– Photo: The release schedule stretches the emails disclosures out through two upcoming contests where Hillary Clinton is competing for delegates.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras issued an order Thursday requiring State to release batches of the still-undisclosed portion of Clinton’s emails on Feb. 13, 19 and 26 with “all remaining documents” released by “the close of business” on Feb. 29.
Contreras had publicly discussed the possibility of releasing some of the messages directly to the Freedom of Information Act litigant whose case the judge is overseeing, Jason Leopold of VICE News. However, the judge’s order Thursday directs State to release the records on its website, as the agency has done at least once each month since last May.
The release schedule stretches the emails disclosures out through two upcoming contests where Clinton is competing for delegates in the Democratic presidential race: the Feb. 20 Nevada caucuses and the Feb. 27 South Carolina primaries.
Lawyers for Leopold had argued that the elections created an urgency for State to complete its work reviewing and releasing the Clinton emails. At a hearing Tuesday, the judge said he agreed.
The staggered releases over the next few weeks were opposed by the State Department, which said such a plan could “interfere with its ability to complete processing of all the emails” by the end of February. In a court filing late Wednesday, State offered to do a single interim release on Saturday with the rest of the emails posted at the end of the month.
In his new order, Contreras continued to display the frustration he expressed at Tuesday’s hearing’ about the State Department’s failure to release all the emails by the deadline he originally set at the end of last month.
“The court expects that defendant will endeavor to avoid any additional delay,” the judge said Thursday. “Therefore, it is FURTHER ORDERED that defendant shall promptly bring any unanticipated problems to the court’s attention.”
Voters’ opinions won’t change much after the GOP debate.
Millions of dollars pour into the political arena every week in an attempt to change people’s opinions and move them closer to one side or the other. But given that most voters make up their minds relatively early, they are largely unmoved by ongoing content, thanks to the way our brains filter what we hear — and it happens automatically. For the GOP debate, the brain’s “auto-correct” means that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump could boycott the event and not change any minds one way or the other.
Here’s why: a recent neuroscience study shows that when people hear their favorite candidate speak, their brains will find a way to explain why everything he or she says is more engaging. At times, people must spend a lot more mental energy processing the content to align it with their views. But if a candidate they don’t like says the same thing, their brains filter that content through a different lens, to find that same message disturbing and alienating.
As a result, while polls, focus groups, surveys, and other sophisticated analytics may give clues as to whether anything nudges the voters, neuroscience can give candidates (and other “marketers”) clues about the types of content that are perceived to be acceptable or offensive. Needless to say, this does not end with politics. It is essentially true for many other situations in which we are confronted with opposing views or complex content.
This is backed by a neuroscience field study graduate students in business, neuroscience and engineering at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management recently conducted involving brain reaction to messaging and content. Gathered together in one room to watch the televised Republican and Democratic presidential candidate debates earlier this month, 20 research participants wore special headgear to record their brain responses. As the candidates debated, neural data was collected to show how engaged the research participants’ brains were with the content and the effectiveness of some of the messages. Throughout the debate, another 40 participants in the same room were polled by researchers to rank who was winning. (Participants in the study were chosen following a survey identifying their political affinity to make sure they cover the full spectrum of political views)
Brain engagement (meaning how “active” brain waves were in certain areas, as well as how similar one brain was to another, when a favorite candidate spoke to his/her constituents) from research participants watching the Democratic debate on January 17 showed Hilary Clinton and Bernie Sanders to be tied (that is, in terms of the level of neural effort they conjured from Democrats’ brains). Martin O’Malley was a distant third. These results differed significantly from polling of the research participants—gathering their opinions after their subjective minds and brain filters weighed in—which showed Clinton as the clear winner, followed by Sanders and O’Malley. (This contrasts further with the pundits and media which called Sanders the winner.). Simply put, when Democrats listened to Clinton or Sanders speak their brains looked similar. At times, the content required more effort (in the form of increased focus, attention or engagement) to process. One interpretation is that the content might have sparked some internal debate within individuals, so that their brains worked harder to align with their conscious desire to rank Clinton and Sanders high.
For Republican candidates in the January 14 debate, the research results were even more surprising. Brain engagement data put Ted Cruz in first place, compared to fourth in the more subjective opinion polling of the research participants.
The same opinion polls ranked John Kasich first, followed by Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz. Trump, who did not show up in the top four in opinion polling, still ranked third in terms of how well he engaged the participants’ brains. (Trump was called the winner of the debate by the media, followed by Cruz.)
In looking at the issues, rather than individual candidates, in the Democratic debate, brain engagement was highest for immigration and terrorism, followed by elections and politics. Healthcare reform, which had sparked arguments between Clinton and Sanders in the debate, did not make the top four of the most brain-engaged topics. In the Republican debate, brain engagement sparked the most for the economy, terrorism, immigration, and guns, in that order.
Interestingly, terrorism and immigration had strong effects on participants’ brains for each party’s debate — which may very well reflect how emotionally charged these topics are for people, no matter what their opinions are on the subject.
The research was not meant to be predictive of the election. Rather, the purpose was to show the difference between neurological responses that show brain engagement (but before the brain “filter”) and subjective feedback from opinion polls (after the brain filter).
Admittedly, gathering and analyzing brain activity, as we have in other research using movie trailers and commercials, is expensive and requires neuroscience expertise. However, it’s easy to see why brain data might be especially insightful, compared to polling people’s subjective opinions. Brain data could show those moments and messages when people are most engaged. That, in turn, could inform candidates, marketers, or others trying to influence voters or other consumers how to best present information and positions for the most impact and engagement.
For any “campaign,” political or commercial, in which the stakes are high and the investment is large (for example on an ad in the Super Bowl, where every extra second increases the price by millions of dollars), brain data could prove far more insightful than traditional polling of consumers for their subjective opinions.
In his classic 1941 short story “Nightfall,” by Isaac Asimov imagines a planet (Lagash ) with six suns. Only once every 2,049 years does total darkness fall—and with nightfall comes the appearance of the stars. When that happens, the citizens of Lagash go mad; they burn everything in a desperate attempt to banish the darkness. The total collapse of civilization means there is no record of what has happened; no collective memory to ward off the next collapse when darkness descends again in another 2,049 years.
This fictional story unfortunately is an illuminating (no pun intended) guide to how we cover—or miscover—the presidential primary process. Even though there’s a gap of only four years between elections, as opposed to two millennia and change, it’s as though our collective memory gets wiped clean sometime around the inauguration, and we approach the next cycle with no guide to what has happened in elections past.
The key lesson we forget every four years is that the nominating process stands in sharp contrast to the general election, where “fundamentals” often hold sway. While I’m skeptical about the predictive ability of academics and experts to call an election a year or two out, there’s good evidence that a combination of variables—mostly, but not exclusively economic—can provide a useful, if sometimes blunt instrument for gauging the outcome of an election. (When you get within a week or two of a presidential Election Day, you’d be pretty reckless not to trust the kind of analysis made famous by Nate Silver).
Perhaps that fact shouldn’t be surprising; a general election in this country is binary. Given that we’ve only elected Democrats or Republicans for the past 165 years, a monkey with one red and one blue card in front of him ought to be able to bat .500; and as often as not, the outcome is a foregone conclusion weeks, if not months, before Election Day. Indeed, there are academic studies that argue more broadly that the general election campaign itself is almost wholly irrelevant to the outcome.
The history of primary elections, by contrast, suggests that they might as well take place on a different planet. The presidential nominating process usually involves a number of contestants. It moves by fits and starts; candidacies can rise, fall, revive and collapse with breathtaking speed. Again and again, months, even years of assumptions are thrown into a cocked hat by a sudden surge or implosion of a campaign. It’s a history that should lead any political journalist to question just how much the ever-increasing tonnage of pre-primary coverage really adds anything useful to our understanding of the process. When we look at the stories and conjectures of just the past two weeks or so—do Bernie Sanders’ crowds mean Clinton could lose? might Trump run third party? Has Jeb Bush’s “work longer hours” notion turned him into Mitt Romney 2.0? It’s worth remembering how quickly and dramatically the fortunes of candidates have shifted in recent decades:
• 1976: Ronald Reagan’s challenge to fellow Republican Gerald Ford is at death’s door in late March; a narrow but unexpected loss in New Hampshire is followed by a series of defeats, withdrawal seems inevitable. Then, aided by a half-hour TV speech blasting the Ford-Kissinger foreign policy, Reagan wins North Carolina, then 10 later primaries, and comes within a few dozen votes of unseating Ford at the convention.
• 1980: Sen. Edward Kennedy’s challenge to fellow Democrat Jimmy Carter is at death’s door in late March; Carter has beaten Kennedy in every contest save for Massachusetts, and a late poll shows Carter with a double-digit lead in New York. Instead, Kennedy beats Carter by 18 points in New York, and wins a series of later primaries that carries Kennedy’s campaign through the convention.
• 1984: Former Vice President Walter Mondale sails through the pre-primary phase with a lead so big he refuses to debate his rivals, declaring the campaign “the sweetest primary in history.” He scores a 3-1 win in Iowa, and several days later, just before the New Hampshire primary, the New York Times reports Mondale has the largest poll lead of any non-incumbent ever. But Senator Gary Hart crushes Mondale in New Hampshire and, within a week, Mondale is struggling to survive.
Are these campaigns too distant to be relevant? How about the past three primaries:
• 2004: Vermont Governor Howard Dean draws huge crowds and torrents of volunteers and campaign cash with a powerful anti-war message and online savvy. With a few weeks before actual voting starts, Dean has double-digit leads in Iowa and New Hampshire. Instead, he finishes a distant third behind Senators John Kerry and John Edwards (His famous—or infamous—pep-talk-cum-scream came on Caucus Night, after his Iowa collapse).
• 2008: In the summer of 2007, presumptive front-runner John McCain is in freefall, with an empty campaign treasury and a staff implosion that has left his campaign written off by rivals and by the press. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani holds huge leads in national and key state polls. By year’s end, ex-Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, with virtually limitless financial resources, is poised to win Iowa and New Hampshire, on his way to the nomination. But Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee turns his appeal to Iowa evangelicals into a win, and in New Hampshire a cash-strapped McCain uses town meetings to win the primary and, with Giuliani’s collapse and a divided opposition, capture winner-take-all primaries in big states and win the nomination.
– Photo: The release schedule stretches the emails disclosures out through two upcoming contests where Hillary Clinton is competing for delegates.
The release schedule stretches the emails disclosures out through two upcoming contests where Clinton is competing for delegates in the Democratic presidential race: the Feb. 20 Nevada caucuses and the Feb. 27 South Carolina primaries.
In his new order, Contreras continued to display the frustration he expressed at Tuesday’s hearing’ about the State Department’s failure to release all the emails by the deadline he originally set at the end of last month.
