The Roots of Fear

That real-world observation has been replicated in lab studies. In one experiment Greenberg and colleagues ran during the 2004 campaign, volunteers who completed a questionnaire that reminded them about their own inevitable death (how thoughts of their own death made them feel and what they thought would happen to them physically after they died) expressed greater support for Bush than voters of similar leanings who were not reminded of mortality. The researchers also found that subliminal reminders of death increased support for Bush (and decreased support for Kerry) even among liberals. It's not clear if such responses in the lab would endure in an actual voting booth. So perhaps one should not be too cynical about the decision by the Department of Homeland Security to raise the terror-threat level on Election Day 2004. "Political use of fear is not something new," says NYU's LeDoux. "But certainly the ante has been upped. We've gone from 'vote for me or you'll end up poor' to 'vote for me or you'll end up dead'."

The effect of fear is not limited to obvious issues such as homeland security. It spills into other political judgments: fear drives voters to cling more desperately to all of their core values. For example, in one experiment volunteers who identified themselves as political conservatives were given reminders of mortality. After that prompt, they rated gay marriage, abortion and "sexual immorality" as greater threats to the nation than they had before the reminders. "When you remind people of their mortality, they defend their world view more strongly and reject those who challenge it," says Greenberg. By laying a foundation of fear and then raising cultural issues, the GOP in 2004 got more traction from the latter than they would have without the former.

That doesn't mean that evoking voters' fears will cause them all to support, say, security measures that trample civil liberties or American exceptionalism at the expense of international diplomacy. If a voter's world view values human rights and global cooperation, then activating his amygdala will make him more supportive of those traditionally liberal views. That response may have pushed voters into the Democrats' column in the 2006 elections despite Bush's warning that "the Democrat approach" means that "the terrorists win and America loses." Paradoxically, by playing to fears so crudely, Bush may have driven enough voters to embrace views associated with the Democrats to give them control of Congress.

The failure of brute-force scare tactics, of course, reflected the times, too: by 2006, more voters than in 2004 were fed up with the Iraq War and terrorism alerts that had begun to sound like crying wolf. But something more fundamental was at work. Simply put, candidates do themselves little good by reminding voters of their fears and leaving it at that, for evoking fears without also raising hopes is rarely a winning strategy. "Successful candidates understand voters' fears and anxieties and speak to it," says Matthew Dowd, a former political strategist for Bush and now a contributor to ABC News. "Clinton did this in 1992, saying he understood voters' anxieties about the economy better than Bush 41 did, and [George W.] Bush did it in 2004 when he said he understood their fears and anxieties related to terrorism and security." To close the deal, these successful candidates took the next step: Bill Clinton offered hope by vowing to address economic problems more competently than George H.W. Bush was doing, and the current president offered hope when he said he would protect Americans better than John Kerry could or would. "Politicians who speak only to the fear and anxiety part without transitioning to something more optimistic don't win," says Dowd. "You can't leave voters stuck in their fear and anxiety. If you tear the bandage off the wound, you need to salve it." Candidates who offer that salve have been moving up in the polls. Obama paints himself as a candidate of hope, recognizing voters' fears about, say, the fragility of health insurance but, crucially, taking the next step by offering a promise that things will improve if he wins the White House.

It works both ways. Just as fear without hope is seldom a winning strategy, so failing to remind voters of their fears can leave even the most optimistic candidate on the short end of the ballot count. "Voters need to believe you understand their fears and anxieties," says Dowd. "If you just give optimistic speeches, voters don't feel that you understand their circumstances." Obama's promises about universal health coverage will therefore gain traction only if he deftly invokes voters' fears about not having or losing coverage. John Edwards, after a period in which he came across as more angry than optimistic, has in recent weeks returned to his message of hope, particularly on the economic front. But if his "America Rising" message clicks, it will be in large part because he has long played to voters' fears of an economic downturn, or of falling into the poor one of his "two Americas."

A big unknown in this presidential race is how fear—of terrorism, of illegal immigration, of an economic downturn—will shape voters' decisions. Psychologists don't even agree on how another terrorist attack would affect voters: make them turn from the party of the president who failed to prevent it, or make them embrace Bush's GOP as the current symbol of national power and pride? What's clear, though, is that continued exposure to a threat that never materializes diminishes its hold on the amygdala. "Slowly, when what we have feared does not come to pass, our logic turns back on," says NYU's LeDoux. "The prefrontal cortex tells the amygdala to stand down." In Bush's final appeal for his party's candidates in the 2006 midterm elections, he said, "If you want this country to do everything in its power to protect you … vote Republican." That surely moved some voters into the GOP column, but for the majority—who returned control of Congress to the Democrats—the power of fear had dissipated. Something similar may partly explain why Giuliani's polling numbers have been falling recently, even as he continues to raise fears of the country's vulnerability to attack, and why Edwards reversed course to emphasize optimism once again even as he subtly reminds voters of all they are right to be afraid of. Ham-fisted scare tactics may have lost their power. But a candidate who neglects the fear factor should have a concession speech ready to go.

With Anne Underwood, Richard Wolffe and Suzanne Smalley on the campaign trail, and Jeneen Interlandi

© 2007