Narrative

How one side is able to win partisan elections.

When I taught freshman classes at Heidelberg, I discovered how difficult it was for my students to provide an analysis of issues. When asked to report on the significance of something, a student would provide a sequence of associated “happenings.” That is, I received a narrative description of past events.

For most people a story of actors and the result of their actions is the customary way to describe and explain reality. A critical approach to explanation needs to be learned. 

During the 2024 Presidential Election, the Republicans told the “best” story.  I think that this is why they won.

Research suggests that people cannot tolerate extreme uncertainty. We need to have, if not total control over our own lives, at least some basic idea as to who our enemies are, and who is fighting with us, as we try to right the wrongs of social life. It gives us a fighting chance, a side to join, and a way out of what would otherwise be a life of bewilderment and defeat.

A good story engages the listener. It appeals to a human desire for action. It doesn’t have to be true.  As long as it stirs our imagination and satisfies our craving for hope, we are drawn to it.  And when it ends with a call to action, when it gives us a role in the story, it is deeply satisfying. 

Many of you, I know, reject the Republican campaign narratives as largely false. I’m not disagreeing, nor am I, in this post, trying to evaluate anyone’s “truth.” What we all need to understand is that what “works” in political campaigns is not the truth of a message, but the extent to which it connects the chaotic “dots,” of experience, i.e. how well it makes sense of a world we are all struggling to understand.

The Democrats could have taken hold of the Republican narrative and retold it in a way favorable to their cause. Instead, they tried to tell a wholly different story or set of stories about women’s choice, defense of democracy, or Trump’s mental states. The electorate was looking for a story about the price of meat and instability.

You may say we have to educate people to know and use facts, the credible information that is available to all of us, in a data driven analysis, as if, once they master the laws of probability, the nature of agency, and the value of economic models, they will be qualified to vote.

It is the “teacher” in all of us that feels this way. But the public are not students and candidates are not professors. And politics is not a classroom. The “lecture” is forever a reminder of smug elite “correction.” Whether it is well meaning “diversity” training, or cartoonish simplication of abstractions, or passionate appeals for belief, it is the same top down, “I’m the teacher” classroom that most of us were happy to escape.

The political battlefield is not “Research Methods 101.” It is a struggle against an enemy.

And gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accursed they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s Day!

[Shakespeare Henry V, Act IV Scene iii(3). King Henry rallies his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, which fell on Saint Crispin's Day.]

As a “teacher,” I wanted my “students,” by learning methods of “data driven” analysis, to better understand their world. I hoped that some of them would become public policy analysts. As participants, however, in the wild of partisan electoral democracy, I hope they became masterful tellers of stories.

And, yes, I hope that their stories do support the results of their data analytic training.