuliffe fundraising team pointed to the bottom line:
Meanwhile, the critics pointed out that raising money is not a substitute for moving voters:
By the time the race was over, McAuliffe had lost by a couple points. With an outcome that close, you can point to just about anything to say it was decisive and you’ll probably be right. Did the money raised make the outcome closer than it would have been otherwise? Probably. Did the repetitive, annoying, doom-and-gloom fundraising alienate some voters that could made it closer or won it? Again, probably.
Look, at the end of the day, the point of raising money is to spend it to make people like you. If the process of raising that money makes people hate you (or wonder about your sanity or competence, or not feel like opening their wallet, or not feel like submitting their ballot…), then you’re just raising wasted money.
Evidence that Democrats have a problem raising enough money to win is shockingly limited compared with the lengths some campaigns are willing to go to in order to raise it. There’s substantially more evidence, however, that Democrats aren’t that great at turning money into votes, given all the recent high-profile elections where Dems raised a gazillion dollars and still lost, including now this one. You might say Democrats don’t have a fund-raising problem, they have a fund-spending problem.
A little loss aversion can be a successful part of a healthy digital fundraising program. But because of the bandwagon effect, it’s clear that dialing the loss aversion all the way up isn’t helping as much as its defenders think. It’s time for Democrats to reevaluate their approach to making people like them, both in terms of raising and spending.
