How to win a US presidential election — reminder

As the US presidential election ramps up, let me remind you of our conclusions about the language patterns used by winners. Since 1992, the winner is the candidate who:

1. uses high levels of positive language;
2. avoids all negative language;
3. stays away from policy and talks in generalities
4. doesn’t talk about the opposing candidate

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379416302062

The reason this works is that the choices made by voters are not driven by rational choice but by a more immediate appeal of the candidate as a person. The media doesn’t believe in these rules, and constantly tries to drive candidates to do the opposite. For first time candidates this pressure often works, which is partly why incumbents tend to do well in presidential elections.

But wait, you say. How did Trump win last time? The answer is that, although he doesn’t do well on 2 and 4, Hillary Clinton did very poorly on all four. So it wasn’t that Trump won, so much as that Hillary Clinton lost.

Based on this model, and its historical sucess, Biden is doing pretty much exactly what he needs to do.

Voting is not rational choice

Pundits and the media continue to be puzzled by the popularity of Donald Trump. They point out that much of what he says isn’t true, that his plans lack content, that his comments about various subgroups are demeaning, and so on, and so on.

Underlying these plaintive comments is a fundamental misconception about how voters choose the candidate they will vote for. This has much more to do with standard human, in the first few seconds, judgements of character and personality than it does about calm, reasoned decision making.

Our analysis of previous presidential campaigns (about which I’ve posted earlier) makes it clear that this campaign is not fundamentally different in this respect. It’s always been the case that voters decide based on the person who appeals to them most on a deeper than rational level. As we discovered, the successful formula for winning is to be positive (Trump is good at this), not to be negative (Trump is poor at this), not to talk about policy (Trump is good at this), and not to talk about the opponent (Trump is poor at this). On the other hand, Hillary Clinton is poor at all four — she really, really believes in the rational voter.

We’ll see what happens in the election this week. But apart from the unusual facts of this presidential election, it’s easy to understand why Trump isn’t doing worse and Hillary Clinton isn’t doing better from the way they approach voters.

It’s not classified emails that are the problem

There’s been reporting that the email trove, belonging to Huma Abedin but found on the laptop of her ex-husband, got there as the result of automatic backups from her phone. This seems plausible; if it is true then it raises issues that go beyond whether any of the emails contain classified information or not.

First, it shows how difficult it is for ordinary people to understand, and realise, the consequences of their choices about configuring their life-containing devices. Backing up emails is good, but every user needs to understand what that means, and how potentially invasive it is.

Second, to work as a backup site, this laptop must have been Internet-facing and (apparently) unencrypted. That means that more than half a million email messages were readily accessible to any reasonably adept cybercriminal or nation-state. If there are indeed classified emails among them, then that’s a big problem.

But even if there are not, access to someone’s emails, given the existence of textual analytics tools, means that a rich picture can be built up of that individual: what they are thinking about, who they are communicating with (their ego network in the jargon), what the rhythm of their day is, where they are located physically, what their emotional state is like, and even how healthy they are.

For any of us, that kind of analysis would be quite invasive. But when the individual is a close confidante of the U.S. Secretary of State, and when many of the emails are from that same Secretary, the benefit of a picture of them at this level of detail is valuable, and could be exploited by an adversary.

Lawyers and the media gravitate to the classified information issue. This is a 20th Century view of the problems that revealing large amounts of personal text cause. The real issue is an order of magnitude more subtle, but also an order of magnitude more dangerous.

The real problem with the Clinton email server

Every intelligence person I’ve talked to has told me that the probability that the Russians and Chinese (at least) hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server is 100%.

While the question of whether any of the emails were classified, about to be classified, or should have been classified is interesting, the real risk created by the use of this server is that it provided a real-time look at the communications of the Secretary of State (and the people she was talking to).

Even the unclassified emails provided insight into the Secretary’s state of mind, plans, location, and intentions. Some of these might have been obvious; others would follow from examining email headers; and others by carrying out textual analysis (which is getting quite good at reverse engineering mental state, as regular readers will know).

Access to your entire email stream + some analytic capacity = fairly complete understanding of your life.

(Note that Google already does this for everyone who has a gmail account, and also for anyone who sends or receives email from anyone with a gmail account.)

Added 2016/05/06: A new problem now arises: control of the presidential election is in the hands of any country that can claim to have hacked the server. While hacking by a foreign power remains a (virtually certain) hypothetical, it is clearly having no impact on the election. But if a foreign power were to leak that they had hacked the server and exploited that somehow, the impact will surely be catastrophic. And I can imagine several of America’s enemies who might prefer a President Trump to a President Clinton II.

Results from the first Democratic debate

The debate held on Tuesday night pitted one well known figure (Hillary Clinton) against one up and coming figure (Sanders) and three others with no name recognition except among the wonkiest. The differences in exposure and preparation were obvious. I can’t see that it made any difference to anyone’s opinions.

But it remains interesting to see how well each person did at presenting a persona. Extremely well known politicians do not usually have the luxury of presenting themselves with a new, improved persona because the old one is so well known, so it’s common to find that persona deception scores are low for such candidates. For those who aren’t well-known, the strength of their persona is a blend of how well they can do it personally, and how big the gap is between their previous self-image and the persona that they are trying to project. A relatively unknown candidate with a high persona deception score, therefore, is likely to do well; one with a low score probably will not.

Here are the results from this debate:

The red and greeen points represent artificial word use corresponding to moderately high amd moderately low levels of persona deception. Clinton, as expected (and from my analysis in the 2008 cycle) has low levels of persona deception. Sanders’s levels are in the mid-range. Chafee is sincere, but this won’t help him with his current level of recognition. O’Malley has the highest level of persona deception, which is a positive indicator for him (for what it’s worth in this crowd). Webb is also in the midrange, but his language use is quite different from that of Sanders.