By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times
After months of alternating between despair and terror, a lot of Democrats are feeling positively unburdened. In the day since President Joe Biden stepped aside and the party coalesced behind Vice President Kamala Harris, a euphoric giddiness has fallen over the party.
You can see it in the donations: The Democratic small-dollar donor platform ActBlue has raised about $100 million in the last 24 hours, and the super political action committee Future Forward has received $150 million in new commitments. And you can see it in the proliferation of silly TikTok memes, in the homemade merch and in the celebrities like Charli XCX and Ariana Grande getting on board. Suddenly, a campaign that felt like a bleak death march has become fun, even exuberant.
Intuitively, it seems like the newly effervescent vibes should help in the very serious project of defeating Donald Trump, but I’ve been curious if the political science literature backs that up. There doesn’t seem to be a ton of academic research about the role of excitement in presidential politics, perhaps because it’s hard to quantify.
“I don’t know of any political science or economic forecasting models that explicitly include a measure of voter enthusiasm,” political scientist Alan Abramowitz said. But scholar Samuel Popkin, whose books include “The Candidate: What It Takes to Win — and Hold — the White House,” said that intangibles such as joy and passion can matter a lot.
When people really like their candidate, he said, politics are “less of a chore, and you’re going to do things like wear the T-shirt.” Signals such as T-shirts and yard signs, in turn, send a message that being part of a campaign is socially desirable.
In politics as in life, zeal is contagious.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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