By Theodore Hong '18
Unlike businesses, political campaigns vie for not just your dollars, but rather something much more sacred and dignified: your vote. It should then come as no surprise that campaigns utilize marketing techniques just as complex, if not more so, to sell their candidates to individuals, as businesses use to sell their products. Nonetheless, people are often shocked and appalled when they learn about the amount of manipulation that goes into running a campaign. Through techniques such as narrowcasting and language manipulation, politicians can alter public opinion beyond what was once thought possible. However, hopes of regulating these methods are increasingly bleak. Rather than fighting this uphill battle, advocates for a functional democracy should hope to put out more, truly unbiased information, rather than giving Americans false hopes on the altruism of campaigns.From John Kerry, to Ben Carson, to high-ranking members of the DNC, extremely high profile political campaigns are utilizing demographic data about their voters to most effectively send them targeted messages in hopes of swaying their vote. Called “narrowcasting,” this new technique integrates extensive demographic data and analysis from conglomerates like Acxiom, which collects data from surveys, credit card records, and more, to find demographic segments of voters and to deliver them specifically tailored messages and advertisements. Campaigns have not only used this in well-known techniques such as playing commercials at certain times and targeted phone call scripts, but also in more dynamic ways such as playing custom campaign ads during door-to-door canvassing. On one hand, this gives campaigns the unique opportunity to make politics more accessible and provide voters with information most relevant to them. However, partial information on a candidate can be just as malicious as misinformation.Another method through which campaigns can see into voters’ thought processes was most notably used by Frank Luntz, a political consultant who worked on several Republican campaigns. Luntz tracked how people in focus groups felt during a speech by having them operate dials to express whether their emotions were positive or negative while watching a speech. His team tracked these emotions not only to the key points made during the speeches, but also in correspondence to specific words and phrases used. Analysis of these results eventually led to phrases that still linger in politics today: changing an “estate tax” to a “death tax,” the Iraq war to the War on Terror, global warming to climate change, and many others. Although he defends all of these edits as “clarifications” rather than overt obfuscation, many still see this as manipulation. It is often seen as taking advantage of people’s lack of due diligence and can affect and bias their understanding of the content of a policy based off of its name.Narrowcasting and language manipulation are techniques long used in the world of marketing. And although it is particularly dangerous to use manipulative techniques when dealing in the realm of public policy, which can have powerful impacts on people’s livelihood, campaigns are still often individually motivated, not unlike profit-seeking corporations.Combined with the difficulty that comes with attempting to enforce and measure manipulation in campaigns, it is perhaps best left to be an issue between campaigns and constituents. Giving the American people enough credit to allow them to discern between politicians and make their own judgments is an important principle. The best solution is not unsuccessfully attempting to regulate campaign techniques and falsely labeling them as manipulation-free, but rather to provide voters with as much unbiased information as possible so that they can think deeply and informatively about candidates and their policy proposals.Sources:http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2000/10/16/the-word-labhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/luntz.htmlhttp://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/etc/script.htmlhttp://www.blueoregon.com/2007/06/democracy_in_th/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-way-out-of-our-dysfunctional-politics/2011/07/20/gIQATEQcQI_story.html