Before Christmas, Sen. John Kerry’s presidential ambitions seemed vaporous at best. Then, suddenly, he won in Iowa and New Hampshire and has been unstoppable since. There are two parts to this story that have gotten little attention. One is the genesis and impact of attack ads aimed at Howard Dean. The other is an intriguing look by a sociologist at human “social decision-making” – in this case, why people vote as they do.
The ads: Interestingly, the beginning of Dean’s decline coincided with attack ads paid for by the conservative Club for Growth and a Democratic group called Americans for Jobs, Healthcare and Progressive Values.
The Club for Growth’s assertion that Dean would “raise taxes on the average family by more than $1,900 a year”** no doubt hurt the former Vermont governor. But the man-bites-dog attack by Americans for Jobs etc. is more interesting. This group, which the Dean campaign claimed was cobbled together by the “Democratic establishment” to derail his campaign, raised $663,000 from a handful of donors and spent $626,400 of it on three ads aimed at Dean.
Among the donations was $100,000 from Yankee Entertainment & Sports Network LLC, owned by George Steinbrenner (as if we needed another reason to dislike the Yankees).
Also among the major donors were former Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, a Kerry supporter, who gave $50,000, and labor unions that supported Rep. Richard Gephardt of Missouri, who was still in the race then. The unions included The International Longshoremen's Association, Laborers International Union and International Association of Machinists, which gave $50,000 each; the International Association of Ironworkers, $25,000; and the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, $5,000.
Dean’s campaign had plenty of problems of its own making – among them burning through $41 million in campaign contributions before even getting to the primaries and caucuses themselves – and a candidate whose personality probably condemned him to be a placeholder for the eventual nominee in any case. But the ads no doubt accelerated the governor’s slide.
Social decision-making: Meanwhile, to the surprise of many, including me, Kerry experienced an amazing resurrection. How? For this, we turn to a most interesting piece by sociologist Duncan Watts at Slate.
Watts recalls some groundbreaking research in the 1950s that appeared to pretty conclusively demonstrate that many people are influenced by the preceding decisions of others to a far greater extent than they’re aware. One example:
“Princeton social psychologist Solomon Asch showed a room of participants a series of slides displaying sets of vertical lines. Two of these lines were clearly the same length, while the others were obviously very different. The subjects were then given the seemingly trivial task of identifying which pair of lines were the same. But there was a trick: Everyone in the room except for one person had been instructed beforehand to give the same incorrect answer. The real subject of the experiment was the lone unwitting participant, and the real test was of an individual's ability to disagree with his or her peers. Asch demonstrated a stunning effect: Faced with a decision that, in isolation, no one would ever get wrong, the unwitting subjects went against the evidence of their own eyes about one-third of the time.”
The same thing, Watts says, happens all the time in daily life – including the polling booth. Many people tend to imitate the actions of others. Thus, when Kerry unexpectedly trounced Dean in Iowa, the stampede was on. Kerry’s ascension and Dean’s defeat became inevitable.
“In many situations,” Watts writes, “social decision-making isn't a bad idea at all. After all, the world is a complicated place, and other people often do have information that we lack. So, we can often do reasonably well, or at least no worse than the people we are copying, by letting them do the hard work for us. But sometimes the people we are copying aren't working either, and that's where the problems come in. When everyone is looking to someone else for an opinion—trying, for example, to pick the Democratic candidate they think everyone else will pick—it's possible that whatever information other people might have gets lost, and instead we get a cascade of imitation that, like a stampeding herd, can start for no apparent reason and subsequently go in any direction with equal likelihood.”
Read it all. It’s interesting stuff.
** Footnote: The Club for Growth appears to have added up all of President Bush’s No Plutocrat Left Behind tax cuts that primarily benefited precisely the class of people represented by the Club for Growth and divided by the number of U.S. households to come up with the “average family” figure. Just as the “average family” never received a $1,900 tax cut from Bush, neither would it have gotten a $1,900 bigger tax bill from a Dean administration.
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