When It’s Head Versus Heart, The Heart Wins

Obama has staked his hopes on the appeal of hope, which tends to be a winning strategy as long as voters' fears and anxieties are not primed by, say, a terrorist attack or a sharp economic downturn. "The outrage and cynicism that the Bush administration has made so many people feel has led a lot of them to want to feel inspired again," says Westen. That is clearly something the Obama campaign is counting on. In his endorsement speech last week, Sen. Edward Kennedy scarcely mentioned Obama's positions on issues, emphasizing instead the country's yearning for "a president who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream … and who can lift our spirits and make us believe again," and calling Obama someone who can "summon our hopes and renew our belief that our country's best days are still to come." Although hope for the future is almost always trumped by anxiety about the present, it can sway voters whose fears are in check. That may explain Obama's success with better-educated, well-off Democrats, while Clinton appeals more to those who have only a high-school diploma and are struggling economically.

In contrast to anxiety, enthusiasm tends to close voters' minds to new information. It makes voters stand pat, as it were, rather than try to learn more about candidates. The lack of enthusiasm for the GOP pack may therefore explain why that race has been particularly fluid: unenthusiastic voters are still actively seeking more information about the candidates.

Clinton's misty-eyed moment right before the New Hampshire primary tapped into another factor that shapes voters' decisions, namely, whom they identify with. Her display of emotion brought her gender front and center. That led more women to identify with Clinton. "When Hillary, who has played against gender stereotypes, suddenly tears up, women flock to her because she seems like them," says political scientist Pippa Norris of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. That was especially true for older women, says Zogby: "When she showed emotion, they said, 'Her struggle is mine.' They related to her."

Which candidate a voter identifies with is one of the most important gut-level heuristics, since it is tantamount to deciding that someone is enough like you to "understand the concerns of people like you," as pollsters put it. "If you feel a candidate is like you racially or by gender, you're more likely to believe that that candidate will support what you support," says Norris. But with a white woman and a black man vying for the Democratic nomination, where does that leave black women? Whom they most identify with depends on which aspect of their own identity dominates their self-image. For instance, in a study of whether black women believed O. J. Simpson guilty or not of the 1994 murder of his ex-wife and her friend, those whose identity as a woman trumped their sense of themselves as black were significantly more likely to believe Simpson guilty. But black women whose self-image was dominated by their race tended to believe him innocent.

Which aspect of identity takes precedence can change week by week and even hour by hour, depending which aspect of yourself you're reminded of. That, too, explains some of the volatility in this year's primaries. Several studies find that when Asian girls take a math test that asks them to indicate their gender, they are reminded of the stereotype that girls aren't good at math and therefore don't do as well as when they are not asked. But when they're asked for their ethnicity they assimilate the stereotype that Asians are math whizzes and do better. Clinton's emotional moment in New Hampshire brought gender to the fore, but the injection of race into the South Carolina primary made that aspect of identity more salient, and black women voted overwhelmingly for Obama.

Explaining why voters make the decisions they do is hampered by people's poor powers of introspection. Exit polls ask people whom they voted for and why. But the explanations tend to be post hoc, and wrong, because people have such little insight into their own motivations, reasoning and emotions, says Eskew. "People default to things like 'He shares my values,' or 'I think he's authentic,' or 'I like his position on abortion," he says. "But those are rational reasons. The real ones, the emotional ones, are harder to articulate." But they are the ones that count, and the campaign that best harnesses the power of the heart is just about certain to see its candidate at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue one year from now.

With Daniel Stone and Pat Wingert in Washington, Richard Wolffe with Obama, and Jeneen Interlandi, Sarah Kliff and Raina Kelley in New York

© 2008