Update: Why Trump Won Voters Who Don't Consume News

New readers: this is required reading on the neuroscience of framing!

A big survey showed Trump with a 19 point advantage among voters who did not follow the news. Back in February, I wrote about why under-informed voters might default to supporting Trump. Now might be a good time to revisit the science behind passive exposure to news and consider what we might need to do about it! New readers: this is required reading on the neuroscience of framing!

---

Data for Progress surveyed 13,404 voters between October 5 and November 3, 2024, and found that Trump had a 19 point advantage among voters who described their news consumption as “none at all.”

---

Reprinted from February 23, 2024

In a New York Times focus group of independent, undecided voters, two things stood out: 1. Most of them planned to vote for Trump. 2. They had absolutely no idea why.

Most voters aren’t informed, they’re exposed to words and images that stimulate parts of their brains. Repeat exposure to a concept like “Trump” makes the Trump neural network grow physically stronger and eventually dominate people’s brains. Our best strategy is to dedicate our efforts and resources to exposing people to President Biden, to our candidates and to our values, until our neural networks become stronger than Trumps.

Meet Persuadable Pete – the undecided voter. What he thinks depends on which part of his brain we activate the most: whether we choose to push the red button or the blue button.

---

The Informed and the Exposed

According to a New York Times focus group, independent, undecided voters appear to be defaulting to Trump for no apparent reason, or at least no reason having to do with, well, reason.

You might think that we need to dedicate our efforts and resources toward informing these voters about who Trump really is and what he says he will do. Here’s the problem: even the voters who know about Trump and don’t like him, seem to be prepared to vote for him anyway.

This may only be one focus group, but clearly, this is happening at a much larger scale. Something has to explain the sheer volume of continued support for Trump, despite the mountains of negative press, indictments, and his clearly offensive and divisive behavior.

According to the neuroscience of language, there is a perfectly good explanation:

Most people do not follow politics or seek out political information. They are exposed to concepts as they go about their lives, mostly subconsciously. Repeated exposure to a concept, positive or negative, makes that concept grow physically dominant, causing your brain to develop a subconscious preference for that concept.

Relentless exposure to Trump has allowed him to grow dominant in people’s brains. Trump is powered by our attacks, like a cartoon supervillain who is blasted with energy weapons, but just feeds off the energy and uses it to grow bigger and stronger.

UPDATE: This is actually a big part of how “branding” works. As I wrote about recently, Kamala Harris didn’t have time to develop a brand, compared with Trump whose “billionaire businessman” brand has saturated our culture.)

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the science.

Thank you for reading Reframing America! I need your help to continue this critical mission. The best thing you can do is to forward this email to everyone you know who cares about democracy, fairness, freedom, equality, a stable climate, and a kind society, and encourage them to subscribe!

The Science

The following is from my training on the science of messaging, based on the neuroscience of language and my work with George Lakoff, father of the field of cognitive linguistics.

How Language Works

Everything we know, feel, or have ever experienced, is stored in our brains, in a vast neural network consisting of billions of interconnected neurons. We use the term “frame” to refer to the subset of neurons that contains everything we know about a particular topic.

We have frames for literally everything: Baseball. Oprah Winfrey. Freedom. Italian Restaurants. Harry Potter books. Jogging. Sunglasses. Math. If we can think about it, it physically exists in our brains, in the form of a frame.

Brains store frames like computers store data: It’s there, but you can’t access it until it’s powered up. Words, phrases, and images act as triggers that switch on or “activate” frames, sending an electrical current through that neural network and waking up everything in it.

Here’s what happens physically when we are exposed to language, in this order:

1. A trigger word or image, such as “elephant,” enters through your eyes or ears.

2. Exposure to the trigger activates the neurons in the entire elephant frame.

3. That activated elephant frame then alerts your conscious mind.

What happens when I say “DON’T think of an elephant?” The elephant frame still gets switched on. Because exposure to a trigger word activates the frame before we become conscious of it, there is no way to stop a trigger from activating a frame.

Here is the first critically important lesson of framing:

Words impact people instantly and subconsciously, independently of the sentences that you put them in, and often, with the opposite effect from what you intended.

How Brains Change

Unlike a computer, the brain is biological; it grows and changes. When an electrical signal hits one of your neurons, it fires. The electrical charge jumps to the next neuron and it shoots a little bit of calcium into that gap. The more neurons fire together, the more they grow physically connected; they build a permanent bridge across the synapse.

When you are repeatedly exposed to the words and images that switch on a particular frame, its neurons grow more interconnected, and the whole frame becomes physically stronger. The same goes for associations between frames. This is called “Hebbian learning” after neuroscientist Donald Hebb who famously said, “What fires together, wires together.”

What does this have to do with Trump?

The stronger a frame or neural network is, the better it is at conducting electricity. As we know, electricity always defaults to the path of least resistance. Because thinking is primarily electrical, our subconscious thoughts also default to the frames that are better at conducting electricity – those that are physically stronger.

Our subconscious minds develop an involuntary “attraction” to frames that are physically stronger. Our brains interpret the physical strength of a frame as an indicator that the concept it contains is true or good.

The more we call attention to what Trump says and does, the more we activate the Trump frame. It’s like we keep pushing the red button on Persuadable Pete’s head, lighting up the Trump part of his brain, making it stronger, and making Pete more likely to default to supporting Trump in the election.

---

What does subconscious neural dominance look like?

This person consciously fears Trump, yet seems to be irrationally compelled to vote for him anyway. This is not unusual. In every focus group I have every witnessed involving “swing” or “undecided” voters, I have seen some of them struggle to explain their own choices and behavior.

Repeated exposure is also how unfamiliar and even abhorrent ideas become normalized. As absurd as it may seem, the more we get people to visualize the abhorrent things Donald Trump will do if re-elected, the more people’s subconscious minds come to feel that those abhorrent things are increasingly acceptable.

---

Conclusion: Push the Blue Button

Many, many people do not know why they have the feelings and preferences that they have. So, how do we win a public debate that is happening at the subconscious level?

We have to make the Biden frame the default frame in people’s brains. We have to make the frames containing our candidates, ideas and values the strongest frames in people’s brains. The only way to do that is to make them physically dominant through repeated activation, triggered by repeated exposure to the words, phrases and images that activate our frames.

UPDATE: Moving forward, it will be twice as hard to deprive Trump of exposure. That just means that we have to double down on communicating with the American people about who we are, what we believe in and what makes us different from him. If we try very hard, we can figure out how to frame all of his terrible behavior from the perspective of our values, to use the outrage around his behavior to garner more exposure for what we believe to be right, as I described in my previous newsletter about the cabinet nominations.

If we continue to do what we have been doing, which is primarily to point to Trump and say, “See how bad he is!” and assume people already understand why, we are likely to get the same results. What the science above tells us is that we can’t just make assumptions. “Unspoken” understandings and subtle references don’t activate neural frames.

You have to say the words you mean out loud if you want them to trigger the frames, so let’s get in the habit of calling out corruption, self-dealing, conflicts of interest and abuse of power, but always in the context of our beliefs: that government must only be used for the public good and consistently with our highest principles of freedom, equality and fairness.

Thank you for reading and for everything that you do!

In solidarity, always,

Antonia

My work is completely financed by subscribers like you. All content is free, but many people choose to be paying subscribers. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss any issues, and please consider upgrading to a paying subscription! I need your help to continue doing this work!

Contact me at antonia@antoniascatton.com or (202) 922-6647‬

NOTES:

The People Who Don’t Read Political News
By Olga Khazan | The Atlantic | October 29, 2024

An Overlooked — and Increasingly Important — Clue to How People Vote
By Steven Waldman | Politico | November 9, 2024

Moral Operating Systems: How Swing Voter’s Brains Work

Inflation and the Association Game