Let the voters vote! Most of us aren't going to change our political positions or our voting decisions between now and November. The discourse of the next ten months of the U.S. presidential election will, the research shows, be a waste of the electorate's time and attention. Here's why: the primaries are an outmoded model, designed for an era when communication mechanisms were as different from today's as a Victrola is from an Oontz.
Beginning approximately ten years ago, executives in the marketing division at Walt Disney Motion Pictures, one of the savviest groups of story scientists in the world, noticed an emerging phenomenon: Moviegoers were making up their minds earlier in a film's marketing campaign than ever before, and then, to an unprecedented degree, not changing their minds or budging from their opinions for the duration of the campaign, until it was time to see (or not see) the movie in theaters.
"It used to be we could produce as much as a thirty percent shift in audience intention from the beginning of a campaign to a film's release," Dick Cook, the Chairman of Disney Motion Pictures told me at the time. "Now there's almost none. People get their first exposure to the film and that's it. Their minds are made up, and there's no changing them. We spent a lot of money trying, and it didn't do any good. We had to change our approach."
In our work with organizational storytelling, we call this reification--the point at which an idea or intention becomes 'concrete' in the minds of a story's audience. Fast reification is characteristic of networks. People can immediately get information about a product or brand from more than one source and therefore can spot its 'fit' to their personal narratives faster than in channel communication, where information flows to and from a single source. In channel communication, information moves at the speed of its source. In networked communication, information moves at the speed a person wants it. In other words, at the speed of thought.
The U.S. presidential primaries were designed for channel communication. Back in the day, candidates and pols set the pace. We live, however, in a networked world, where the audience sets the pace. It's an important difference. Conducting a modern election via the current primary system is like dancing hip hop to a harpsichord. Possible? Yes. But why would a dancer want to?
Using channel communication in a network turns it circular, because channel communication is designed for repetition. For repetition. And repetition. And later, on tonight's news: Late-breaking repetition! Networks do not benefit or grow from repetition. They benefit and grow from connection and emergence. It's the primary elections that get the candidates repeating themselves, as if what they said in New Hampshire can't be heard in South Carolina or in the rest of the country. The repetitive cycles called for by the primary system have them filling networks with noise long after most of the electorate's voting decisions have reified.
After a year of campaigning and fundraising, the presidential candidates are as clearly positioned in our minds as the products in a supermarket cereal aisle. Whole grains and dried fruits in one direction, sugary shit that's bad for you but you feed it to the kids anyway in the other. Cap'n Crunch will still be Cap'n Crunch in November. Muselix eaters will still be eating Muselix in November.
The U.S. media covering the presidential campaign are beginning to sound like they're covering the cereal aisle:
"I thought Cap'n Crunch came out extremely crunchy tonight, Anderson. He has not shown this much crunch before. I think we're seeing a whole new Cap'n Crunch in this sampling program."
"Wolf, the Wheat Chex being on a higher shelf like that--that's going to hurt sales. It's out of the eye line of the average buyer!"
"Judy, any bran cereal, I don't care if it's got raisins, raspberries or fairy dust in it, will only be popular with seniors."
"Karl's a Grape Nuts guy, of course he's going to argue for shelf footage over the number of shelf facings in the Kroger stores--he's selling a smaller box!"
After a year of this, with ten more months looming, we are like weary shoppers expected to push our carts up and down the aisle a hundred times before we can pick a box of cereal off the shelf and get to the checkout line. We feel the need to get things done, to transact already. There's no demand in the marketplace for another ten months of debating who gets to disappoint us for the next four years when nothing gets done.
In a networked national election, by comparison, we could have 26 weeks--a typical TV season--of campaigning nationwide, with the national conventions in the middle, and 13 weeks later, a general election. No primaries. No more votes to vote to vote to vote. No more voting after the fix is in. No more 'Win the popular vote, lose the fixed vote' voting.
Back when presidential primaries became part of our political system about a century ago, as a way for states to exert more control in the electoral process, Grammy and Grandiddy, who seldom left the farm, needed primaries to acquaint themselves with the candidates. The candidates could use the mechanisms of caucuses, town halls and county fairs to get seen locally. State primaries gave the regional and local media channels more material to work with, and the back-room wheeler-dealers a new set of back-rooms to wheel and deal in.
Today, the primary mechanisms are secondary to the media they generate and the engines that push it everywhere. Pundits pick fights and spin circles around every event, all in the name of indecision. Hey, it's just being at work! Today, all media are local, and a person has to go Full Amish to avoid bumping into Donald Trump on a screen. When the primaries were designed, New Hampshire and Iowa mirrored the national electorate. Today they do not. That, and their staggered, unbalanced scheduling, has the electorate lurching indecisively, according to the media, from one primary to the next, when this is not the case at all. The reality is that it's the primaries that are lurching. The electorate will be ready to vote long before the candidates and their media mouthpieces are ready to give up campaigning.
To paraphrase Dick Cook, we are spending a lot of time and money on these elections and it's not doing us any good. We need to change our approach.