KAMALA IS AHEAD NATIONALLY BUT IT’S STILL CLOSE IN THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE RACE. MAYBE THIS DIFFERENT APPROACH WILL HELP HER

Mr. Baron is an attorney who has represented many institutions involved in the international markets and advised various parts of the federal government on economic issues.

Previously published in The Hill on 09/25/24 and edited by Neil Baron

In the wake of the only presidential debate, Vice President Kamala Harris is leading nationally. But the Electoral College race is still close.
Recently she’s has been doubling down on the same tactics that worked for her win, taunting Trump and baiting him. But that may not help her to win. In fact, it could stiffen support for her opponent.

Voters tend to seek consistency with their beliefs. Pummeling them with facts and criticisms inconsistent with their beliefs may actually cause them to dig in. Democrats might want to reconsider their strategy and learn from an experiment that a team of Israeli psychologists conducted during the 2013 Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To get beyond intractable, hardline support for the conflict, the researchers proposed a fruitful approach they called “paradoxical intervention.” Instead of bombarding Israeli hawkish voters with facts and opinions that challenged the Israelis entrenched support for continuing the war, they validated it, but with information that led the Israelis to discover for themselves what would be perilous about doing it. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in “The Prophet” a century ago, the teacher “does not bid you enter [his] house of…wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.”

In the experiment, hawkish Israeli Jews were shown 30-second videos. Instead of asserting that the conflict threatened peace in the region and should stop, the videos argued Israel couldn’t afford to discontinue the conflict because continuation demonstrates the morality of Israel’s position and encourages their unity. This counterintuitive approach did what more conventional messages couldn’t: It unfroze the Israelis’ insistence that the Palestinians were exclusively to blame for continuing the conflict.
That prompted center and right-oriented Israeli Jews to vote for more dovish political parties, and made them more open to compromise in order to reach a peaceful resolution, including eliminating Jewish settlements in the West Bank. These changes were remarkably long-lasting, especially given the intense counter-messaging voters were subjected to during the period.

“Paradoxical intervention” might also help the 85 percent of white evangelical voters who identify with the GOP to drop their fealty to Trump by leading them “to the threshold of their own knowledge”– that Trump’s professed devotion to the Bible and personal relationship with God is disingenuous and false campaign rhetoric.

This process could start with messaging that respects evangelical beliefs and their desire to have a devoted Christian in the White House. Then it could revisit videos like Trump discusses the Bible, Trump the Bible Salesman or Trump’s personal relationship with God. Validating their beliefs might take them to a threshold where they can recognize Trump’s palpable ignorance of the Bible and disrespect for Evangelical beliefs.

This counterintuitive logic could help unfreeze conservatives’ obsession with smaller government and their support for hamstringing or dismantling most of the 439 federal agencies created by Congress.
In this case, the “paradoxical intervention” would start by agreeing that abolishing or undermining federal agencies restores the balance of power and checks and balances among the three branches of government required by the Constitution. It would also concede the point that allowing administrative agencies to make and enforce their own interpretations of the law (a hot topic given the recent Loper Bright decision) subjects the country to rulings by unelected bureaucrats whose decisions can be influenced by whoever is in the White House at the time.

Then, taking these views to their logical conclusion, it would propose federal courts hire the expertise they need to address the thousands of diverse, complex, pressing public interest issues Congress entrusted to the federal agencies. That should help Republicans recognize what they may already know deep down: This is an impossibility.

It’s like the Aesop’s Fable about the old man who wants to be released from his difficult life and comes face to face with the Grim Reaper. Confronted with death, he learns the moral: “Be careful what you wish for.”
It’s a lesson evangelicals and conservatives might learn. But before that can happen, Democrats need to learn how to curb their knee-jerk opposition and show that they can appreciate the reasons of the other side.