Under Pressure: U.S. Elections, Identity, and Emotion

Georgia: Hi, I’m Georgia Kernell, your guest host for this special Talking Policy miniseries. On this second episode of our series on American elections, I’m joined by two professors of political science from the University of California, Riverside: Ben Bishin and Jennifer Merolla. Together, we will talk about how voters’ identities inform their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors.

Ben and Jenn, thanks so much for being with us on Talking Policy.

Ben: Thanks for having us, Georgia.

Jenn: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Georgia: So, I want to just start by asking you each how you got into this. Why do you study what you do? Why are you interested in American politics, and identity more specifically?

Jenn: Let’s see. So I became very interested in political science in high school, going on a little trip to Washington, D.C. I thought I wanted to study Congress, but became very interested in understanding public opinion and political behavior throughout graduate school, and in particular, really interested in understanding how people’s identities in politics influence their attitudes, their behaviors; how elites appeal to those identities. And so that’s kind of been a big part of my research over the last 20-something years now.

Ben: For me, I think, I was always interested in puzzles, and I just kind of always really civically minded and interested in politics. I was a Boy Scout when I was little. My mom was very politically active. She was president of the League of Women Voters and ran for school board. And so, as I got older, the idea of getting paid to learn stuff seemed really cool, you know?

I went to grad school. I was going to study international political economy, and then the faculty I wanted to work with left, like, within a year and a half or so. And I was very fortunate. I had a really great mentor at Cal State Long Beach, who I’d been working with. And so I’m like, “Well, I can always do American politics and representation. I’m interested in that and know a lot about it.” So I guess that’s how I ended up where I am.

Georgia: Thank you. Yeah, it’s so interesting to see all the different routes that we take to academia.

Okay, so on today’s podcast, we’re really going to be talking about the upcoming midterm election and how voters are making their decisions, forming their beliefs, their attitudes, and then what they’re going to do when they go to the polls and if they go to the polls. So to start, let me just ask you about this upcoming election. What are you watching as you follow in the lead-up to the election, and what is at stake in this midterm?

Jenn: So, I mean, I guess I’ll start with what’s most obvious what’s at stake, right? And so that’s control of Congress. Republicans currently have a pretty slim majority in both chambers.

So I think what we’ll be looking at is, will the Democrats potentially take back most likely the House? Senate will be a little bit harder. One thing we know from congressional elections is, you know, incumbents are very likely to win, but there’s always some of these toss-up states, right?

And with such a slim margin, it’s very likely that the Democrats will be successful.

Georgia: In taking back the Senate as well?

Jenn: I mean, that one’s, I think, a little bit trickier. I think Democrats would need to kind of keep all 13 seats they currently are defending and then maybe flip about four Republican seats.

Some are looking like they’re leading in two of those states, but two of those other states are really competitive, and it’s a toss-up. So it’ll be a bit of a challenge. At the House, that’s where f it’s a historical almost regularity that the president’s party typically loses seats in midterm elections, especially when the president is not popular.

There’s been only three elections since the Civil War when the president’s party did not lose seats. So that was in 1934, New Deal, people were kind of starting to kind of feel better about FDR and what he was trying to do to address the economic recession. 2002, so that was after 9/11, President Bush’s popularity was really high. And then 1998, and there was some response to perceived overreach with the impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton. So those were years where presidential approval was quite high, and so the president’s party didn’t lose seats, but usually the president’s party does lose seats.

And right now, Trump’s approval rating is sitting about 38% among likely voters. That’s usually a sign that the party will lose quite a bit of seats. And so Democrats have a real chance certainly of taking back the House, but even potentially the Senate.

Ben: In terms of the first part of the question- it’s a really important election because I think there’s a consensus that Trump has overreached dramatically on a number of issues and is engaged in a number of non-democratic behaviors, right? And the only real check on him would be through a change in control of Congress with this unified Congress losing one or both chambers. So that’s what’s at stake. It’s a really, really important election from that perspective.

As Jenn points out, we have an extremely unpopular president. For a long time, we didn’t see presidential approval go below 40%. 38 doesn’t sound that far below. It’s quite below, and I saw a number the other day that was, like, 33, 34.

You know, the challenge with me is, having done polling work, is just that so much depends on your models to try and make these representative, and it’s so hard. I think election polling’s one of the hardest things people don’t appreciate because the population you’re trying to draw inference about doesn’t actually exist yet. Like, we don’t know who’s going to vote, right? And so, you know, you can wait all you want, but we’re guessing, right? And particularly with respect to midterms, super tricky.

But irrespective, approval ratings are really low. The generic ballot numbers are really bad for the president. If those numbers are close to correct, I think Democrats are actually favored to take the Senate. And then some of the secretary of state races, may matter a lot too in some of these states, in terms of counting the ballots. We don’t know what is up with the plans for post-electioneering. Honestly, I try to bury my head in the sand a little bit about some of this stuff, and not get too worked up before there’s something to get worked up about. But it is something that we should be attentive to.

Georgia: So historically, turnout is lower in midterm than presidential years. But what factors affect who goes to the polls and who stays home? And do you think turnout might look different in this midterm?

Jenn: The midterm electorate, of course, looks a little bit different than presidential elections, so turnout is typically lower in midterm elections, though at least in the past few cycles, it’s been higher than it historically has been. So it has been increasing, probably in part because of polarization, right? But what we know is, in general, those with more socioeconomic resources, people more highly educated, typically are more likely to vote in midterms.

And so on the one hand, with respect to education, that may favor Democrats a bit because there’s been this increasing diploma divide, right, where people who are highly educated have been moving even more over the last few cycles to the Democratic Party. And so you kind of couple that along with low presidential approval ratings. A lot of Democrats will use this as a referendum against Trump. Probably turnout will be a bit higher among Democratic constituencies, that’s at least my sense in this cycle.

Georgia: Did we see that in the primaries leading up to this election? Was there a higher turnout? It seemed like there was a lot more media coverage at least of these primaries. In a lot of races there were, like, far left candidates running against more traditional Democrats. Or in some cases, that was happening on the right.

Ben: Well, so my sense of the primaries was, what you described happened on both sides. So you saw some mainstream Republicans getting ousted in favor of Trump loyalist, MAGA Republicans. And then you also saw battles between the extreme left Democrats and more moderate Democrats.

We’ve got an interesting general election here in Orange County, where we have two Republicans that are out trying to out-Trump each other between Ken Calvert and Young Kim, and that’s the kind of race that we traditionally would see in primaries, and I think we saw in some, where they’re both trying to look like the strongest possible Trump supporter. And that was a function of the redistricting, where these Republican districts were combined when Newsom pushed the California redistricting in response to what was happening in Texas.

Jenn: I think the only other thing, to speak to one of your other questions about the primaries, sometimes certainly pundits will look at the primaries as a bellwether for likely turnout in the fall election.

And so there were many more people voting in Democratic primaries this cycle than in Republican primaries. I think it was 57% to 43%. And so that’s higher than even another year in which Democrats did well in 2018. But just as a point of contrast, in 2022, so the last midterm, more Republicans were voting in primaries. So it’s just another signal that Democrats are more energized, more excited about these different races, and so that might lead to the expectation of higher turnout.

Ben: Well, and I would argue a lot of that is just the nature of the prime they get, right?

So if you look, there’s all this research on identity priming. The most effective primes are threat primes to prime group identities, right? We know partisanship is a group identity, and so the out party is the one that’s currently threatened, you know? And I think that’s a lot of what tends to mobilize out partisans in these midterms.

Georgia: What do you mean by, like, a threat prime? Is that something that’s, like, an issue that’s in the campaigns, or is it something that’s more based on the policies?

Ben: Yeah, so, if you feel that something relating to your identity group is threatened, whether it’s a benefit or a civil right, your ability to live your life as you want, whatever it is that threatens some aspect of the sense of self, that motivates you to pay attention first of all. Humans are hardwired to recognize threats. It also motivates you to develop meaningful opinions on that that are consistent with your identities, and then to act on those. And so I think part of the reason we tend to see out-partisans more active is because the incumbent party, the policies they make are engaged in actions that are perceived as threats. And so that stimulates that threat attention.

Georgia: So are the Democrats trying to capitalize on that, like emphasizing threats to their voters’ identities from the Republicans, to then mobilize their supporters? Have you seen that in the campaign at all?

Ben: Well, I think that’s most of the politics that we see. Issues pertaining to ICE, for instance, are targeted toward people of color who are threatened by ICE’s actions.

Georgia: And Democrats are trying to campaign by emphasizing that?

Ben: Yeah, I don’t know that they realize that, like, the roots of this come from these psychological mechanisms or social identity theory. But I think, you know, effective politicians do this, they may not realize why they’re doing it or why it’s effective, but they can see that it’s effective in the types of polling and experiments and all these things that they do in order to figure out which issues to emphasize.

Jenn: And it varies based on where they’re campaigning, right? So, like, in California, concern about ICE raids is certainly going to mobilize a good chunk of the Democratic electorate. But then if you look to other states where they’re more moderate, they may be talking much more about economic issues and concerns about affordability, economic threat. Like, I can’t provide for my family. I can’t afford a house. It’s just another way of using threat framing, but which ones politicians employ depend in part on the constituency that they’re dealing with and the district or state that they’re running in.

Ben: Well, and they’re not limited to particular issues, right? So because we have a variegated constituency, and we have incredible information about who voters are and what they want and what they care about. You can narrowly target groups within the same congressional district or state or whatever.

So in Iowa, we see farmers getting messages about tariffs that are affecting their ability to ship goods to Canada, right? I see labor issues… ICE is actually big in Nebraska, apparently, because they need labor for meatpacking plants and other industries, right? And so many of these policies, the way they’re implemented may affect other identities people have about how society should operate. Even ones that may not be traditionally Democratic, people may have strong identities that can be tapped into.

Georgia: So on the Republican side, I’m seeing Republicans spending a lot of money. Elon Musk just recently has now spent millions of dollars with his America PAC funding dozens of ads in these key swing Senate states that focus on anti-transgender messaging.

And I’m curious, why is that identity issue effective? Is it effective? And if so, why in political messaging?

Ben: Yeah, so it’s really interesting. You know, I think it’s not widely appreciated, but trans issues have become a touchstone. And people react very differently to trans issues than they do to lesbian and gay issues. The public has become generally quite supportive of gay rights broadly, but they are not nearly as supportive of trans rights.

And a lot of that seems to be related to a sense of disgust that people feel about trans issues. It was once the case that lesbian and gay issues were framed in the same way, and those were actually some of the most effective ads against things like gay marriage, for instance.

The most effective ads were ones that kind of talked about personal behavior in ways that were designed to elicit disgust. And, you know, Jenn is the expert on emotion, but the broader process is that they’re trying to make these issues that benefit them salient to sub-constituencies that are valuable for them to have turnout. And trans issues work exceptionally well for Republicans, and for many non-Republicans.

Georgia: Yeah, I remember watching the World Series in a bar in LA, and Trump’s anti-trans ads came on, and the whole bar, I mean, this is like a loud, raucous bar, just went quiet and watched the ad. I’m sure 95% of the people in the bar did not support Trump’s message, but it was such an attention-grabbing ad, and very upsetting. I mean, there were a lot of responses, but it was hard to not watch. It was not the kind of political ad you can glaze over.

Jenn: And I think there’s a sense that that ad in particular that you’re talking about, right, that “Harris is for they/them, not you.” I think the sense was that that was very effective, especially among people who may be traditional constituencies of the Democratic Party, they could even peel away with those ads. And so the thinking is, “Oh, let’s try this again because, especially, we’re in a vulnerable position. People are concerned about the economy. It doesn’t benefit us this time because we’re the party that’s leading government, right? So we’re going to be harmed by negative economic perceptions and so we can distract voters with these other cultural issues where they may be inclined to vote Democratic.” I think that’s part of why we’re seeing that strategy as well.

Ben: Well, I was going to say, too, that the rise of LGBT issues and their place in our discourse really emanates from a right-wing attempt to find messages that could re-energize their base.

So if you go back to around 2000, the religious right in particular, Christian conservatives, were very worried that they were losing this battle. They had lost on abortion, all these issues that were really important to them. They were losing political power. And there’s this wonderful book on The Evangelicals, where they come together to try and find issues that can help them mobilize their voters around what is going to be core religious conservative issues, and they choose gay marriage.

Gay marriage was not something advocated by the LGBT community. In fact, ironically, LGBT interest groups like the Human Rights Campaign opposed marriage equality, in those terms, because they were worried about backlash. And it was actually these conservative Christian organizations that got together and put this on the agenda in order to juice turnout, and resources—money—for their groups. And then it was very quickly co-opted by the Bush campaign, and incorporated there, because it fit quite well with what they wanted to do, and they used it to win key states like Ohio, for instance, in 2004.

Jenn: Yeah, so in a sense, this may be also an attempt to drum up evangelical turnout. You know, they were very energized also by abortion, but now Dobbs, right? They got the decision that they were working toward for many decades. And so now this issue can be another one that is mobilizing in an election where they may be kind of more depressed and less likely to show up and/or satisfied with one of their biggest issues and see less of a need.

Ben: Well, it’s really hard, right? We haven’t seen the economic resurgence. Like, you can’t talk about the debt or the deficit, right? It’s a disaster.

Jenn: Or gas prices…

Ben: Yeah. Inflation is not good, right? We’re in another war despite being promised to not be in stupid wars.

And so what do they have to emphasize, if you’re a Republican, and especially if you’re a Republican who’s not a hardcore MAGA supporter, right? Around the edges there’s a lot of fraying.

Georgia: Yeah, so it’s really elites that are driving this discourse about trans rights, and especially the anti-trans rights movement, and in this case, in a way to avoid talking about the economy or the war or a host of other issues.

Ben: Can I just say, though, I think they’re always choosing issues on this basis of what’s going to benefit them, right? So it’s not just like, “Normally we would be doing X, but instead we’re doing Y,” you know? Like, if the economy was great, they’d be talking about it because that’s what they’d be doing anyway, but when it’s not, they never talk about it.

Georgia: Right, because the economy is usually the number one top of mind thing that voters say in exit polls, when they’re asked, “Who did you vote for?”, and then, “Why?” The economy’s usually the number one answer, I believe.

Jenn: Yeah, it’s usually the top concern. Now, it’s not usually what always drives their decisions, because their perceptions of the economy are strongly colored by partisanship, especially in today’s level of partisan polarization. But at least at the margins, we do usually see if the economy is worse, it kind of hurts the incumbent party.

Georgia: So you mean if we ask Democrats and Republicans how the economy’s doing, they’ll give us different answers.

Jenn: Yes. But I should say, even with that, Republicans are not fully satisfied with the economy in this cycle, which is also why that’s a pretty telling statistic. If even Republicans are reporting that they’re not happy with Donald Trump’s performance on cost of living type of issues, that is really cause for concern, because usually there’d be some kind of perceptual filter by partisanship where they may look at it a little more rosy or try to blame, “Oh, but it’s because of Biden’s policies.” But we’re even seeing Republicans admit that, you know, Trump’s not performing well on the economy.

Ben: I was just told yesterday that gas prices are due to Biden and Ukraine. And that really actually speaks to where these cues come from, right? The partisan nature and uptick of media really helps lead to that polarization.

Georgia: Okay, I want to come back to something we brought up earlier. We were talking about the role of emotion in affecting the information that people, whether or not they pay attention, the opinions that they then form, and then their behaviors, like if they go to the polls, who they vote for. Jen, I know you’ve done a lot of work on emotion.

Can you tell us more about the role of emotion in turnout? I think people are pretty angry right now. Am I right about that? And how does anger affect turnout, and what about other emotions? We mentioned disgust, but what other emotions do we see that are really related to voting behavior?

Jenn: Anger certainly is an emotion that’s typically linked to political behavior. I mean, we all know this, right? Just in our own lives, if you feel angry about something, right, you feel the need to take some action, right? And so a lot of scholars have theorized when people experience feelings of anger, it should lead to greater engagement.

So we should see greater turnout, but it also leads to increases in activities beyond voting, right? So people may be more involved in campaigns. They may be donating money to campaigns if they feel angry. So it’s not just related to turnout, but also other types of activities; engaging in protests. So that’s one important emotion that will likely play a role in this election cycle.

Another one that sometimes people overlook is enthusiasm. That’s also an approach-oriented emotion. So if voters are really excited or enthusiastic about a particular candidate, they also may be inclined to turn out just because the pleasure of the act of supporting someone that is energizing. We saw that with some of the primary races, like Mamdani in New York for mayor, right? There was a lot of enthusiasm around his candidacy. So that can also lead to higher levels of turnout.

For emotions that demobilize, that would be if people are feeling depressed, right? So if you have, say, Republicans who are kind of depressed at how the president’s performing, what the party is doing, if people feel depressed, they’re usually much more likely to stay home.

Georgia: And so, like, how long does a person’s emotion last? Is anger something that, if you prime it now, it’s there twenty minutes later? I can imagine that sometimes, it is. Do you have any sense for how long these things last?

Jenn: That’s a great question, and it’s one we get often. And it’s not always clear. Sometimes scholars will study trait-based emotions, right, some people are just more likely to get angered by something. But in terms of emotions that people experience as a state—so you see some piece of information and it makes you really angry. Like, how long do you stay angry? Well, we don’t have enough research in political science to know how long people experience that emotion.

But the way I like to think about it is that I think politicians always keep it salient. There’s so many things in politics that make us angry. So, you know, in the real world, we’re getting multiple stimuli that kind of keep that emotion at a higher level.

Georgia: Yeah, so that’s why they’re running ads for months. Because they want you to donate now, and tomorrow, and a week from now, and then also remember who you want to vote for on Election Day.

Jenn: Exactly.

Georgia: So, I mean, this is just so interesting because, coming from the context of European or Canadian politics, the campaign is so much shorter in almost every other country than the U.S., that I just wonder if people are, like, less emotionally toyed with in these other countries, where you’re not allowed to campaign until eight weeks prior, versus a country where there’s no limits, like in the U.S.

Ben: I assume they still have partisan media and stuff though, no?

Georgia: Yeah, but I mean, there’s a lot of limitations on whether you can even run ads, when you can start ads, how much time can even be allotted on network television. And then things like social media ads are highly restricted.

I mean, I think, though, part of this probably is about polarization, right? So here there’s really just two choices. When people go to the polls, I think even in local elections now, they think more about national politics than in the past, and partisanship just matters more. And that certainly is, to some degree, a byproduct of the fact that there are only two parties, whereas in most other democracies there’s multiple parties competing on different issues where a person might agree with one party’s stance on one issue and another on another issue, and then a third party or a fifth party can then crop up to, like, take that constituency of voters that has that set of preferences.

Ben: I think it’s also worth noting that this polarization is also reinforced by this incredible sorting of different groups into the parties in ways that have led to fewer of these cross-cutting cleavages being salient in American politics. I think they’re actually still there. It’s just we don’t talk about them because the parties don’t benefit from raising those, you know?

Ukraine is not a huge issue in the elections, even though a sizable contingent of Republicans support aid for Ukraine against Russia, and of course, most Democrats do. But that one doesn’t align quite so neatly. We know that so many of the group memberships and group identifications people have begun to sort very clearly and cleanly into and alongside the party identities.

Georgia: So some people say that the left’s emphasis on identity issues is what led to Trump’s rise and MAGA in general. And I think, Ben, if I understood you correctly, you’re saying that actually, in many ways, it’s the right and elites on the right that mobilized identity issues, especially around gay marriage around 2000, and then trans issues today, to be crucial in elections.

Ben: Yeah, they all use identity issues at different… Like, Reagan Democrats was an appeal to white Democrats who were upset about economic benefits going to Black Americans, right? We see these appeals constantly. I think it’s shortsighted to suggest that this is something that happens only from one side. This is what political parties do, is they identify issues that can activate groups that are beneficial to them.

Jenn: I think some of the difference, and maybe why people think about this more with the Democratic Party, is because they have a more diverse constituency, many more different groups, that critique is often leveled against them, whereas the Republican Party is less diverse. But they are kind of railing against a lot of these cultural issues related to identities associated with the Democratic Party, but it’s to protect the status quo and sense of privilege. They don’t want to lose status in the U.S. political system. So it’s still related to identity, it’s just packaged in a slightly different way.

Georgia: Alright, so let’s just go back to polarization. How might we confront the divided American public that we have today? Could identity issues possibly be leveraged in a positive way, and unite voters across the political spectrum?

Ben: So, if you want to ask how we get out of the trap we’re in, where we have what appears to be a race to the bottom in terms of the parties polarizing and people doing just what’s in their best interest, the answer lies, I think, in politicians who try to activate superordinate identities, which are identities that bring people together, that emphasize our shared plight and interests.

There are a couple of challenges here. First of all, they’re not always so easy to activate. And when they are activated, they’re often activated in the face of other threats, right? So, the activation of American identity following 9/11, where you saw Democrats and Republicans come together, right? Well, that’s, you know… Preferably we’d not have a terrorist attack to do that. But we also see some politicians that try to take advantage of this.

I think Barack Obama, the way he got around some of the issues of race among mainstream Americans was by trying to bring people together. He had this very famous speech during the primaries, “We’re not the Republican States of America. We’re not the Democratic States. We’re the United States of America,” right? He talked about blue and red and bringing people together constantly, and in bringing together that American identity, we have identities that we share. That is a way to kind of bring people back together around some set of shared values.

Jenn: Well, I think it’s an important point that you’re mentioning, it probably only happens when there is a condition of threat, like a pretty big threat. And so even the example of Barack Obama, that was an effective strategy in part because there was this big economic recession. And so that type of rhetoric would make people who maybe were Republican or Republican-leaning independents feel comfortable supporting Obama…

Ben: It did my grandfather…

Jenn: Because they weren’t happy with the economy.

So I wouldn’t say issues and identity aren’t necessarily always separate things. Like these things are intertwined and work together in important ways in elections. And elites kind of know that, and certainly use rhetoric to try to play that up.

Georgia: So you mentioned the role of the economy in 2008. Today, are we also nearing a point today where downturns in the economy could lead Americans across the spectrum to respond in similar ways?

Jenn: Well, it is a different time point because we are even more polarized than we were when Obama was running, right? Polarization keeps going up, so you still will have some people that interpret the economy in different ways. And we don’t always have the unifying rhetoric, as Ben was talking about around Obama.

But I do think there are enough people that are dissatisfied that, again, I think that’s why concerns about the economy will largely drive a “blue wave,” as the pundits will sometimes talk about it.

Ben: Yeah, I also want to be very clear, Obama was able to overcome some of these issues through invoking superordinate identities with some people.

There are people with strong white identities who reacted in just the opposite way and saw Obama as a threat, right? And so it’s important to understand that, often, the same cue can work both for and against, with different groups.

Georgia: Okay, well, thank you so much, Ben and Jen. This was really a fruitful discussion, and we really appreciate having you on Talking Policy.

Jenn: Great. Thank you so much.

Ben: Thanks for having us. It was fun.

Georgia: My conversation with Jenn and Ben highlights how issues and identities interact in American politics. Elites leverage emotions to drive discourse on many issues in hopes of swaying the electorate, but key issues like the economy are often front and center to Americans across the aisle. At a time of heightened affective polarization, the upcoming midterms will test how individual and situational factors shape the vote.

On our next episode, we are heading back to the home of IGCC: UC San Diego. I’ll speak with Professors Thad Kousser and Lauren Prather in the Department of Political Science about U.S. election security and transparency. We’ll learn about how the public feels going into the midterms and how election officials are preparing to deliver a free and fair election. Please join us right here on Talking Policy. I’ve been your guest host, Georgia Kernell. Thanks for listening.