Campaigns Hit Mailboxes Hard

In the past week, people all over Greenwich have received just about a postcard a day using what are referred to as “negative attack ads” in mail.

“It’s overwhelming,” according to one registered Democrat, a young woman living in the backcountry who declined to be identified. “I received a mailing that said Scott Frantz is anti-woman and another that said he is against children’s safety issues.” In addition, the internet has been flooded with “fact checks” as Frantz and other candidates struggle to keep up with claims.

On both sides, information is being disseminated with very little oversight. Why are there so many attack pieces coming in these last few days? The short answer is that they work.

According to Psychology Today, “anxiety is an emotion that waxes and wanes in all of us, and as it swings up or down our political views can shift in its wake.” Fear is an incredibly powerful tool in the human arsenal for survival and it is the most easily manipulated; but it also is the most temporary.

Political marketing can use fear very effectively because that fear only needs to last for a short time, until election day, so it must be timed just right for maximum effect. It follows that it would be intensified in the last days before an election. In Greenwich, elections have typically been not only immune to negative campaigning but campaigning using attack mailers has all but guaranteed a loss for the attacker.

Honesty, integrity, and “over communicating” has been the technique most effective in our home town. This year, there has been a new onslaught of direct mail that is negative and much of it is misleading at best. The direct benefit to the perpetrating candidate is that the nastiness typically disenfranchises reasonable voters, making them want to stay home, and motivates ideologues to get out and vote.

It works like this:

Target demographics by finding wedge issues.

Use those wedge issues to create fear.

Get as many people who might vote for your opponent to stay home.

Emotions to which politicians will appeal tend to be either fear and anger or compassion and honor. Fear was identified by the Athenians as one of the three strongest motives for action, the other two being honor and interest.

Fear tends to break the world into good or bad and is targeted to manipulate voting behavior in a subconscious way that goes far beyond the ability to “fact check” no matter how quickly the truth gets out. The manipulated content, although important, is only part of the message.

According to Frank Murray, the CEO of Intertech, a data and technology firm, “fact checks of political ads are typically limited to the accuracy. We need better standards for ethical communication. The “just the facts” strategy is too archaic and slow to serve a busy, goal directed, and fast-paced community like Greenwich. We need higher levels of accountability that reveal manipulative tactics and penalize those who use them.”

There are two main types:

The emotional patterns in marketing pieces. This includes images used, colors, manipulated or truncated text, misleading interpretation of facts, coloring of photos, subtle graphic items file folders are all subconscious techniques to manipulate readers.

The set of emotional primers known as “frames”that change the reader’s frame of reference for the information they are about to receive and create false conclusions. They are a fundamental part of the communication process to determine whether the impression they create is valid. For instance, a communication about an issue that begins with violence is framing the communication in a way that is manipulating your frame of reference. Often you don’t even remember later that it was there.

Voters deserve to know how their own emotions and behavior is being manipulated.

Fact checking is vital too but often it is not the facts that is having an impact on the reader. The Greenwich Sentinel has made every effort to fact check on behalf of readers and you can view those on Facebook. Mailers sent the last few days of the election make it difficult but if you have a question, please send it to the Greenwich Sentinel via Facebook@GreenwichSentinel and it will be researched as quickly as possible.

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