Pleasure vs. pain: How Kamala Harris is flipping the script on the GOP

—President Franklin D. Roosevelt, June 27, 1936

When President Joe Biden was running for reelection, his main pitch was about the danger Donald Trump represented to American democracy and peace in the world. Now that Kamala Harris is the Democratic nominee, she’s shifted the emphasis of the campaign away from that danger and onto the opportunities that lay before Americans if we can just elect enough Democrats to bring them into reality.

The recent and dramatic swing in the polls is probably mostly driven by Biden stepping down and Harris stepping up, showing the nation she’s fully capable of running a campaign and the country. But it also reflects her shift in strategy.

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Every moment of every day, we’re always doing one of two things: moving toward pleasure or moving away from pain. Mentally and emotionally we never stand still; we are always either moving toward something we want or moving away from something we fear or would prefer to avoid.

The Moving-away-from-pain Strategy

In the short run, the most effective strategy for persuasive political communication is to motivate someone to move away from pain. The reason is simple: it’s physiological. If you get an electric shock, you pull your finger away from the wall socket. If you’re barefoot and step on glass, you lift up your foot. “Wow!” “Gotta do something!” Causing people to experience — or even imagine experiencing — pain gets an immediate response.

Moving-away-from-pain strategies are very powerful because they’re among the first we learn as children. Many children’s first spoken word is “No!” because they so strongly experienced parental admonishments to avoid pain: “No, don’t pull on the tablecloth!” “No, don’t touch the hot stove!” “No, don’t run into the street!” And by the age of two, most children have experienced enough pain, accidental or unintentionally self-inflicted, that they know well the association between “No!” and pain or the threat of pain.

If moving away from pain motivational strategies were compared to the forces of nature, they most closely resemble the electromagnetic force: nobody wants to be struck by lightning, and avoiding that fate will lead people to run for cover during a storm.

As adults we internalize these moving-away-from-pain strategies and use them to motivate ourselves and others. Dick Cheney motivated voters using the pain strategy when he ran for reelection in 2004 and said that if Americans voted for Democrats, terrorists would again attack the United States. Vote for Democrats, feel pain. Vote for Republicans, avoid pain.

Similarly, moving away from pain is at the core of Trump’s campaign strategy now; he’s largely abandoned his moving-toward-pleasure slogan of “Make America Great Again” and now spends almost all of his and his campaign’s time warning about Democrats’ embrace of queer people, racial diversity, and Keynesian economic policies.

Sabrina Haake points out:

“Donald Trump is a master of manipulating people with negativity and fear.”

Doktor Zoom writes over at Wonkette about the essence of the Trump campaign’s message:

“How dare Chelsea Handler say she enjoys not having kids? How dare a pop song celebrate women getting aroused? And drag queens! Oh god, the drag queens are having fun when they should be ashamed and hiding in a closet, and possibly seeking conversion therapy. And of course those ‘childless cat ladies’ should be having babies for the Fatherland, but instead think they’re allowed to live as they wish.”

Trump himself is laying the prospect of impending pain on thick, posting last week on his failing, Nazi-infested social media platform that if Harris is selected we will experience:

“GREAT DEPRESSION OF 2024, NOT TO MENTION THE PROBABILITY OF WORLD WAR III.”

The downside of the moving-away-from-pain strategy — which Trump is now experiencing — is that over time it stops working or produces terribly dysfunctional results.

It’s like whipping a horse to keep it going. At first it works, but after a while if you keep whipping the horse over and over, harder and harder, eventually the horse will drop dead of exhaustion, or it will give up and stop trying to avoid the pain and just sit there and whimper.

When overused, the moving-away-from-pain strategy eventually becomes ineffective; now, after 8 years of Trump’s imprecations and warnings — about everything from immigrants to crime to Democrats being socialists to Vance’s scurrilous Swift Boat allegation that Walz misrepresented his military service —people just shrug. We’ve seen this movie before, and it’s now getting tiring.

The moving-toward-pleasure strategy

At the other end of the motivational spectrum is moving toward pleasure, the primary strategy that the Harris/Walz campaign has embraced and promoted for the past two weeks.

Pleasure is typically nowhere near as initially powerful as pain. Prick your finger with a pin: it’s hard to produce an experience of pleasure that is as strong and as brief as that common experience of pain. Probably the closest we get to such intense feelings of pleasure are either drug-induced experiences (studies with rats show that they’ll push a bar to get cocaine until they starve to death) or orgasm (which will cause humans and other animals to risk their lives to achieve).

But broadly, setting aside drug-induced and sexual ones, the vast majority of our moving-toward-pleasure behaviors are very gentle and subtle. Getting a pay raise, having a good conversation, or enjoying a nice meal or movie — none of those, in terms of the intensity of the sensation, comes even close to the short-term power of the experience of having somebody poke you with a pin or scare you. If somebody pokes you, you’ll jump immediately; most of us, however, have never involuntarily jumped for a meal or a nice conversation.

But that doesn’t mean moving toward pleasure isn’t a powerful force; in fact, over the long term, it’s far more powerful than moving away from pain.

Moving toward pleasure is like the natural force of gravity. Just as gravity is the weakest of the four primary natural forces, it is also the most steady and constant. It’s keeping you and me glued to our seats. It steadily acts through our lives, never varying.

Although moving-toward-pleasure strategies don’t always produce immediate changes in behavior like moving-away-from-pain strategies do, they can last far longer and be far more powerful if properly reinforced.

Conservatives generally prefer moving-away-from-pain strategies, while liberals generally promote moving-toward-pleasure strategy. It makes sense that conservatives, who tend to think that the world is an evil place, would tend toward a moving-away-from-pain strategy; likewise, liberals, who tend to think the world is a good place, tend toward a moving-toward-pleasure strategy.

To be successful in politics, however, both types of motivational strategies are important. We want a safe nation (moving away from the pain of danger) and a nation where every person can fulfill their greatest potential (moving toward the pleasure of fulfillment). From a communication perspective, both types of motivational strategies have their uses.

In politics, a holistic message includes both moving toward pleasure and moving away from pain, but should always start with pleasure. “Vote for me because I’ll expand Social Security — while the other guy will gut it.”

As both the Reagan 1984 “Morning in America” campaign and the Obama 2008 “Hope and Change” campaigns showed, primarily offering people the pleasure of a beautiful and newly reinvented America can be a very seductive pitch. That was also the primary subtext of Trump‘s original 2016 “Make America Great Again” slogan, which he’d appropriated from Reagan’s 1980 campaign.

The simple way to do this is exactly what the Harris/Walz campaign is doing now. Start with the vision of a new and better America like the “freedom” meme Harris has put at the core of her stump speech.

In doing this, she’s borrowed heavily and brilliantly from the 20th century’s most effective politician, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who repeatedly pointed out that people aren’t free if they’re hungry, homeless, or unemployed. Harris is adding the freedom of women’s bodily autonomy, freedom to read what you want, and freedom from sickness to the pitch, pointing out that Democrats are promoting freedom while Republicans are trying to take it away.

As surrogates for the Harris/Walz campaign, we can all learn from this understanding of how people are motivated to make political decisions.

When talking with friends, neighbors, or canvasing door-to-door, always open with moving toward pleasure, talking about the great things Democrats have done for America and how much more there is to be done. Democrats brought us the 5-day workweek, Social Security, Medicare, safe food and drugs, a cleaner environment, free college and quality public schools, etc.

Add to that all the things Harris/Walz want to do for America going forward, from expanding healthcare and cutting drug prices to free college to solving our problem at the border.

But then also segue into the moving away from pain strategy by pointing out how Republicans opposed every one of those things for over 100 years and are today committed to ripping away even more of our freedoms than they’ve already taken or prevented from coming into being.

Understanding how motivation works makes us all more effective political communicators. Now that you consciously and intentionally know this, get out there and wake folks up!

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