ARE YOU HORNY TO VOTE OR WHAT?
An exploration of political enthusiasm
To open this piece, I will teach you a term that really only campaign staffers know about. “Viz”. Viz is short for visibility, and this visibility is specific to visual support of a candidate. When a candidate walks off a bus, or hops out of a car, or walks onto a stage, the comms folks want need1 to have a crowd of adoring fans clapping, chanting and taking photos like they are in front of Dua Lipa2. Oftentimes, these aren’t actually random citizens and excited voters cheering for a candidate. They are paid staff3 (mostly organizers and interns/fellows4) and scheduled volunteers. They will stand outside in the rain, in the blistering sun, in the snow, for many hours on end, all to visually display enthusiasm, mostly for the press (Twitter (pre-Elon)).
I wouldn’t say that viz is inauthentic, because it’s usually not. Though they are paid, organizers do in fact have a lot of enthusiasm for their work and are willing to do whatever it will take to help their candidate win. Even if it involves pretending that Kamala Harris is Taylor Swift. They scream chants into megaphones using their candidates name, and do a bit of dancing. Few people really enjoy viz. It’s kind of a “shut-up-and-serve-your-time-as-a-campaign-underling-and-scream-when-we-ask” mentality.
Some campaigns get really creative with viz, and it becomes a pageant of drama and money. (Insert cliché line about politics just being Hollywood for ugly people). The most extreme viz spectacles happen in presidential primaries, at the annual mega-fundraisers for the early voting state’s Democratic party. People from all over the country fly in to see what I call the “Democrat Olympics” or the “Lib Superbowl”, which are the annual Iowa Democratic Party’s and New Hampshire Democratic Party’s fundraisers. Shit gets bonkers. In 2020, campaigns had viz budgets carved out, and I can estimate that the top five campaigns had budgets that were above $40,000 (at least). I’ve seen a few people pass out before during viz, from being in the extreme heat for so long, cheering and chanting for hours (to possibly impress the field director).
It’s a dramatic charade. It exists to show the media, and the people that consume the media (ideally prospective voters and not Russian bots) that there is enthusiasm for a candidate. People seeing other people supporting a candidate is supposed to encourage them to REALLY want to vote for that candidate. It’s the same idea behind yard signs5. It’s also why yard signs are not helpful whatsoever in an election. It’s a performance.
Young reporters will talk about the “enthusiasm gap”, and communications staffers have to tap dance to it6. It’s a term that basically means how excited and willing to vote for your candidate do people seem? There is no way to measure this, even though pollsters will ask about the enthusiasm of likely voters on the phone. Enthusiasm cannot be quantified, and there is no test that accurately demonstrates how enthusiasm correlates to turnout. It’s an amorphous idea that can be observed and hypothesized, but never truly proved. Whenever I have reviewed drafted survey scripts (for polls) that include an enthusiasm question, I want to suggest that we just ask people how horny they are to vote.
I find the enthusiasm gap premise funny because it creates an imaginary spectrum of a voter. On one side we have a person who is only going to vote if they happen to wander into a polling location, or if their wife/husband drags them, and on the other side we have someone wearing head to toe candidate merch to a polling place, (it’s actually illegal to do this in some states, insane), is an active campaign volunteer, and engages in political debate on Facebook (on purpose). People all across that spectrum are going to show up on election day, and each of their votes count exactly the same.
I’ve never worked at a polling firm, but I’ve worked with them, so I know how annoying the concept of enthusiasm truly is. A pollster’s job is pretty dependent on it. A person has to be enthusiastic enough to:
Speak to a stranger on the phone, sometimes for upwards of 15 minutes, usually after a long day at work
Know that there is an election coming up7
to even become a data point on a poll.
Once that enthusiasm is established, a person becomes a single line on a massive spreadsheet8, with all of their responses to policy questions and voting excitement being quantified and placed on a scale amongst other people. In 2016, we saw a mess of pollsters blaming pundits and pundits blaming pollsters for not accurately predicting candidate enthusiasm and forecasting that that guy would win. (Before Nate Silver9 comes for me, yes, the undecided vote pre-2016 election was a margin so large that it could account for Trump voters, but can you recognize nuance for one god damn moment!!!!!).
People reluctantly voted for Trump. I don’t believe there were millions of “secret” Trump voters who purposefully misled pollsters. I think people voted for him but had been feeling unsettled about it, and they did it anyway. I don’t think they were un-enthusiastic, but I think they felt something a bit closer to apathy for the election that cycle, and a choice like Trump met their needs.
This was the same apathy that Trump voters had when the “grab her by the pussy” comment video leaked, because it didn’t directly happen to them. The same apathy that fuels their hate of immigrants, and how they feel nothing about families being separated, because they think their own suffering is worse. Enthusiasm is fun to look at, but it doesn’t decide an election. I don’t know if we know exactly what wins them though either.
None of this actually needs to happen. I sometimes forget how all of this is just completely made up.
I go back and forth on her.
Conservatives looooove calling people paid actors! In this case (viz) they are semi-correct.
Fellows = unpaid internship. NEVER take a fellowship, unless your parents are rich, then you should take a fellowship so you can sand down your nepo-baby exo-skeleton.
I am so sick of yard signs and people wanting yard signs and having to move yard signs and cutting my hand on yard signs.
These are the same fucks that bring up “electability”. Electability = candidate is a woman or a person of color, I’ll write about this later after a man ghosts me on a dating app probably.
Before a fucking pollster comes for me, yes they do not have to know about the upcoming election. But your candidate committee is going to want to separate out the data for likely and “informed” voters on those crosstabs to see what the news addicts are thinking.
Or a computer statistics program, don’t come for me pollsters. I don’t know how all of your nerd shit works.
If you are Nate Silver, please delete this tweet, I found it annoying. Fan of some of your work though.
Always fascinating