Emotion is the new battleground

The authoritarian right has been playing to feeling —and now, so is Kamala Harris

Illustration by New Rules Media

In this era of fear and anxiety, who wins the White House will likely depend, ultimately, on how each candidate makes us feel.

---

CHICAGO —Feelings have always played a role in politics. But not as big a role as they’re playing this election year.

Sure, policies still matter to voters—a lot. We just got quite an earful on plenty of of all that in the first, if not only, high-stakes debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump—just as we will, again, on October 1st, during the vice presidential debate between Democrat Tim Walz and Republican JD Vance, to be hosted by CBS News.

But in this year of fear, anxiety, high conflict and social turbulence, it’s not about data and policy differences so much as it is about a candidate’s temperament, and how well each will be able to connect emotionally with voters in today’s politically charged climate as a compassionate ally, solidly prepared to move both them and the country forward.

Not convinced? As a very young reporter covering Bill Clinton’s White House campaign for Hearst News back in the day, I was always being reminded by Clinton’s lead strategist, James Carville, of his famous line, “It’s the economy, stupid” —a reminder that despite attack ads, poor debate performances and other issues of the day, it would be the state of the economy that would always make or break a candidate’s bid for higher office.

In these times, though, Carville says that phrase he coined is no longer entirely true. “That trope doesn’t bark much anymore,” he said in a recent interview—at least not in this year’s fight for the White House. He and today’s top strategists, political thought leaders and some top GenZ influencers now say the new battleground is emotion.

A CNN poll released the morning after the first Harris-Trump debate showed that 63% of the network’s viewers felt Harris turned in a better and more “emotionally solid” debate performance than Trump; the Atlantic, sizing up the emotional component of the first debate, said “Harris stayed human, while Trump went feral.” Taylor Swift endorsed Harris on Instagram after the debate in a post that received 7.8 million likes, saying, in part: “I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” She signed it, “Childless Cat Lady”—a reference to a remark by GOP Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance lamenting what he perceived to be the emotional deficit of a country being run by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” Swift included with her endorsement a photograph of herself holding one of her three cats.

Big Feelings

 “If this were an era defined by big policy questions and little else, that would be one thing. But it is an age now defined by Big Feelings,” says writer Anand Giridharadas, who has been tracking efforts by aspiring autocrats to play the emotional card in their campaigns.

“There is a lot of anxiety and fear and great confusion among millions of people about who they will become on the far side of head-spinning change,” he said at a recent conference of journalists. “There is the emotional crises of men unsettled by a future of gender equality. The anxiety of many White people unsettled by a future of racial equality. The anxiety of many young people” worried about the future health of the planet, along with growing fear over government inaction to stop what is now becoming a common and continuous string of school shootings. And there have been unresolved questions in this era over whether pro-democracy leaders and movements can, in their own way, “get the blood up” to defend the rule of law and its ideals of pluralism, economic justice and basic human rights.

“…All around us, people are not sure how to make sense of their place in a world of upheaval, nor the ability of their governments to serve them any better than now,” Giridharadas continued. And in an era such as this, “leaving the politics of emotion, of passion, to autocrats … would be a dangerous abdication.”

While connecting emotionally with new audiences is critical, trusting a candidate can be seen as a emotional risk, says Manos Tsakiris, director of the University of London’s new Centre for the Politics of Feelings. Democratic elections in the U.S. and in democracies around the globe this year are being rocked and seeded by a set of new emotional flares—biased algorithms, disinformation, and targeted, emotional appeals created by Russian social media trolls and global autocrats meant to intentionally whip up voter anger and persuade many Americans to start questioning the value of democracy, itself.

“Political language today has become saturated with emotion,” says Tsakiris, who co-founded the Center in 2021 to study how politicians and aspiring autocrats are using emotion to influence voters in democracies around the world. “Historically, democratic political theory has focused on reason and rationality as a means of taming emotions. …But now, we’re seeing some politicians using emotion, void of reason and deep thought, to convince new voters to depart from our democratic values.”

Vibe Watch

So, dear readers, with the most respected public opinion polls now showing an increasingly polarized electorate with Harris and Trump locked in a dead heat, here’s some back-of-the-envelope context to consider about the Big Feelings our candidates and their communication teams are both navigating, sharing and designing this presidential election year, for better or worse, to shape how voters will feel and engage with others about the November election.

Being a media professor during an historic U.S. election year has given me and my grad students access to a ton of fresh examples of how vibes and memes are influencing the mood of the electorate—and, by extension, how both facts and emotions are shaping the outcomes of campaigns.

My students’ first-week assignment this new semester was to start ‘vibe-watching’ the new memes, attack ads, and TikTok videos the candidate’s teams are using to generate emotion and connections with target voters. Here are some of the pre-debate, non-partisan observations they shared, with permission, on global polling, the use of attack ads and the gender gap. All have been fact-checked. Spoiler alert: They’re just getting started!

• Race and gender vibes. According to the Wesleyan Media Project, a collaboration of university media professors tracking the communications used in political campaigns, 100 % of Trump’s attack ads have been focused so far on Harris, with 95% attacking her personally and only 5% talking about policy differences. The attack ads, distributed in swing state counties considered most likely to go from blue to red, question Harris’s laugh, her experience, her racial identity and suggest that in past jobs, she has been “a DEI hire.” Trump’s ads are also meant to build fear by describing her as a potential danger to the country, suggesting her focus on the Middle Class makes her a “Marxist” and her lack of bias against others “makes her a member of the Communist Party.” Trump spokespeople acknowledge that very little of this name-calling, so far, has stuck; Trump advisors say they’re testing which Republican vibes best spike the emotions of MAGA supporters and targeted GenZ men who fear social change will not include their interests. Harris is also starting to roll out attack ads, hers designed to inform voters about Trump’s policies and how his former top cabinet officials feel he lacked competency as President. According to political marketers, attack ads sometimes work by either persuading voters to change their preferences for office—or, most often, to avoid voting for a particular candidate altogether.

• Secret vibes. Team Trump’s recent visits to various “sundown towns” across the Sun Belt and Midwest were intentionally scheduled to convey a “secret, inside vibe” meant to reassure White voters who fear racial equality that he understands their fears. [Trump advisors acknowledge this is true.] Sundown towns are places in America where the resident populations, back in the early 20th century, made local laws intended to force Blacks to leave town before sundown, so as to keep those cities and towns ‘White-only.’ Most of these towns are still mostly White and proud of their history. Trump’s repeated mis-pronouncement of Harris’s first name has also been called a “secret vibe” meant to both entertain supporters and convey his opposition to Harris in a way that has nothing to do with her policy positions. During the first Harris-Trump debate, Trump avoided looking at Harris and did not call her by her name.

• The Joy vibe. Kamala Harris’s new “joy” campaign was not created only to convey happy talk and contrast the Harris-Walz campaign with Trump’s campaign speeches about “American carnage.” In communities of color, the use of the word “joy” is a cultural reference to the organizing strength of political movements built on the values of resilience, inclusion— and resistance to racial bias, gender bias, segregation and religious freedom for all Americans, including Whites. In this emotion-driven strategy being pushed by the Harris-Walz team, Trump might have finally met his match when it comes to emotional targeting.

• The freedom vibe. MAGA supporters want freedom. So does everyone else. But democracy? Not unless it is re-set to work better. According to a recent Pew Research survey, 72% of Americans say the U.S used to be a good example of democracy, but isn’t anymore, and a median of 40% of adults polled across 34 other democracies around the world say U.S. democracy “used to be a good example for other countries to follow.” The Harris-Walz strategy, therefore, is consciously avoiding references to “democracy,” using the word “freedom” to acknowledge, says Walz, that “you can still be clear-eyed about the injustices and violence and hypocrisy America was built on but still see the promise of its story—not by rejecting things as they are but by supporting new leaders to make democracy work better, for all.” The Trump Team is also mostly avoiding the use of the word “democracy” in their campaign messaging.

• The relevancy vibes. Harris and Trump are duking it out on social media, mostly to woo the 41 million GenZ voters now registered to vote— many for the first time this year. There is a widening gender gap among young Americans; Trump is targeting young White men on the streaming platforms Kick and Twitch, who are deep into bro culture and have concerns about the topic of gender equality. Harris, meanwhile, is targeting young women on TikTok, X and Instagram, to connect with them using popular culture references to GenZ fashion, music and food memes to underscore her relevance and understanding of what they care about, how they relate to each other and what they want and need from their leaders. [See our recent stories, Politics, Re-wired and GenZ Influencers: the new swing voters?].

• Ezra Klein, the journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show podcast, explained at a recent media conference his early lesson on how best to connect emotionally with an audience. He said: “All through school I was heavily bullied, but the thing that was very clear to me then—as a kid who wanted to be liked by other people but often wasn’t—was that what mattered in the school yard was not the thing you said but the mood of the crowd when and after you said it.”

---

I hope we’ve given you some additional context and input on the messaging being used to fuel the start of the Harris-Trump race for the White House. Please share your take on this year’s emphasis on emotion. We’d love to hear your feelings, too!

NOTE: This article was updated on 9-11 to include new poll numbers and to share some post-debate references to the emotional punch of the Harris-Trump debate on 9-10.