A time to slow down and re-think

When we're disappointed with the results, like in an election, taking the time to figure out the right questions to ask offers the best opportunity for growth

As soon as the results of the 2024 election became clear, the inevitable happened: news analysts and commentators began explaining why Harris lost and Trump one. Just look at the International New York Times from this weekend: “The vice president took women for granted”; “Harris failed to read the room”; “Democrats were rebuked for ignoring Gaza”; “How Trump spun his grievances into gold”. Each of these statements have a measure of truth to them. They also make me wonder – if these people knew so much, did they send these warnings to the Harris campaign or keep it to themselves?

To me, all these observations can be summed up in one phrase: motivated reasoning. That’s the phenomenon of humans relying on their emotional motivations, usually subconsciously, to process new information. It is a biased and lazy way to make sense of the world because it allows us to avoid doing the harder work of studying all the facts at hand. It is also understandable, since evolution has trained our brains to opt for speed over accuracy in order to save energy. If I can find a good explanation why my candidate lost, then I can just move on with my life.

Understanding the world as I do now, thanks to my many teachers, I thought it better to slow down, sit back and observe a while. And here’s what I think about what happened and how to move forward:

Indeed, the election proved to be a huge mismatch for millions of Americans who were expecting Kamala Harris to win, even if they had many more trepidations than in 2016 when Hillary Clinton was the heavy favorite. Such mismatches between our expectations and the outcomes create discomfort. Psychologist Leon Festinger put a name to it, “cognitive dissonance” – that uncomfortable feeling that you’re wrong.

We humans don’t like the feeling of being wrong. So, our brains resolve the discomfort through a number of ways. First, we can ignore, deny or contradict, looking for information that contradicts the contradiction – the election was stolen! Second, we can add consonance, admitting that things turned out differently than expected but contextualizing it – yeah, he won, but only because people were brainwashed by social media influencers.

Third, we can change our beliefs/attitudes/values or we can change our behavior – either it’s good that he won or he won fairly and we have to re-think how to do things differently to win next time.

I am strongly in favor of re-thinking and figuring out what are we missing. Denial only increases tension and division, and it can lead to violent results like the January 6 riot. Consonance absolves us from taking ownership of the problem at hand. Changing our behavior by re-thinking a situation not only offers the best opportunity for growth but also keeps the dignity of others intact. Rather than write off others who think differently than us as brainwashed or corrupt we have the humility to acknowledge that they saw something that we didn’t, and it’s worth understanding that different perspective. As the popular Israeli song goes, “Things they see there, we don’t see from here.”

At the moment, all we have are a lot of working hypotheses. Ann Lowrey of the Atlantic pointed out that while so-called Bidenomics were working on traditional metrics like low unemployment, falling inflation and GDP growth, it missed on several cost-of-living criteria. “Real median household income fell relative to its pre-COVID peak,” she wrote. “The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 percent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness.” Isaac Saul, the uber-centrist author of the Tangle Substack (which I highly recommend), noted a demographic realignment – Harris lost ground with every group except white voters.

Yet another possibility is that the Trump anti-trans ad campaign, which showed Harris openly supporting trans rights for prisoners with the tagline, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” made a decisive difference. Future Forward, a pro-Harris super PAC, found that voters who saw the ads in focus groups, shifted toward Trump by an average of 2.7%. Considering that he won the states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin by less than 1.5%, such a shift might have been sufficient to flip the entire election from Harris to Trump. While research remains to be done, there was a correlation between the evaporation of Harris’s lead in the closing weeks of the campaign and the preponderance of the anti-trans ad in swing states. (It should be noted that correlation doesn’t mean causation.)

If so, this wouldn’t be the first time that an ad was so decisively effective. After hundreds of thousands of Californians flipped their vote in a 2008 referendum on gay marriage from pro- to anti-, an LGBTQ rights group interviewed tens of thousands of voters to learn why support for their cause evaporated in the closing weeks of the campaign. They discovered that the main reason people had changed their mind was an ad in which a girl came home to her mom and told her that she learned in school “how a prince married a prince and I can marry a princess!”

For now, I totally get people who want to retreat into their cocoons. I didn’t open my American news apps for two weeks. But at the end of the day, the best way to grow from this experience is to listen to the people who changed their mind, not to reason with ourselves about what happened. After all, wasn’t their vote about wanting to be heard?

Figuring out what questions to ask is also important. It’s part of slowing down and re-thinking our approach to conflicts in our daily lives as well as in politics when things don’t go as expected. As U.S. author and professor Sam Keen has said, “What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, the questions we don’t ask or never think to ask.”

Credit: Pinterval.com