Voter Motivation Quotes

Common man's patience will bring him more happiness than common man's power.

I am not a one-issue voter in the sense that indicates I am an ignorant fundamentalist who only cares about one thing. I believe in protecting the environment. I believe in caring for the poor, the orphan, the widow in her distress. These are some of the so-called "issues" that many of us use to justify voting for Obama. How can we possibly claim it is Christian love for the poor and helpless that motivates us to vote for such a man when he is so committed to the killing of the most helpless among us?

Great leaders, in contrast, are able to inspire people to act. Those who are able to inspire give people a sense of purpose or belonging that has little to do with any external incentive or benefit to be gained. Those who truly lead are able to create a following of people who act not because they were swayed, but because they were inspired. For those who are inspired, the motivation to act is deeply personal. They are less likely to be swayed by incentives. Those who are inspired are willing to pay a premium or endure inconvenience, even personal suffering. Those who are able to inspire will create a following of people—supporters, voters, customers, workers—who act for the good of the whole not because they have to, but because they want to.

In a democracy government is the God.

Fear is an excellent motivator, and voting is no exception.

89% of Democrat to Deplorable voters agree or strongly agree with, "Fighting back against political correctness motivated me to vote in 2016.

I am subject to constant criticism all day long,” the president told me in our Oval Office discussion. “And some of it may be legitimate; much of it may be illegitimate. Some of it may be sincere; some of it may be entirely politically motivated. If I spent all my time thinking about it, I’d be paralyzed. And frankly, the voters would justifiably say, ‘I need somebody who’s focused on giving me a job, not whether his feelings are hurt.

Travelers recognize that the results of an election here in the US can have a greater impact on poor people half a world away than it does on middle-class American voters. My travels have taught me that, even if motived only by greed, you don’t want to be really rich in a desperately poor world. With this in mind, I think of it not as noble or heroic, but simply pragmatic to bring a compassion for the needy along with me into the voting booth.

Moreover, the fact that more than a third of the electorate voted Nazi in 1932 was a hugely significant factor in the Republic’s fall and in the rise of Hitler. But most of those voters were not motivated by a broad discontent with the Republic, including with its sexual politics, as some studies have asserted.54 Rather, voters were radicalized, driven to the extreme parties, and drawn to the polls by specific issues, such as the economic crisis, the fear of communism, and the trauma of unemployment.55

People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it.” To explain this peculiar phenomenon, Jost’s team developed a theory of system justification. Its core idea is that people are motivated to rationalize the status quo as legitimate—even if it goes directly against their interests. In one study, they tracked Democratic and Republican voters before the 2000 U.S. presidential election. When George W. Bush gained in the polls, Republicans rated him as more desirable, but so did Democrats, who were already preparing justifications for the anticipated status quo. The same happened when Al Gore’s likelihood of success increased: Both Republicans and Democrats judged him more favorably. Regardless of political ideologies, when a candidate seemed destined to win, people liked him more. When his odds dropped, they liked him less. Justifying the default system serves a soothing function. It’s an emotional painkiller: If the world is supposed to be this way, we don’t need to be dissatisfied with it. But acquiescence also robs us of the moral outrage to stand against injustice and the creative will to consider alternative ways that the world could work.

When some bigoted white people heard the message of Donald Trump and others in the GOP that their concerns mattered, that the fear generated by their own biases had a target in Mexican and Muslim immigrants, many embraced the GOP to their own detriment. We talk at length about the 53 percent of white women who supported the Republican candidate for president, but we tend to skim past the reality that many white voters had been overtly or passively supporting the same problematic candidates and policies for decades. Researchers point to anger and disappointment among some whites as a result of crises like rising death rates from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; the decline in available jobs for those who lack a college degree; and the ongoing myth that white people are unfairly treated by policies designed to level the playing field for other groups—policies like affirmative action. Other studies have pointed to the appeal of authoritarianism, or plain old racism and sexism. Political scientist Diana Mutz said in an interview in Pacific Standard magazine that some voters who switched parties to vote for Trump were motivated by the possibility of a fall in social status: “In short, they feared that they were in the process of losing their previously privileged positions.

One business practice I want to eliminate is the use of microtargeting in political advertising. Facebook, in particular, enables advertisers to identify an emotional hot button for individual voters that can be pressed for electoral advantage, irrespective of its relevance to the election. Candidates no longer have to search for voters who share their values. Instead they can invert the model, using microtargeting to identify whatever issue motivates each voter and play to that. If a campaign knows a voter believes strongly in protecting the environment, it can craft a personalized message blaming the other candidate for not doing enough, even if that is not true. In theory, each voter could be attracted to a candidate for a different reason. In combination with the platforms’ persuasive technologies, microtargeting becomes another tool for dividing us. Microtargeting transforms the public square of politics into the psychological mugging of every voter.

Most voters disown selfish motives. They personally back the policies that are best for the country, ethically right, and consistent with social justice. At the same time, they see other voters—not just their opponents, but often their allies too—as deeply selfish. The typical liberal Democrat says he votes his conscience, and

White vulnerability’ and ‘racial resentment’ are in themselves euphemisms (political correctness is sometimes not a myth, you see, when it comes to refusing to call prejudices what they actually are). Both terms imply that Trump voters’ motivation was legitimate and understandable – they were just vulnerable and resentful. ‘Racial entitlement’ would be a more accurate and less unnecessarily forgiving descriptor. Racial entitlement, rather than economic concerns, made Trump a more attractive proposition for white voters who, in the millennial category, were in fact less likely to be economically deprived than voters who did not support Trump. White non-Hispanics without college degrees making below the median US household income made up only 25 per cent of Trump voters. On the whole, Hillary Clinton lost to Trump among white voters in every single income category, across classes, educations and incomes. He won among poor working-class voters and their wealthy overlords. This was not an economic revolution; it was a white nationalist one.

Jimmy Carter’s pollster Pat Caddell understood how dangerous all this could prove to the Democratic coalition: blue-collar voters were vulnerable to conservative appeals because they were “no longer solely motivated by economic concerns—which have traditionally made them Democrats.” Now that they feared “change in society” more than losing their place in the middle class, they were “one of the most vulnerable groups in the Democratic coalition.

Preachers in the pulpit peddling their wares, while beggars in the street wonder if anyone cares. Teachers in our schools talking bout math, while students are deciding which will be their path. Faithful in their pews listening to the Word, while losers on the corner hope they’ll practice what they’ve heard. Leaders in their meetings trying to save our nation, while voters ponder their true motivation. With people filled with hate and doubt, God is in our boxes waiting to be let out!

In reality, though, almost all voters now had their minds made up. You didn’t need to persuade them of whom to vote for — indeed, you couldn’t persuade them of whom to vote for. What you needed to do was excite the group of them who, if they were going to vote, were going to vote for you. Those people had to register, they had to remember where their polling place was, they had to take time out of their day to go cast a ballot. America isn’t like Australia, where voting is compulsory. We make it both optional and, in many places, difficult, so a winning campaign needs not just supporters but motivated supporters.

The idea on which Lick’s worldview pivoted was that technological progress would save humanity. The political process was a favorite example of his. In a McLuhanesque view of the power of electronic media, Lick saw a future in which, thanks in large part to the reach of computers, most citizens would be “informed about, and interested in, and involved in, the process of government.” He imagined what he called “home computer consoles” and television sets linked together in a massive network. “The political process,” he wrote, “would essentially be a giant teleconference, and a campaign would be a months-long series of communications among candidates, propagandists, commentators, political action groups, and voters. The key is the self-motivating exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with information through a good console and a good network to a good computer.” Lick’s

The American republic now extended across a third of a continent, and was unlikely to stop there. How then could the British time bomb of generosity—the ocean of land ceded in 1783—fail to revive familiar protests of “no taxation without representation”? Where, if that happened, would Hamilton’s “UNION” be? Madison solved these issues of time and space by shifting scale. In doing so he drew, knowingly or not, 65 on Machiavelli. For only in republics, the Florentine had observed, could the “common good” be “looked to properly.” By expanding the number who benefited, the influence of the few who didn’t could be reduced: not all parts, submerged in wholes, need drown. 66 Scale could be the life preserver. There were, Madison acknowledged, dangers in this: By enlarging too much the number of electors [voters], you render the representative too little acquainted with all their local circumstances and lesser interests; as by reducing it too much, you render him unduly attached to these, and too little fit to comprehend and pursue great and national objects. But surely there existed “a mean, on both sides of which inconveniences will be found to lie.” In this way balancing factions—a Burkean enterprise—could put “inconveniences” to good use: Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other. The proposed Constitution “forms a happy combination in this respect; the great and aggregate interests being referred to the national, the local and particular to the State legislatures.” 67

Model 4 further holds that most of the time decision makers are guided by two competing motivations: the desire to make a good decision and the desire to make an easy decision.

Remember that for a man like Tony Blair, this was the biggest decision of his political life. He was not just a voter who supported the war, he was a prime minister who had gambled his career on the conflict, committing troops on the ground, of whom 179 would lose their lives. His political reputation, to a large extent, hinged on the decision. If anyone would be motivated to defend it, he would. So, let us explore the contortions. On 24 September 2002, before the conflict, Blair made a speech to the House of Commons about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction: ‘His WMD programme is active, detailed and growing,’ he said. ‘Saddam has continued to produce them, . . . he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes . . .

the government-slashing agenda of the Koch network was a problem for these voters. Fink acknowledged, “We want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, okay? Yeah, and cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes. There’s truth in that.” But the “middle third” of American voters, he warned, was uncomfortable with positions that seemed motivated by greed.

After the 2016 election, a great deal of journalism and social science was devoted to finding out whether Trump’s voters were mainly motivated by economic anxiety or racial resentment. There was evidence for both answers. Progressives, shocked by the readiness of half the country to support this hateful man, seized on racism as the single cause and set out to disprove every alternative. But this answer was far too satisfying. Racism is such an irreducible evil that it gave progressives commanding moral heights and relieved them of the burden to understand the grievances of their compatriots down in the lowlands, let alone do something about them. It put Trump voters beyond the pale.

Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.

Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.

Considering the long-shot nature of its petition against Fahrenheit 9/11, it is worthwhile to consider whether Citizens United was mainly interested in hectoring the marketing strategy for that film, or whether it had ulterior motives in mind. One possibility is that Citizens United had recognized an opportunity to test whether the FEC would grant a “media exception” from the electioneering rules to companies producing documentary films. The BCRA allowed such exemptions for material that appeared “in a news story, commentary, or editorial distributed through the facilities of a broadcast, cable, or satellite television or radio station.” Though it was banned from traditional “electioneering” due to its corporate structure, Citizens United might have believed in 2004 that the FEC would distinguish between documentary films and campaign advertising, allowing corporate producers of the former to air ads with candidate images. Such a decision would have allowed it to create and market similar movies advocating conservative ideas.

The mid-19th century was noted for a partisan, rather than a consensus press, but this partisanship was able to turn out voters consistently.

The focus on one sector of Trump voters—the white working class—is puzzling, given the breadth of his white coalition. Indeed, there is a kind of theater at work in which Trump is pawned off as a product of the white working class as opposed to a product of an entire whiteness that includes the very authors doing the pawning. The motive is clear: escapism. To accept that even now, some five decades after Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down on a Memphis balcony, the bloody heirloom remains potent—even after a black president, and, in fact, strengthened by the fact of the black president—is to accept that racism remains, as it has since 1776, at the heart of the country’s political life.

Finally, Christians can use more-advanced strategies like geofencing. Geofencing is a powerful marketing strategy my marketing company uses for commercial clients. It targets prospects and gathers their mobile IDs based on their physical location. You can target your prospect by time and/or location — for example, anyone who went to a selected church in the last week, in the last month, or in the last six months. You can also select anyone who went just one time, two times in one month, four times in two months, and so on. It’s a great way to get very specific contact lists that meet pretty much any criteria you can think of. If a pastor simply won’t talk about the election, geofencing their church is a good way to get directly to the church attendees. For one campaign, my company “fenced” 74 different evangelical churches in a candidate's district and gathered 94,000 mobile IDs, thereby building a large database in a short amount of time. In the end, we collected the contact information of 10,000 highly motivated voters who were also considered “low propensity” voters for the clients’ database. We also generated potential voters by getting: • 100,000+ landing page visitors. • 942,000 ad impressions. • 288,000 video views. All these views and ad impressions led to increased voter awareness and turnout for our client.

Before the Great De-evolution, politicians had made it as difficult as possible for people to vote. Interestingly, as soon as money was removed from the politician’s profit motive, they made it easy for people to vote anywhere they pleased.

She faced two major conflicts as the convention opened: papering over her differences with Bernie and delivering an acceptance speech that would convince voters she had a better vision for America than Donald Trump. On the surface, the former would be a tougher challenge, but the absence of a motivation for her candidacy remained the biggest obstacle on Hillary’s path to the presidency. Without that, her speech would be what she’d once derisively referred to as “just words.

Broken Compass I will not pretend that these leaders I’ve referenced were motivated by their desire for biblical adherence. Perhaps there was a time when that case could have been made, but with the exception of Jerry Falwell Sr., who died long before the Trump evangelical was born, all of these men have utterly reversed their positions in favor of Donald Trump. After the Access Hollywood tape of Donald Trump leaked in October 2016, Ralph Reed, who was quoted in this chapter saying “character matters” in his condemnation of Bill Clinton, had a far more pragmatic view of the situation. In an email to the Washington Post, Reed referred to the contents of the recording as “disappointing” but ultimately dismissed the idea the recording should impact his endorsement of Trump, saying, “People of faith are voting on issues like who will protect unborn life, defend religious freedom, grow the economy, appoint conservative judges and oppose the Iran nuclear deal.” Translation: Character doesn’t matter now because voters don’t care.

Vote for a transformative leader that empowers the growth of a nation, not a figurehead that thrives on socio-economic instabilities.

So, he explained, the government-slashing agenda of the Koch network was a problem for these voters. Fink acknowledged, “We want to decrease regulations. Why? It’s because we can make more profit, okay? Yeah, and cut government spending so we don’t have to pay so much taxes. There’s truth in that.” But the “middle third” of American voters, he warned, was uncomfortable with positions that seemed motivated by greed.

Once Trump had won, a panicked punditburo swung into action, insisting in a crescendo of consensus that trade had little to do with the country’s deindustrialization; that it was pretty much all due to technological factors; that what happened to manufacturing workers was therefore unavoidable. After the dust had settled, many commentators changed their mind on this question, quietly acknowledging the disastrous consequences of ill-crafted trade deals. But what matters for our purposes is the initial reaction, which was virtually unanimous and unfolded along the same lines as in 1896: the rationality of working-class grievances had to be denied.12 The outcome of the 2016 election, the same punditburo insisted, could not and must not be explained by reference to economic factors or to long-term, class-related trends. Yes, lots of Trump voters said they were motivated by economic concerns; yes, Trump talked about economic issues all the time; and yes, the economic stagnation of Trump-voting areas is obvious to anyone who has gone there. And also: every time our post-partisan liberal leaders deregulated banks and then turned around and told working-class people that their misfortunes were attributable to their poor education … every time they did this and then thought to themselves, “They have nowhere else to go” … they made the Trump disaster a little more likely. But to acknowledge those plain facts was to come dangerously close to voicing the intolerable heresy that the D.C. opinion cartel dubbed the “economic anxiety” thesis—the idea that people voted for Trump out of understandable worries about wages or opioids or unemployment or deindustrialization. The reason this was intolerable, one suspects, is because it suggested that there was a rational element to certain groups’ support for Trump and also that there was something less than A+ about the professional-class Camelot over which the Democrats presided for eight years.

One cannot legislate trust in government. A lack of true leadership is a systemic, party agnostic problem in government, leading to apathy among citizens, regardless of their voter status.

Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations. Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation. Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success. Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.

As a matter of principle, I didn’t believe a president should ever publicly whine about criticism from voters—it’s what you signed up for in taking the job—and I was quick to remind both reporters and friends that my white predecessors had all endured their share of vicious personal attacks and obstructionism. More practically, I saw no way to sort out people’s motives, especially given that racial attitudes were woven into every aspect of our nation’s history. Did that Tea Party member support “states’ rights” because he genuinely thought it was the best way to promote liberty, or because he continued to resent how federal intervention had led to an end to Jim Crow, desegregation, and rising Black political power in the South? Did that conservative activist oppose any expansion of the social welfare state because she believed it sapped individual initiative, or because she was convinced that it would benefit only brown people who’d just crossed the border? Whatever my instincts might tell me, whatever truths the history books might suggest, I knew I wasn’t going to win over any voters by labeling my opponents racist.

Nor was it especially difficult to find out that the things listed above were the issues that American voters cared about, and that they voted for Trump because he seemed more likely to provide them than Clinton did. Yet across this country’s collective conversation in the wake of the election, next to no one other than Trump voters wanted to hear it. Suggest that people voted for Trump because they were worried about the risk of war, afraid that Obamacare would bankrupt their families, hoping a change in policy would bring back full-time jobs at decent wages, or disgusted by the political trickery that kept Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination, and you could count on being shouted down. It became an item of unshakable dogma in the media and the realm of public discourse that every single one of the voters who supported Trump could only have been motivated by sheer evil.

Old people vote. You know who votes in the swing states where this election will be fought? Really old people. Instead of high-profile videos with Cardi B (no disrespect to Cardi, who famously once threatened to dog-walk the egregious Tomi Lahren), maybe focus on registering and reaching more of those old-fart voters in counties in swing states. If your celebrity and music-industry friends want to flood social media with GOTV messages, let them. It makes them feel important and it’s the cheapest outsourcing you can get. Just don’t build your models on the idea that you’re going to spike young voter turnout beyond 20 percent. The problem with chasing the youth vote is threefold: First, they’re unlikely to be registered. You have to devote a lot of work to going out, grabbing them, registering them, educating them, and motivating them to go out and vote. If they were established but less active voters, you’d have voter history and other data to work with. There are lower-effort, lower-cost ways to make this work. Second, they’re not conditioned to vote; that November morning is much more likely to involve regret at not finishing a paper than missing a vote. Third, and finally, a meaningful fraction of the national youth vote overall is located in California. Its gigantic population skews the number, and since the Golden State’s Electoral College outcome is never in doubt, it doesn’t matter. What’s our motto, kids? “The Electoral College is the only game in town.” This year, the Democrats have been racing to win the Free Shit election with young voters by promising to make college “free” (a word that makes any economic conservative lower their glasses, put down the brandy snifter, and arch an eyebrow) and to forgive $1.53 trillion gazillion dollars of student loan debt. Set aside that the rising price of college is what happens to everything subsidized or guaranteed by the government.17 Set aside that those subsidies cause college costs to wildly exceed the rate of inflation across the board, and that it sucks to have $200k in student loan debt for your degree in Intersectional Yodeling. Set aside that the college loan system is run by predatory asswipes. The big miss here is a massive policy disconnect—a student-loan jubilee would be a massive subsidy to white, upper-middle-class people in their mid-thirties to late forties. I’m not saying Democrats shouldn’t try to appeal to young voters on some level, but I want them to have a realistic expectation about just how hard it is to move those numbers in sufficient volume in the key Electoral College states. When I asked one of the smartest electoral modeling brains in the business about this issue, he flooded me with an inbox of spreadsheets and data points. But the key answer he gave me was this: “The EC states in play are mostly old as fuck. If your models assume young voter magic, you’re gonna have a bad day.