The 2016 Brexit vote in the UK was fraught with emotion, and as anyone with an understanding of the current politics surrounding Brexit will tell you, it still very much is today. Elections are often the same. But many politicians and even campaign professionals do not always fully understand how voters are really feeling or how they are likely to react emotionally to varying messages or campaign scenarios.
Those that do understand the need for emotional campaigning, realise it’s important to do two things: 1) move beyond traditional polling to find out what their voters are really feeling; and 2) engage with their electorates in more emotionally compelling ways.
Extremists across the political spectrum are often quite adept at this, but centrists and moderates can feel they lack the means, especially when they want to avoid the emotionally charged tactics of fear and mistrust so often utilised by others.
I recently spoke to the leader of Ireland's main opposition party, Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil. He told me in the second referendum his country held on the EU's Lisbon Treaty, the keys to victory in that vote were their use of voter research and how they spoke with the electorate using emotionally engaging language.
The problem with most traditional polling techniques is they don’t really measure voters’ genuine emotional responses. Traditional surveys ask people to consciously decide, quantify, post-rationalise and then artificially report their views on concepts that are presented to them in ways that do not reflect how they would actually be experienced.
This limits a participant’s ability to authentically feel or report their own genuine emotional responses. That’s a problem for campaigners because emotional responses are usually more predictive of future actions, such as how someone will vote, or what might change their mind about how they will vote.
The question then is how can voters’ feelings be accurately measured?
Traditional pollsters have tried to get into the heads of voters, but with limited success. For example, they will ask in a normal survey how important voters feel education policy is on a scale of 1 to 10. But to answer this, a respondent will have to bring the issue right into their conscious mind, where it can be affected by various biases, such as how virtuous they want to appear. Tapping into the sub-conscious mind avoids those reliability reducing biases, giving a much more direct and therefore accurate measure of what voters really feel.
How can we get there? One answer is a branch of opinion research called Sub-conscious or Implicit Testing. This involves accurately measuring the time it takes someone to react to an image or to answer a question. The difference in reaction times is not consciously decided but it can be measured. The shorter the gap, the more emotionally secure the respondent is in their answer—i.e. they genuinely feel or believe it more.
This can tell you both how deeply someone really agrees with, or even cares about, a proposition or how much they emotionally connect with say, a party leader or a draft message. Our researchers have long used such techniques to help movie and TV producers and advertisers in the commercial world. We are now deploying them in political campaigns too. We not only use them to find out what different segments of voters think is important, we use them to work out which message can persuade which segment to change their mind.
Along with testing the emotional effectiveness of different messages, we use Sub-conscious or Implicit Testing to work out which exact creative execution and which delivery mechanism is most persuasive for each segment of the electorate. Campaign managers can then construct a campaign plan knowing what they need to do to persuade enough voters from each group to secure victory.
What's next? Another UK referendum is not impossible. Elsewhere, some may try to force through similar votes in their countries in the coming years, though the turmoil that Brexit has caused in British politics may put many off going down that road. Either way, the emotional engagement lessons from Brexit and Ireland’s Lisbon Treaty vote also apply to election campaigns: do your research properly to find out what voters really think and feel, and then engage with them emotionally.
Simon Rix is senior partner at Stratagem Global, an election campaign consultancy which provides centrist parties and candidates with emotional voter research, as well as strategic advice and campaign professional placements.