The Vibes Election

This contest will be won on how folks feel. And that’s good news for Harris.

Photo: Michael Buckner; Chris duMond/Getty Images

You’ve probably felt the frustration before while talking to conservatives or independents, or even many fellow Democrats. No matter what the facts actually were—a strong economy, low unemployment, low inflation, crime and border crossings down—people just didn’t dig Joe Biden. He was just “too old.”  

It didn’t matter that Trump is just three years younger. Or that he is cognitively impaired, a criminal felon, an adjudicated rapist, and wants to end democracy. You could recite all of that and back it up with hard evidence, but it wouldn’t change people’s minds.

So why is that? And what can we do about it?

Here’s what to remember: Elections, for better or worse, are won on feels, not facts. As Professor of Global Politics Brian Klaas notes, the human “political brain” works by creating “schemas,” meaning shorthands for how to process all that information we’re bombarded with.

For Biden, that shorthand sadly became “he’s too old.” For Trump, it’s “teflon,” which carries a far more positive connotation. “Teflon Don” even survived an assassination attempt. 

And this is important: Once that shorthand gets baked in, the mind actively reinforces it, no matter what facts get put out. The “political brain” filters, sorts and often rejects those facts in order to buttress whatever pre-existing scheme it has adopted. 

That’s how Trump can successfully claim to his followers that all of his crimes are actually the result of Joe Biden witch-hunts. This claim is totally counterfactual, but it’s what the MAGA brain filters, processes and accepts.

There’s good news, though. Democrats recently have found a way to crack the code and create new shorthands that resonate with middle America. The “Republicans are weird” attack is working. So is the “Auntie Kamala” vibe. Today, I’ll explain the “political brain” theory a bit more and provide some recent examples of how schemas were used to devastate candidates. I’ll also show how Democrats are using them today to define and uplift Harris.

The political brain and “schemas”

As Prof. Klaas describes,

The political brain is a brain defined by schemas. Political movements that understand that fact will usually beat those that don’t.

Republicans have battered Democrats on messaging in recent years because they intuitively understand schemas in a way that Democrats often don’t.

Schemas, according to Prof. Klaas, are “intellectual shortcuts for processing the information we encounter in our lives.” Those shortcuts are incredibly useful but also incredibly malleable. Klaas gives the example of an office:

[R]ather than remembering exactly what every office we have ever set foot in looks like, we develop a conceptual representation of what an office looks like. Then, when we remember an office, we fill in the gaps. So, even if we go into an office without a stapler on the desk, we often remember that a stapler was there later on, because that fits with our schema for an office.

And then here’s the kicker: Our brains quickly latch on to the ideas that match the shorthand versions we have handy. But when we encounter countervailing facts, our brains actually work overtime to alter reality so that the facts better match with our preexisting notions.

That’s why when you rattle off facts to someone who is on the opposite side politically, they likely won’t absorb them. Instead, their brains will work hard to create an explanation that accounts for the conflicting facts. The result is that the existing schema gets reinforced, not diminished.

Establishing the vibe quickly

When Ron DeSantis announced he intended to seek the GOP nomination for president, a lot of Wall Street bros and National Review types cheered. Here was a conservative cause warrior, fresh off a huge electoral win in his home state of Florida, which he declared was where “woke goes to die.”

The problem was, outside of these circles, it was obvious to anyone who’d actually met DeSantis that he was awkward, off-putting and even cruel. That smile looked painful and forced. His movements were stiff and unnatural. His war on Disney felt manufactured for political gain—plus, who goes to battle against Mickey Mouse and his own state’s largest employer? His attacks on gay and trans kids were harsh and bullying. Then there were the book bans, the demonization of migrants, and a new six week abortion ban he signed and announced under cover of night. 

Because of all this, everything around DeSantis started getting filtered through the “DeSantis is a weirdo” schema. His white boots moment became a meme and a punchline. His debate performances were as “Ron the Robot.” And his candidacy began to tank fast.

The same thing is now happening with JD Vance, largely because the Democrats learned something from the former GOP strategists at the Lincoln Project about how to create a politically fatal vibe around a guy like Vance. His weirdness around women isn’t just a personal failing. It extends to actual policies that would control women’s lives and bodies. Strict abortion bans without exceptions for rape or incest. A belief that childless cat ladies are running everything. His proposal that parents with kids have more votes than those without.

These policy proposals transform the whole weirdo thing into something truly abusive and creepy. If your daughter were dating a guy like this, you’d plan an intervention and get your spouse and grandma involved if possible.

Klaas points to another recent and instructive political casualty in his own country: Liz Truss, the former British prime minister who famously could not outlast a head of lettuce. Writes Klaas,

The lettuce gag may have seemed like a silly sideshow, but when I saw it, I knew Liz Truss was toast. She had become defined by a punchline. Every piece of new information in the news was filtered through a schema that was shared across the British political divide: Liz Truss is an incompetent screw-up who crashed the economy and is likely to expire before a comically bespectacled bit of produce.

The bad news for JD Vance is that he is also fast becoming a punchline, whether it’s “Vladimir Futon,” dolphin porn, or the whole childless cat ladies thing. He is being laughed at, especially by women, which is the one thing men like Vance or Trump hate more than anything in the world.

Nice try, but no

The GOP has attempted to create schemas around Harris, but they keep falling flat. As I discussed in my recent piece in The Big Picture, the first volley of attacks portrayed her as the “DEI” candidate, which is MAGA shorthand for the N-word. Even Republican leaders recoiled at this and warned their members not to go down this path. 

Perhaps they also knew there would be reactions like this in her defense that would galvanize even more African American voters behind her:

The GOP has also tried to pin the “border czar” label on her, but it has fumbled this badly. For starters, there’s no such position, and Harris’s work was at the diplomatic level with Central American countries, not at the border. “Diplomacy czar” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. And when Republicans decided to actually impeach an official over the number of migrant crossings, they targeted not Vice President Harris but Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. I guess Harris wasn’t the “border czar” after all.

Attempts by Trump to paint Harris as a “Marxist” and a “communist” have also failed to stick, in large part because the GOP has called everything and everyone that for years, and it just doesn’t resonate with the average voter. A shorthand only ever works if there is some deeper truth behind it. Biden really is old, for example. Trump really does seem like Teflon Don. But Harris as a communist? Only if every other Democrat they don’t like is, too.

The failure by the GOP and Trump to create an effective schema to pull down Harris has left a wide opening for supporters of Harris to define her with positive messaging instead. Her quirky sayings about falling out of a coconut tree have become popular coconut emojis. Her laugh is now a weapon of joy against Trump’s humorless and dark campaign. And her leadership in this moment, with progressive, democratic forces arrayed behind her, even became a new version of a well-known Avengers movie clip:

Beyond the memes and videos, and far more fundamentally, Harris offers an economic vision that is far closer to the mainstream, focused on affordable health care, job opportunities and education. She’s a fighter for freedom and associated with cool celebrities like Charli XCX and Beyoncé. And she represents the future, not the past, both in her vigor and her ideas. 

As a result, voters are increasingly enthusiastic to cast their ballots for Harris. Indeed, in the latest ABC News/Ipsos poll, she performs a full nine points better than Trump on enthusiasm among all voters. Those figures include an astonishing 26 point gain among Democrats for their own candidate since February, when Republicans used to have an 18 point lead on enthusiasm.

As Harris’s favorables have risen, we should understand that in the eyes of many voters now, she’s become the cool auntie with the funny laugh you just want to be around—and maybe even gain some wisdom and hope from. If the GOP can’t redefine her soon, then everything she does from here till Election Day could be filtered through the context of that “cool auntie” schema.

That means Republican attacks would only serve to reinforce that image among her supporters and undecided voters. And wouldn’t that be fun to see for a change?