Another nail in Democracy’s coffin: “crafted talk” and “simulated responsiveness”

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For both Republicans and Democrats, politics has become a tricky balancing act. In their never-ending bid to win elections and governing majorities, both the major political parties are caught between the poles of their most partisan base voters and undecided swing voters. In the 49-49 nation, whichever political party can sufficiently stimulate its spectrum of voters, wins. An operation of slicing and dicing various voter blocs -- especially in the battleground districts and states -- is simultaneously a process of trial-and-error as well as one of extreme sophistication, involving polls, focus groups and Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/TikTik/YouTube data mining of voter’s online behavior to create psychographic profiles of voters for hyper-targeting of campaign messages.

Trump in particular uses the new communication technologies to emphasize polarization rather than moderation or compromise as a tactic for mobilizing his support base. But this does not mean that Republican strategists have abandoned their attempts to woo more centrist voters. On the contrary, it is necessary to cast a gloss of centrism over their extremism, at the very least to prevent the undecided and independent voters from swinging to the Democrats. In a winner-take-all “if you win, I lose” framework, these sorts of electoral behaviors can be easily manipulated in a way that further exacerbates tendencies toward polarization.

How can Trump appear to be both a polarizing mobilizer of the MAGA base as well as a sober leader who doesn’t alienate the undecided independent voters? How can he appear as both a leopard with spots and also one with no spots?

That’s long been the challenge of any presidential candidate, and two decades ago in their book Politicians Don’t Pander political scientists Larry Jacobs and Robert Shapiro tried to figure out this dilemma. Specifically they wondered how Americans could hold simultaneously two contradictory beliefs: that, on the one hand, there is a public perception that the growing influence of opinion polls has increased pandering by politicians, and so in one sense increased politicians’ responsiveness to the public; but on the other hand there is a perception that the pernicious impact of partisanship, when combined with other factors such as the polluting effect of privately donated campaign funds, causes officeholders to ignore the wishes of the public in favor of pursuing the private agendas of various special interests. How can both be true, the researchers wanted to know?

Jacobs and Shapiro discovered the answer in their conception of “crafted talk” and “simulated responsiveness.” In today’s context, politicians indeed rely heavily on social media data-gathering to create personal profiles on every voter, supplemented with information from opinion polls, focus groups and the like. But more importantly, the authors showed that politicians use those communication tools, not so much to be actually responsive to the desires of most voters, but instead to find words and phrases to manipulate and mislead certain blocs of voters, using “crafted talk” designed to woo voters by "simulating responsiveness.”

How to fool “We the People”

Using the modern campaign technologies to rhetorically trick their audience about their alleged centrism, politicians and political strategists attempt to prevail even when they diverge from the sentiments of the voting public. Successful politicians and strategists are fully capable of using centrist rhetoric to cover up their non-centrist policy when it suits their purposes. In the past, politicians used labels for themselves like "compassionate conservative" and "New Democrat," when most of their targeted policies were anything but compassionate or new.

More recently, Donald Trump could say with a straight face that under his One Big Beautiful Bill Act “your Medicaid is left alone” when that is clearly not the case for the nearly 12 million million Americans who are projected to lose their Medicaid health insurance once the new work requirements and other provisions kick in. The law is so massive and complicated that the White House has been able to use these well-worn techniques of crafted talk and simulated responsiveness to highlight and cherry pick any features it wants low-information voters to know about, even as it uses clever legislative tactics and tricks to obscure the impact on which Americans, i.e. potential voters, would be helped or hurt.

This continues a long tradition of politicians and political parties trying hard to appear authentic amidst their fakery. Playwright Arthur Miller, who dealt with his share of actors and staged drama, once pithily observed that political leaders have become actors who now understand “that to govern they must learn how to act.” And the audience -- the 43% (midterms) to 62% (presidential) of eligible voters who on average attend the show -- have come to accept artifice for politics. Trump is the apotheosis of this democratic degradation, a reality TV performer who is now on his biggest stage.

Not surprisingly, said Jacobs and Shapiro, “We have found a dramatic decline of political responsiveness to the wishes and preferences of the public on major policy decisions.” In fact, Jacobs and Shapiro found that in four social policy areas (social security, health care, welfare and crime) Congress in the 1990s was on the same page as the public only 36 percent of the time, compared to 67 percent of the time in the late 1980s. Their research was conducted many years ago, but if anything the patterns they identified have intensified. With the use of crafted talk and simulated responsiveness, and the influence of modern campaign technologies, political rhetoric has become divorced from policy. A schism has developed between what politicians say they will do to attract voters, and what they actually do once in office.

Digital and AI technologies are sinisterly suited for manipulating voters

These rhetorical tactics of persuasion, and the digital and AI technologies increasingly deployed with such precision, are at the crux of the dilemma that is utterly undermining any incentives toward moderation or centrism. The two political parties have slickly substituted centrist rhetoric for centrist policy when it suits them. The Republican and Democratic parties today, their leaders, candidates and their mad scientist consultants, use modern campaign polling, focus groups, dial meter groups, psychographic targeting on digital platforms and “adjust on the fly” campaign ads to figure out how to fool voters. The mad scientists of campaigns are constantly probing, prying and re-re-re-evaluating to figure out which sound bites, slogans and contrived images to aim back at “we, the voters” like heat-seeking missiles. In his 2016 campaign for president, Donald Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of the same basic ads, each one tweaked for individual targets according to an internal paper written by a Facebook analyst. Each ad was rapidly tested on a unique niche of prospective voters to see which ones generated the most effective engagements. After a few ads were identified as the most engaging and became the runaway winners, those would be widely disseminated by algorithmically identifying more people who shared similar characteristics with the original targets.

The Trump campaign ran up to 100,000 iterations of an ad in a single day, in which language and visuals were tweaked to entice as many people as possible to click. The long tail harvesting of specific psychographic profiles was deployed to bombard millions of prospective voters with manipulative ads. “Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook between June and November of 2016,” according to the Facebook analysis, “but Trump’s FB campaigns better leveraged FB's ability to optimize for outcomes.” The Trump campaign’s strategy of using “long-tail marketing” of targeted ads aimed at tens of millions of Americans not only strongly influenced the outcome, but pointed the way toward the future of political campaigns. This is targeted manipulative political advertising on steroids. Sprinkle in more AI and deep fake counterfeits and American democracy is creeping toward the edge of an abyss in which Jacobs and Shapiro’s crafted talk and simulated responsiveness will be even more effective at sinisterly manipulating voters.

So if there are any incentives toward centrist policy, increasingly they are “simulated” ones. Yet in a two-choice system, voters have very limited options when it comes to “tossing the bums out.” Thus, contrary to popular and even political science stereotypes, when we examine our current politics from both empirical and theoretical angles, we see that America’s winner-take-all political system need not -- indeed, has not -- led to moderate, centrist, stable or majoritarian government or policy. The alleged sober centrism of the US political system has been undermined by “crafted talk,” “simulated responsiveness” and modern campaigning techniques that are used so effectively in a “winner take all” political system to hoodwink the voters.

When combined with the partisan bent of regional demographics in Red vs Blue America, and with the polarization in voter attitudes about big government and racial minority programs as revealed by the American National Election Studies (a series of public opinion polls about voters’ attitudes taken over the last seven decades by the University of Michigan), and all of that expressed via votes cast in a winner-take-all electoral system that has produced a fundamental lack of competition in most lopsided legislative districts and presidential states, we end up with a strange brew of national politics that has become a formula for polarization and balkanization. “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of many, one) is being transmogrified into "E Unum Pluribus" (Out of one, many).

Despite ample opportunity in recent years, there has been little discussion by the national punditry about how the political mechanics and calculations of the two-choice, winner-take-all system, now filtered through modern campaign technologies such as extreme targeting and conspiracy-mongering using digital and AI media platforms, substantially drives such pointlessly adversarial politics. Increasingly, Trump and other MAGA strategists and leaders have bet that compromising is a losing strategy, that polarizing will win elections. But they can’t lose the swing voters in the battleground states and House districts, so simulated responsiveness helps the campaign strategists to fool enough low-information voters in the 49-49 nation. And these new communications technologies are becoming ever more powerful with deep fakes and AI for waging this “war by other means.”

Unfortunately, the soundness of national policy gets caught in the crossfire. A poisoned atmosphere of polarization will continue to undercut attempts to pursue bipartisan governance. Deformed policies have emerged as a result of the trends and incentives of our two-choice system, further confusing an already disengaged and disgusted voting public which has nowhere else to go but the sidelines. And as more and more voters abandon the field, the game is left to the partisans to wage their battles using the techniques and technologies of polarization, which then fuels a new round of voter alienation and withdrawal, which in turn cedes even more influence to the partisans.

It is a vicious cycle, a race to the bottom, and we are in the middle of it.

Steven Hill @StevenHill1776 bsky.social @StevenHill1776