On US Election Day 2026, REDefine explores political psychology, emotional persuasion and the difference between knowing the facts and making a political judgment.
On November 3, 2026, Americans are voting in the midterm elections. Political advertisements, campaign messages and electoral commentary are competing for attention, each offering interpretations of the problems facing the country and the choices available to voters.
But political persuasion rarely operates through information alone. A campaign can make a threat feel immediate, a promise feel reassuring or a political opponent seem responsible for something deeply upsetting, all before the audience has examined the evidence.
How do emotions influence voting? Political psychology shows that fear, hope, anger and enthusiasm can affect how people pay attention to political information, interpret evidence and form opinions. These emotions are not inherently irrational. They become problematic when the strength of an emotional response is mistaken for proof that a political claim or proposed solution is correct.
Understanding this distinction is particularly important in an information environment where emotionally charged messages can circulate faster than the evidence needed to evaluate them.
From Daisy to Morning in America: How Political Campaigns Use Emotion
In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidential campaign released Daisy, an advertisement featuring a little girl picking flower petals before an ominous countdown and nuclear explosion. The advertisement invoked fears of nuclear war without explicitly naming Johnson’s opponent.
Twenty years later, Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America offered a strikingly different emotional experience. Its images of weddings, new homes and people going to work invited Americans to associate the administration with optimism, stability and national recovery.
One campaign used fear. The other used hope.
Neither emotion was necessarily unreasonable. Nuclear conflict was a genuine concern during the Cold War, and economic conditions were legitimate matters for political debate in 1984.
What makes these advertisements important for understanding political persuasion is how effectively they connected an emotional experience to a political interpretation.
The larger question is whether that emotional connection supplied enough evidence to justify the conclusion.
In our new essay, The Feeling Behind the Vote, we revisit both advertisements and examine what decades of political psychology research can tell us about the relationship between emotion, information and democratic choice.
Why Doesn’t Accurate Information Always Change Political Opinions?
One of the most interesting findings in recent political psychology research concerns the gap between factual beliefs and policy preferences.
A study published in April 2026 in the Journal of the European Economic Association examined the responses of 12,000 adults in Italy to emotionally charged news about immigration and crime.
The researchers found that participants exposed to highly emotional news could update their factual beliefs when presented with statistical information. However, the influence of the emotional stories on their policy attitudes persisted.
In other words, participants could become better informed without necessarily changing what they thought should be done.
The experiment measured policy attitudes, not actual votes, and its findings cannot automatically be generalised to every political issue or electorate. Nevertheless, it raises an important question about a familiar approach to misinformation.
If accurate information can improve factual understanding without resolving differences in policy preferences, then fact-checking is necessary but not always sufficient for evaluating political arguments.
Some disagreements involve inaccurate information. Others concern values, acceptable risks, competing priorities or the weight people assign to different consequences.
Recognising the difference is essential for meaningful political discussion.
A Political Story Can Be True Without Proving That a Proposed Solution Will Work
Consider a political advertisement showing an overcrowded hospital. The images may be entirely genuine. Patients may be waiting too long, healthcare workers may be exhausted, and the situation may require urgent attention.
But those images cannot, by themselves, establish which policy would improve the situation.
Would the answer involve staffing, funding, primary healthcare, hospital management or better coordination between services? Determining that requires evidence beyond the original emotional appeal.
This distinction applies to political communication more broadly.
A compelling story can establish that a problem matters. It cannot automatically demonstrate that a particular intervention will solve it.
The famous Brexit campaign promise concerning £350 million a week for the National Health Service offers another example. Beyond the contested financial claim, there was a separate question: what would ensure that the proposed political change actually delivered the promised benefit?
Evaluating political communication requires examining both the accuracy of a claim and the reasoning connecting it to a proposed outcome.
What Role Do Social Media Algorithms Play in Political Persuasion?
Political campaigns no longer depend exclusively on traditional advertising. Social media platforms help determine which messages people encounter, how frequently they see them and which forms of political communication receive visibility.
A 2025 study published in PNAS Nexus examined an engagement-based ranking algorithm on Twitter and found that it amplified emotionally charged, politically antagonistic content compared with a chronological feed.
The findings do not establish that every platform behaves identically or that these mechanisms directly change election results. They do, however, illustrate why political media literacy cannot focus exclusively on individual users.
The architecture of information systems also matters.
As we explored in our earlier article, Media Literacy Is About Power Now, understanding information requires asking not only whether a particular message is accurate, but also how it is distributed, amplified and prioritised.
How Can We Evaluate Emotionally Persuasive Political Messages?
The aim should not be to eliminate emotion from political judgment. Fear can alert us to genuine dangers, anger can motivate responses to injustice, and hope can encourage political participation.
A more useful approach is to recognise when an emotional response has become stronger than the evidence supporting a conclusion.
Before accepting or sharing a particularly persuasive political message, consider what emotion it produces, which factual claims it makes, and what evidence connects the problem being described to the proposed response.
It is equally important to ask what additional information might change your interpretation.
These questions cannot settle every political disagreement. They can, however, make it easier to distinguish legitimate concern from an unsupported explanation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can emotions influence voting decisions?
Yes. Research in political psychology shows that emotions can influence political attention, engagement, information processing and attitudes. Their effects depend on the emotion, context and individual circumstances. Emotional responses do not automatically make political judgments irrational or incorrect.
Why doesn’t fact-checking always change political opinions?
Fact-checking can correct inaccurate beliefs, but political opinions also involve values, priorities and emotional responses. Research indicates that people may update their factual knowledge while retaining policy preferences influenced by emotionally powerful information.
What is emotional intelligence in politics?
Emotional intelligence in a political context involves recognising emotional reactions, considering different perspectives and examining whether a political conclusion is supported by evidence. It does not require emotional detachment, agreement with others or treating all political claims as equally credible.
Read The Feeling Behind the Vote — Our Full Essay and Video
We published The Feeling Behind the Vote on November 3, 2026, to coincide with the US midterm elections. But the questions it raises extend far beyond one election or one country.
Our full essay brings together historical campaign advertisements, recent research into emotional persuasion, examples of misleading political claims, and an examination of how contemporary information systems influence political discussion.
It also introduces a practical two-minute reflection exercise designed to help readers examine emotionally powerful messages before accepting their conclusions.
Prefer to watch? We have also produced a companion video essay featuring historical footage from Johnson’s Daisy and Reagan’s Morning in America.
For more research-based commentary on democracy, responsible technology, civic education and the systems shaping our societies, explore REDefine // Civic Intelligence and subscribe to receive our new essays and resources.
