Politics in an Era of Denial

How to Break Through

In the fall of 2022, when I was out knocking doors for my local state representative candidate, I had a very normal experience.

I was at a multi-unit in an industrial-ish area of town. The woman who answered the door was probably in her sixties, thick set, short light brown hair and glasses.

She spoke with an old school Missouri accent and was very polite, apologizing profusely for her large dogs going crazy in the background. Thin rays of bright sunlight filtered through the drawn blinds and cut sharp lines through the gloom of cigarette smoke behind her. Wheel of Fortune dancing across a flat screen was the only other source of light.

I thanked her for saying hi, introduced myself as a Marine veteran, and let her know that I had some information about an upcoming local election, which she said she was happy to hear. I told her that I was supporting a guy named Robbie because he was a veteran, too, and knew how to take care of people. I asked if she’d be willing to support him or if I could give her some more information to help her feel better about any decision.

She got super excited and told me about one of her close relatives who was wounded in Vietnam, had a purple heart, and had struggled since returning from Vietnam. She talked about her own disability, how she hadn’t been able to work for a long time, how hard it was to make it on SSI, how afraid she was about losing social security, and a neighbor’s son dying of a fentanyl overdose. We bonded over Vietnam veterans helping my family when we struggled and my deployments. I told her that’s why I was out talking to people about Robbie, because we needed guys like him in the state legislature, who understood how hard it can be for so many of us, including veterans.

She told me she was so happy that people who “got it” had finally started running for office. For as long as she could remember politicians had been corrupt, country clubbers out for themselves and big business. Never for the little guy.

That’s why she had been so happy when Trump ran in 2016 and why she was so mad that the insiders had come together to steal the 2020 election from him.

This wasn’t an uncommon sentiment on the doors in Missouri, so I told her that I had felt the same way about politicians serving big business rather than us. I had seen it myself as a Marine with big defense companies robbing taxpayers and giving subpar or defective equipment to guys like me and Robbie and her purple heart relative. All to pad their shareholders’ pockets.

I added that I know Trump is a Republican, and that I needed to let her know that Robbie is a Democrat, and how great it was that we could fight it from both sides.

She hesitated. She didn’t want someone helping Biden or the other national Democrats who she felt had ruined our country.

I added not to worry, that Robbie would be in Jefferson City taking care of us, not part of the mess in DC. So it was completely different. This was local.

She relaxed and said something along the lines of, oh, well that’s great then, both parties are corrupt and I can’t stand them, that’s why I love Trump. He rises above it. And she said of course she would vote for Robbie and that she was glad I stopped by because she hadn’t known anything about him.

Robbie won his race that year by 342 votes.

I know a lot of people consider this woman the incomprehensible stereotypical poor white Trump voter who clearly votes “against her own self interest.” And I’m sure hearing stories like this is very frustrating and reinforces a lot of beliefs liberals have about voters being stupid. If you’d like to explore these apparent contradictions more, I went deep into it– with several more examples– in “Why do people keep voting against their own self-interest?”

Today, however, I want to go a step further and talk about how to break through the contradictions, like I did, in the smallest way for Robbie, on that doorstep in 2022.

One big misconception that liberals have is that they think Trump voters will finally “get it” someday, when their lives have been “ruined” by Trump policies, and will “come around” as a result.

But that’s just not how people work, and there is no better evidence than the quote you all voted to explore more in my “Poll for the Next Issue” last week that is the basis for this discussion.

As background, measles recently killed two unvaccinated children in an outbreak in a small community with a low vaccination rate in Texas. In response, U.S. Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time anti-vaxxer, visited the town and met with the parents of one of the deceased little girls, Daisy Hildebrand.

Later, as part of the ongoing coverage of the outbreak, Daisy’s father, Peter, spoke to the press, defiantly stating:

“The [MMR] vaccine ain't worth a damn. My brother's family got it and they all still got sick — worse than my unvaccinated kids. This isn't about the vaccine.”

There are two notable political takeaways from this.

First, literally the worst possible thing happened to this man: his child died a painful death in front of him. And yet he was still unwilling to change his mind, even though it could potentially save the lives of his surviving children. Not only that, but this father was willing to claim–on national TV for many millions of people and contrary to all evidence– that his brother’s living children had gotten more sick than his dead daughter did.

If this doesn’t make it clear that people don’t suddenly “get it” when their lives are ruined, how about that Trump voter whose wife was ripped away from him and detained by ICE for deportation when they returned from their honeymoon? No regrets, he says.

But he would love it if you donated to the gofundme for a liberal immigration lawyer to get his wife out of custody….

Expecting people to change their minds when confronted with facts or the truth is in itself a failure to understand the truth and reality, particularly when it comes to politics and how people make decisions.

As hundreds of studies have shown, facts don’t change people’s minds. In fact, despite being obviously wrong, people will still think that they are right even when presented with concrete and irrefutable evidence that they are wrong.

And this is everyone. Not just people on the right. Or uneducated or stupid people. Or anything like that. The behavior is endemic to humanity. I’m sure you can think of plenty of times that you (or perhaps it’s easier to insert someone you love…) have been wrong and resisted accepting it.

One of the most obvious recent examples of this on the left–by very smart people–was the year-long emperor-has-no-clothes denial about Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. It was incredibly challenging as a candidate that something so obvious was being denied, and it’s remarkable to see so many Democrats still struggling to accept that it was real and not just a media frenzy, despite the increasingly large volume of public evidence that eventually led to Biden stepping down and that continues to compile.

The knee-jerk response by Democrats, beyond that the decline was exaggerated, is usually that Trump is even crazier or losing it even more and is also old so it’s hypocritical that people held it against Biden. But while that might make people feel better, it’s just another form of denial, and it doesn’t change the fact that this long-running denial about Biden’s health and the aftermath is likely the single biggest reason that Trump is president right now.

I don’t say this to needle anyone or to be contradictory, but to point out that this isn’t unique to one political or educational or socio-economic demographic.

So, if denial and stubbornness are endemic, what do we do about it?

This brings us to the second notable political takeaway from Peter Hildebrand’s interview about his daughter’s death.

Right after meeting the Hildebrand’s and his trip to Texas, RFK Jr. tweeted “The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine,” effectively contradicting decades of his own advocacy.

Afterward, when the press asked Peter about meeting RFK Jr., he simply replied:

“He didn't mention vaccines once. But he was the nicest man I ever met.”

RFK Jr. had literally just betrayed this man, selling out to the political establishment, big pharma, and everything else by telling the world that MMR vaccines are effective.

And Peter Hildebrand still loved him.

Peter made up his mind about RFK Jr. a long time ago, and a little betrayal for the press and to keep his job was not going to change that relationship.

I have talked to and interacted with many many thousands of voters of all persuasions under very challenging circumstances, and RFK is an example of someone who has done what it takes to to break through with certain people and maintain that breakthrough.

Because, let’s face it, on paper the people who like RFK shouldn’t be into him. He’s one of the biggest nepo babies of all time, scion of a great liberal family, who’s never had to worry about anything, who spent his career as an environmental attorney going after big business, and who ran against Donald Trump.

So how did Peter come to be so pro-Kennedy and why didn’t he go after Kennedy as just another slimeball flip-flopping politician when Kennedy flopped? Because Kennedy built trust and loyalty in many of the same ways that Trump did.

1. RFK earned trust and commitment by doing something that cost him. If you want people to believe and trust you, the best way to do that is by doing something that costs you. The higher the perceived cost, the better. Kennedy rejected his family legacy and elite society and became the subject of their disdain and scrutiny by becoming an anti-vaxxer. And he committed to it. Some of the things that our testing found persuaded people to trust me the most during my campaign were my positions that had a high cost or a perceived high cost, like rejecting all sorts of sources of campaign funding and being critical of the Democratic party and party leadership on things like stock ownership by members of congress.
   

2. RFK made Peter and others who otherwise felt neglected or ridiculed feel seen and respected. Some of the best headway we made in the campaign was going to communities that had been left behind.
   

3. RFK supported his people even when they were wrong and never confronted them. “He didn’t mention vaccines once,” Peter said about their meeting.

Combined, these are the foundational first steps to breaking through and changing behavior: earning trust, making people feel seen, and not antagonizing your counterpart.

The final step is building a permission structure– an emotional and psychological justification– for your counterpart to alter their behavior.

Going back to the beginning, I couldn’t have successfully asked that Trump voter to vote for my Democratic State Rep candidate if I had argued with her about why Trump was bad for her.

Instead, I earned her trust based on a perceived cost or sacrifice (my deployments and military service), talked to her in a way that she felt seen and respected (and which alerted me to one of her core beliefs, corrupt politicians), and then, on that foundation, I built a permission structure around that core belief that allowed her to be both a Trump voter and a Democrat state rep voter.

Here is another example, this time of a permission structure we wanted to try in my campaign but didn’t ultimately have enough money for.

A core belief of a vast amount of Missouri voters is that they are independent. This is deeply held to the point that they will say they are independent voters even if they hate Democrats, think that Democrats ruined America, and haven’t voted for a single Democrat in a decade or more.

Our research found that people liked me a lot more than they liked my opponent (probably because I had built trust using steps 1-3 above and he hadn’t), that a vast amount of voters considered themselves independent, but that they were worried about voting for a Democrat.

In this case, the permission structure would have been to run a mini-campaign along the lines of:

“You’ve always considered yourself independent, you say you aren’t bound by either corrupt party, and in this election you have a chance to prove it, because you have a choice between the worst possible Republican and the best possible Democrat. So, are you independent, or aren’t you?”

After building the foundation of trust, this was one way we would have liked to try to tap into a core belief to try to change a default course of action. I wish we could have tried it, but the Democratic brand is so bad in Missouri that we ran out of money on the building trust phase and weren’t able to take the next step. (Reminder– with just the building trust phase we were able to outperform the Dem ticket by 10 points in target areas despite being outspent, so something here was working).

This approach isn’t meant as a critique of facts, or to say that they aren’t important, or that there isn’t value in publicizing the shortcomings of what’s going on right now.

The point of this is to acknowledge that there has been a deep shift in voting in this country. Missouri was a bellwether state for generations until 2016, for example. And to recognize that a reverse shift isn’t likely to be based on facts or even experiences. That’s just not how people work or make decisions.

A counter-shift won’t be about bullying or confronting voters with all the ways they were wrong. It’s going to require significant trust-earning sacrifices at the national level, like those I outlined in “Time to Start Breaking Things”, combined with making people feel seen and a permission structure that help them feel good about changing their minds. If those things happen, politics really will turn the corner faster than you could ever dream of.

If you’ve made it this far, you must be motivated to make some change, so thank you for being a part of that! Please share this with anyone you think would be interested in it or who would find it useful.

-Lucas