How Voting Is Like Social Sharing

Over at
The Washington Post, Greg Sargent
notes that Democrats have a frequent turnout problem in midterm
elections, and it doesn’t appear to be going away. Despite having
sunk tons of cash and effort into boosting turnout amongst core
consituencies, it looks likely that the party’s midterm turnout
problem is going to continue this year. Here’s Sargent: 

What stands out is how intractable this problem appears.
Democrats have thrown everything they have at solving it —
emphasizing a slate economic and cultural issues designed to give
women, minorities, and young voters a reason to care about who
controls the Senate — but the GOP edge is either the same or even
more pronounced than it was in polling last spring.

Democrats have long known this problem would bedevil them
through Election Day, which is why they invested $60 million
in the Bannock Street Project to mobilize voters who sat out
2010.

But when the Obamacare web site crashed last fall, and
predictions of a Dem bloodbath were everywhere, it became apparent
to Democrats that voter mobilization would be even more crucial to
holding the Senate than previously thought. Bad news about the
President’s signature domestic achievement, combined with a
sluggish recovery and continuing Washington gridlock, risked
depressing core voter enthusiasm in truly debilitating ways,
particularly given the red-state tilt of the Senate map. 

Obviously part of this is just the structure of the midterm map.
But what this makes me wonder is if voter turnout is somewhat like
social sharing. As anyone who logs into Facebook with any frequency
knows, people like to share things that either make them very happy
or very excited or very upset. So your Facebook feed is probably
filled with cute puppies, news about the new Avengers
movie, and various local and national outrages.

What you see less of, though, are things that make people glum
and depressed. People are less likely to share, say, news about
disappointing movie casting (unless, of course, this news also
makes them
very angry). 

The research tends to back up the anecdata here. In a 2011
study
for the Journal of Marketing Research, two marketing
researchers from the Wharton School looked at what makes content go
viral and found that “content that evokes high-arousal
positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more
viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions
(e.g., sadness) is less viral.”

I suspect there’s a similar tendency when it comes to voting.
People will turn out when they are excited, as many were by Obama’s
first presidential campaign, or when they are outraged and upset,
as a lot of Republicans are now. And in this election, Democrats
are depressed (or disinterested), and Republicans are angry, and
that gives Republicans an advantage.