How could Donald Trump pull more undecided voters to his side and even up the race? Speak “collaboratively” in public, according to our research.
When Trump speaks with what we call a collaborative inflection, it has a subtle emotional effect on the undecided voter that pulls him or her across a "line of reluctance" -- even at this late stage of the race.
"Collaborative inflection" and "line of reluctance" are not just ten-dollar words. There actually is some useful science here. Our social-science research firm, Cascade Strategies, has been working on it for about eight years – with cereal boxes. We claim that understanding how voters vote is psychologically no different from understanding how buyers pull cereal boxes from grocery shelves. Subtle, unstated emotions pull at you in hard-to-express ways in each case.
Emanations from your brain and other parts of your body
Cascade Strategies and others in the field of biometric research have put some scientific muscle behind concepts like these that have been purely anecdotal in the past. It's all about what our brainwaves and other signals from our bodies, such as skin temperature and conductance, say about what we're really likely to do rather than what we say we're going to do.
In past presidential elections, undecided voters have still made all the difference in the race, but they have had positive impulses toward one candidate or the other. But not this year. Instead of a line of acceptance, there’s now a line of reluctance. Our research indicates that undecided voters this year are using subtle emotional cues from the candidates to choose the least disastrous option. We can determine the effect of those subtle cues by measuring voters' internal biometric pulses.
These subtle cues we call “inflections” – nonverbal communications in body language, demeanor, etc. that in effect give permission to the undecided voter to cross the line of reluctance.
How do we know this as a matter of science rather than just ordinary conversation?
We use a sophisticated biometric measurement system called BioNimbus to detect emissions from the voter’s body (called “Wave 3 Data”) that move up or down depending on the candidate’s gestures, facial expressions, body movements, etc. (and not the candidate’s voice, which doesn’t matter to this branch of science). They’re instantaneous arousals, lasting only about 1/30 of a second. But we have learned from eight years of experiments that millions of these small arousals can amount to something, like the buyer’s decision to cross the line of acceptance and finally buy that box of cereal. In effect, we’ve discovered what causes to the undecided buyer to crack.
For this year's presidential election we modified BioNimbus to subtly detect the millions of tiny arousals in undecided voters’ bodies and minds that were most critical to pulling them across the line of reluctance and “crack,” or choose the least disastrous option in the race.
Here's a video illustration of how all this works.
Understanding the Oddball Way the Undecideds are Deciding This Oddball Election
By Jerry Johnson