SUMMARY: The strong emotions and enthusiasm generated by the DNC last week have energized the Democratic Party and given Harris a bump in the polls, but will it affect the outcome of the election? Have the Democrats peaked too soon or is it a wave that they can ride to November? The science says that it is far more likely to be a wave than a peak.
KEY WORDS: Democratic National Convention, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Election 2024, Joy, Enthusiasm, Dopamine, Endogenous Opioid, Liking System, Wanting System
COMMENT: How did the DNC affect you? How do you think it will affect the outcome of the election? I’d love to discuss it with you in the comments.
- A Convention Designed to Move Us: The Emotional Impact of Personal Stories and Using Children
- Worrying About the Excitement and Enthusiasm Peaking Too Soon
- The Actual Impact of the Excitement and Enthusiasm Generated by the DNC
- Image Attribution
I don’t know about all of y’all, but last week was a helluva rollercoaster ride! The Democratic National Convention was an amazing performance. It was well put together, especially considering that they had to do it on the fly and adapt it to a new candidate and new circumstances.
The emotional intensity seemed to be a conscious choice. They wanted to trigger all of our emotions. I don’t think I’ve cried so much in a week since I was a wee tot. The bastards! Every speaker seemed to hit some emotional chord. Hell, they even made the roll call exciting and fun.
I can’t imagine what it was like to be there. If the reporters are to be believed the excitement, energy, and elation were contagious. Even the Fox News reporters caught it. Even the reporters and pundits were smiling, laughing, tearing up, and crying.
A Convention Designed to Move Us: The Emotional Impact of Personal Stories and Using Children
The real dastardly thing they did was using children to evoke empathy, sympathy, and sorrow from us. From the horrific pregnancy stories of lost children and nearly lost mothers to the children lost to mass shootings to Harris’s nieces teaching the world how to say her name to Gus’ unbridled love for his father, children were everywhere and tugging at the heartstrings.
I don’t know about you, but as of Wednesday, five days AFTER the closing the convention, I am still feeling drained and just now getting over feeling hungover. It was such rousing success on all accounts, it makes you wonder how anyone can find fault with it, but you know they did.
Worrying About the Excitement and Enthusiasm Peaking Too Soon
Since the convention, the pundits who need to justify their existence have clutched their hands and wrung their pearls worrying over whether or not the Democrats will make like a 78 year-old, 34-count felon, adjudicated sex-offender, serially bankrupt chronic liar on a date with a porn star and shoot their exuberance wad prematurely, and there won’t be enough viagra in the world to help them get it up in time for the election on 5 November.
I don’t know what elections these people watched in the past, what political psychology studies they reviewed, or which snarky sarcasticky profaney blogs they read, but if they’d read Ye Olde Blogge, they’d know that a convention like that has the exact opposite effect.
The Actual Impact of the Excitement and Enthusiasm Generated by the DNC
We might be feeling the political equivalent of Football Withdrawal Syndrome, which accounts for my feeling depressed, and we might be feeling hungover because of the sudden lack of excitement in our lives, but that doesn’t mean we’re not likely to go out and vote. It means that we are more likely to. Let’s see how that works.
Understanding the Emotional High Produced by the DNC
The DNC was a four-day dopamine and endogenous opioid binge. Hour after hour, our brains were flooded by all of the natural feel-good chemicals we could make. The speeches, the cheering, and the chanting activated all the little structures in our limbic system collectively known as the liking and wanting systems.
The Liking and Wanting Systems Get Activated
They are separate systems, but they interact. When you like something, your liking system gives you a bit of opioid. Oooh, we like that. We like that a lot. We like it so much, we want more of it, which is when the wanting system kicks in.
When you want something, you get dopamine. If you ever found yourself in the “just one more” trap of binge watching a series, or doom scrolling your social media or checking your blog stats, then you know your wanting system has sunk its claws into ya.
The wanting system is insatiable. It is never satisfied. It is like a Chinese subway car, it can always hold just one more, all you gotta do is squeeze in a little tighter.
The liking system is satiable. It stops feeling good after awhile, but you can’t stop because the wanting system keeps pushing you to do more trying to find that elusive high that the liking system delivered the first few times you did whatever.
The End of the DNC and Experiencing Withdrawal
Now, once it ended, though, not only was my wanting system still wanting more more more, but my liking system wasn’t even sated. Every night of the convention, our wanting system anticipated the rewards, and we got a BIGGER reward than we thought possible, which just drove the system harder. However, when it ended, the wanting system was still anticipating rewards. It can’t shut off. When the rewards didn’t come, it leaves us feeling inhibited and depressed.
All that excitement, the opioids, the adrenaline, the oxytocin, they involve the whole body. It is like the fight, flight, or freeze reaction, only it is more like the dance, jump, and hug reaction, amirite? Our muscles were tense for four straight days. Our faces hurt from all the smiling. Our eyes burned from all the crying. And, when it stopped, we felt that tired emptiness like a hangover.
It’s like reading about the draft and trades and coaching evaluation after football season ends. Your wanting system is still driving you forward, but there just isn’t a liking payoff as big as you got from watching the game.
I tried listening to all the pundits punditing on all the weekend infotainment shows on the Internet and cable news, but they didn’t quite get me the high I was jonesing, especially those woebegoning know-it-alls carping on about the possibility that the Dems shot their wad too soon.
Evidence of Increased Commitment to Electing Harris
The DNC did several things to us viewers at home. It gave us an intense emotional experience that we are longing to repeat. We’re looking for opportunities to repeat it. That means we’ll be paying more attention to news about Harris’ campaign rallies, interviews, debates, and other election-related stories.
Watching the Convention was an Investment in the Election
We made a commitment to the convention to watch it. It is just like the commitment you make to a TV series when you watch it. You invited it into your home. You didn’t do the things you normally did — I didn’t write no blog posts during the damn thing, did I? You sacrificed for it.
But, it wasn’t all for the convention. It was also for Kamala Harris. It was for Tim Walz. It was for the Democratic Party. When you commit that hard and you do that one thing, you’re more likely to do another. That’s why the DNC and the Harris campaign raised so much money during the convention.
Each donation is a commitment to the party or the ticket, which makes all the more likely you’re going to do another thing for them.
FOMO and the Growing Movement
People who didn’t watch night one, had FOMO. That FOMO built as news of each night’s events spread across the Interwebz. People wanted in on it. Now, all those low-information voters who were barely tuned in to the election are stanning for Harris and Walz.
Now, these folks are all over your social media dropping like they was in a coconut tree. They want to use all the cute in Harris lingo because we’re not going back to not being involved and part of the KHive. That’s why we’re going to sleep when we’re dead and all y’all can mind your own damn bidness.
Let’s face it, during the convention, we drank the Kool-Aide. We’re on board. We now believe in something. We believe that Harris-Walz can win the election. We are now part of something. We are now part of helping Harris-Walz win the election.
And, we want to do more.
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Image Attribution
This image was found on Freedom of Thoughts using a DuckDuckGo Creative Commons License search
The Psy of Life 
please, let it be so.
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I didn’t watch, or even listen to the DNC convention (and certainly not the other one). I did pay some attention to the coverage, mainly on NPR and web sites (HuffPost, Salon, DailyKoss, and Politico), and their coverage of others’ coverage.
[I never liked pep rallies in school either, or going to games to cheer. There’s something very off putting for me in mass and crowd situations.] But in observing the effects of the thing, it looks way more like a wave than a bump, however much the MSM may want the horse race to stay “too close to call” all the way to election night and maybe beyond.
I am noticing a shift in the coverage. The “Uncommitteds” are getting more attention on their impossible demands that Biden slap an arms embargo on Israel and “end the Gaza war with one phone call”. And them saying they will still withhold their votes if he doesn’t, or if Harris does not promise to do it. They just can’t seem to grasp that the Republicans in the House and Senate are hoping he will do just that so they can impeach him, use accusations of antisemitism and worse to pressure Senate Democrats to vote to convict and remove, and use it all against Dems in the down ballot. And nobody appears to be explaining to them the real limits, political and practical, on what this President can actually do. Still, the coverage seems more aimed at maintaining the image of disunity among Democrats.
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Howdy Bob!
I really find all of the nitpicking at the convention hard to fathom. There are “people” out there that are saying it wasn’t policy detail driven enough, there were too many celebrities, it was too long. The DNC was so damn entertaining, no one really wanted it to end. It was like a variety show. Trump’s acceptance speech alone was long enough to warrant taking a day from the RNC. Jeez. What a boring windbag.
The comment on shortening the conventions got me thinking about their length. It seems to me that they used to be five days and it was a big deal when they decided to shorten them to four. I can’t quite remember when that was. And, when I looked into it, it turns out that there have been three day conventions. Hunh. Go figure. Since the delegate math has already been decided by the day of the convention, it really doesn’t make much sense to have them be so long. Viewership has been declining steadily.
I haven’t caught up with her interview yet, but the headlines I’ve seen are how it was tense and testy, but friendlier coverage sees it as her being engaged and clarifying. Of course, as a woman, appearing angry works against her and as a Black woman, she’s seen as uppity. She’s in a tough spot, perhaps impossible.
I’ve seen polls showing her pulling even with Trump in Georgia and NC, so her position to be improving.
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Jack
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The length of the conventions is an interesting question. With the current structure of the primary elections, the nomination is usually settled before the convention, making the event mainly a PR and entertainment project. This time, the Democrats did that much better than the GOP. Much as the commenting class want more detailed and wonky policy and legislation reveal to pick apart, that really isn’t the point.
The MSM will never be happy and satisfied with the “high stakes” interviews they demand. They see their job as to criticize and nit pick.
The polling news does continue to be good.
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To paraphrase Gandhi, it is easy to tear things down, it is much more difficult to build. Any idiot with a bomb can destroy something, it takes real dedication to endure the hardship and suffering necessary to produce something. If the press don’t see themselves as part of the solution and that their role is to be the purveyor of the agreed upon truth, then they are as much of a problem as the MAGA Republicans are.
Jack
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And even worse than purveying an agreed upon truth is purveying that there is no such thing, and so, no definition of facts and fiction.
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Without it, we cannot have a functional society. That’s a problem.
Jack
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I was hearing on the news (NPR) a clip of Trump complaining of all the unfair coverage he gets from the MSM. I remembered other “Conservatives” doing that for decades, really ever since before the end of the Fairness Doctrine (part of how they got Ronnie to kill it). And for 40+ years, the MSM have tried to defend by doing bothsidesism and not calling out those complainers on the central lie in the complaint, that facts being reported is unfair. And then, as I write this one of the main themes associated with the complaint is the accusation that the Democrats steal election through rampant voter fraud. This is far older than the rise of Trump.
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Howdy Bob!
Some of what we’re seeing is older than the country itself. The slavers have always used bogus Christian beliefs to justify slavery and have opposed anything other than rule by the landed gentry. I’m fairly certain we’re just seeing an extension of that racist culture.
The Fairness Doctrine only came into effect in 1949 according to Wikipedia in response to TV and the need to license broadcasters. Before then, most of the press was openly biased towards one end of the political spectrum or another. Reagan really weaponized the media liberal bias and Newt Gingrich stabbed the press in the heart with it. None of it is true. If anything, the press has had a conservative bias, but Reagan and Gingrich were such liars that they had to do something to keep the press off balance and blunt their reporting on their lies and crimes.
By turning to the Southern Strategy, the Republicans have embraced the Old Confederacy racism and anti-democratic ideals as their political base. Trump and MAGA are just the logical extension of that exercise in promoting anti-democratic views.
I don’t know why the press has seemed so helpless in the face of accusations of liberal bias, but they have. Part of it is corporate ownership and the pursuit of profits. Part of pursuing profits is preserving access journalism and not getting cut off from the conservative side of the political spectrum, but it could be that it is a symptom of the conservative bias that has always been there in American journalism under the Fairness Doctrine.
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Jack
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That need to maintain access to conservative news makers certainly plays a large role. And those news makers can always keep up the accusation of bias no matter how untrue it is. I think this guy has a point:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/8/31/2267095/-C-mon-MSM-You-re-gaslighting-yourselves?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web
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Anyone who doesn’t see it is just rationalizing there way through their own cognitive dissonance.
Jack
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Yep
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