Language in Presidential Elections — 2012 Season Opener

Readers of this blog will know that we spent a lot of time analyzing the speeches of the U.S. presidential candidates in the 2008 election. Our primary interest was in the use of the deception model, a linguistic/textual model of how freeform language changes when the speaker/writer is being deceptive.

In the political arena, factual deception, saying things that just ain’t so, plays very little role, perhaps because voters have very low expectations of politicians in this area. What we call persona deception, presenting oneself as a better,wiser,  more powerful, more able, more knowledgeable person than one really is is the heart of successful campaigning. It turns out that the deception model captures deception across the whole range from factual to persona deception, so it gives us a lens to look at candidates and campaigns. What’s more, because language generation is almost entirely subconscious, this lens is hard to fool.

The most important skill candidates and their campaigns have is the ability to reach out to potential voters to convince them that they are better than the other possibilities. The language that they use is an important channel, especially in settings where everyone is conservatively dressed, and standing behind a podium that conceals most of their body language, as the Republican presidential field was in Iowa yesterday.

Strong candidates understand, at least instinctively, that they are not making arguments to convince voters, but presenting themselves as more compelling human beings. Our analysis of the speeches of candidates in the 2008 U.S. presidential election showed that candidates use three different kinds of speeches: blue skies speeches that promise generically good things and could be delivered interchangeably by any candidate – they are aimed at a wide audience; track record speeches that use past achievements to imply special qualifications for future achievements – they are aimed at swing voters; and manifesto speeches that describe a candidate’s personal qualities directly – they are aimed at a candidate’s base and reinforce common identity. But in all three cases, it’s not the content of the speech that matters, but what it implies about the speaker.

Our analysis in the last election cycle showed that Obama was by far the best as presenting himself as a wonderful person, and many voters, and certainly many in the media, projected onto the persona  positive qualities that were perhaps not there. Interestingly, yesterday was the first time I have seen open Democratic buyers remorse about electing Obama, something I predicted would happen from the analysis we did.

The Republican candidates’ debate in Ames showed what a shaky grasp many of the candidates have on how to be a convincing candidate. Of course, this venue was a difficult one. Its overt purpose was for candidates to explain themselves to the local Republican base ahead of the Ames Straw Poll,which would have required largely manifesto content; but national television coverage made it an unmissable opportunity to reach out to a wider, but much more diverse audience, suggesting track record content. Blue skies content is always dangerous in the early stages of a campaign because grand but potentially unwise statements can come back to haunt a candidate.

Manifesto content was indeed popular – for example, we learned how many children almost every candidate has – typical content aimed at the base (“I’m a parent just like you”). Several candidates also tried for track record content, but got it quite wrong. The purpose of a track record speech is not for candidates to read their resumes to the audience; it’s to make the argument “I was able to do A, so you can trust me to be able to do similar-but-larger B” and this second part was notably absent.

Voters also want candidates to be sincere — recall the famous quotation “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made” (Jean Girardoux). This is not just a cute quotation; this is what good politicians are able to do. In Iowa, this was another area where almost everyone stumbled. It was clear that most of the candidates had not only prepared talking point responses to probable questions, but has also rehearsed actual answers. Delivering from a prepared and memorized script and seeming sincere is a difficult business, and actors who can do it reliably command high rewards.  Most of the candidates failed at seeming sincere. Several managed the worst of both worlds by trying to combine their prepared scripts with some ad libbing and came across as quite incoherent. One of the reasons for Gingrich’s strong showing is that he stayed away from scripts and delivered his answers as if he had just thought of them. Huntsman and Romney, in contrast, were especially wooden.

When humans listen to humans, the content matters. But when character is the issue, other aspects of language matter more. Much language generation is subconscious, and therefore beyond a candidate’s control. This is good for voters because it means we can sometimes see through to the real person no matter how sophisticated their speech writers and spin doctors.

First U.S. Presidential Debate Results

Debates are a great opportunity to examine candidates’ languages because they are less scripted. The candidates prep answers to typical questions, but the actual words used to deliver them are their own.

The problem with most debates is that they are question-driven, and this changes the dynamics of deception. The format of the first debate used questions mainly as hooks to start statements, so this was much less of a problem.

As usual, I’m assuming that people vote for candidates they like, rather than candidates who are most competent. Hence it is always the right strategy for candidates to appear more likable and appealing than they might really be.

Candidates can use four strategies for their debate presentation:

1. Make blue-skies policy statements, with high spin. This reaches out to the maximal number of potential new supporters; but the attraction may not last very long precisely because the content is not connected to the candidate as a person.
2. Make blue-skies policy statements, with low spin. This is a waste of an opportunity.
3. Make track-record policy statements, with high spin. This reaches out to people who are on the boundaries of supporters, typically independents. If it can be made to work, this is probably the best possible strategy option, but it is hard to do. The problem is that the link to the candidate as an individual who has done or is going to do particular things makes it hard to also appear to be more attractive to people who might not like the things done or planned.
4. Make track-record policy statements, with lower spin. This is a good strategy for expanding those who favor a particular candidate (if you can’t do 3) because those who are attracted are attracted more strongly and so more likely to stay attracted.

In the debate on Friday, both candidates made a hash of answering the first two questions (on the financial bailout). They had obviously not prepped questions in this area, and hadn’t even had much of a chance to talk about the issues — so their speech was very choppy and they kept changing their minds about what they were going to say half way through sentences.

On the remaining questions, it is clear that Obama was going for strategy 1, while McCain was going for strategy 4, to the extent that they made conscious or partly-conscious choices about what kinds of answers to give. The levels of spin in response to each of the 8 questions are shown in the figure below.

Comparative spin for 8 questions

As usual, red is McCain and blue is Obama. Obama’s level of spin is high throughout (once he gets going) and his answers tend to be either of the form “we must do something” or “something must be done”. This high-spin strategy worked, and he is generally reckoned to have won the debate. The risk of this strategy, however, is that the attraction doesn’t stick; and I heard at least two commentators complain that Obama was so vague that it was hard to work out where he really stood on any issue. So there is danger here that, as people hear Obama more, they will be less and less impressed.

McCain’s levels of spin vary much more substantially. His two high-spin segments were in response to questions about the lessons of Iraq and the threat from Iran. In the first case, his answer was both short and off-topic; in the second he launched into a conversation about Obama’s statements about meeting with world leaders, interleaved with historical remarks about Nixon and China etc.. It looked like he was trying for his typical track-record policy statements, but he didn’t succeed very well because he kept dropping back into blue-skies policy. Thus there were answers that might have made an impact on independents, but he spent more time competing for those further away from his positions. By doing so less coherently than Obama, he probably didn’t do as well with any group. McCain has developed a partial way to get the effect of strategy 3 – he creates sandwich speeches, with chunks of low-spin, this-is-what-I’m-like content at the beginning and end, and blue-skies policy in the middle.

As debate speakers, both were quite poor. They were like my students who, having prepared an answer to an expected exam question, use it even though it doesn’t quite fit the question they were actually asked. I know that politicians become adept at making statements that appear to be answers to questions, but I thought they did it very transparently in the debate.

Clinton and Obama spin including Penn debate

Here are the results of the analysis of spin for Clinton and Obama, using speeches from 2008, and the Penn debate last night. 19 is Clinton, and 39 is Obama.

Clinton: blue dots; Obama: blue stars.

As I’ve noted before, Clinton in general uses less spin than Obama, except when she’s under pressure. It’s also clear from this figure that there is a significant difference between the two orthogonal to the line that indicates level of spin. This is almost entirely due to Clinton’s liking for action verbs, to which Obama is relatively allergic.

It’s not quite fair to compare debate content to prepared speeches, because a debate requires some level of responsiveness to questions (which changes the model of deception). However, it was clear that most of the answers last night were heavily prepped, so perhaps it’s not too different.

The striking thing is that both performances represent all-time lows in spin for both candidates. This is somewhat surprising since Clinton is presumptively in the last few days of her candidacy. Both candidates seem to have decided that they can only be who they are — which has to be a good thing.

Mind you, Obama is still in love with the pronoun “we”. He almost said “when we become president” last night!

Obama thinks he has the nomination

In my previous post, I pointed out that Obama has changed the way in which he uses first-person singular pronouns — increasing them dramatically, a strong signal that he has reduced the amount of spin he is using.

I wasn’t sure why this was happening. In the debate this evening, he’s using the same increased level of first-person singular pronouns.

The change is truly dramatic.

I think perhaps he has decided that he has the nomination, and he’s stepping out from behind the careful facade that he’s used to get this far. Certainly he learned something this weekend that has changed his attitude to the campaign. I don’t think that this much of a change could be managed consciously.

It’s a big change.