The Secret Weapon of the 2020 Election: Neuroscience Tech

Could the brain-reading tech that predicted Trump’s election in 2016 help determine who takes 2020?

In the summer of 2016, as Hillary Clinton barreled towards a seemingly inevitable Presidential victory, Spencer Gerrol assigned a new project to the top-secret neuroscience team at his Manhattan design and UX agency.

For three and a half years, Gerrol had frustrated his executives and advisors by employing a four-person team of data scientists and neuroscientists to work on something that had absolutely nothing to do with the company’s day-to-day business. Instead of helping sell websites to brands, they were developing a tool and algorithm to measure how different stimuli affect our brain and emotions. They called it Spark Brainwave.

Gerrol believed would be the holy grail to the future of marketing entertainment, politics … heck, even modern medicine.

His team thought he was kind of crazy.

Although Gerrol’s initiative was in stealth mode, a firm hired Spark Brainwave to study Trump’s campaign ads — particularly in the swing state of Pennsylvania. Clinton was up by an average of 8 points in the Pennsylvania polls, an unusually healthy lead. If she won the state, Trump would have to draw an inside straight to win. But if she lost, it’d signal big trouble across the Midwest.

Trump’s campaign was blitzing the state with anti-immigration ads and stump speeches that told a simple story — immigrants are coming to hurt you and steal from you and take your job, and only Trump could fix this. It was a story his campaign believed would resonate in economically depressed areas. Trump deployed a similar strategy in Florida as well. So, Gerrol and the Spark Brainwave team decided to study undecided voters in both states, showing them campaign ads and Trump speeches while using a headset to measure electroencephalogram (EEG), the electric signals from the brain, and galvanic skin response (GSR), which measures electrical signals in sweat that indicate a person’s emotional state.

They followed up with interviews afterwards, and they were shocked by their findings. Many independents were actually “hidden Trump voters”, falling into two distinct camps:

1) People who were afraid to admit to pollsters that they supported Trump because they didn’t want to be judged. In reality, they were likely Trump voters, but they told everyone they were undecided.

2) People who honestly believed they didn’t know who they’d vote for, but were actually very likely to vote for Trump, based on their emotional response to his ads and speeches.

In other words, Spark’s neuro-technology revealed something about voters that they didn’t even know about themselves.

“We would say things like, ‘Look, you got a big emotional spike right here when Trump is talking about Mexicans entering the country — tell me about that as an undecided voter,” Gerrol explained. “And you would get responses that were like, ‘Yeah, I am pretty emotional about that and I am pissed off about that.’ And then we started to realize that a lot of these people—who were answering the poll undecided—were not undecided.”

“it was so prevalent that we couldn’t imagine a situation where Trump wasn’t going to win the election,” he added.

Ryan McGarry, Spark Brainwave’s chief Neuroscientist, was so confident that he started betting everyone he could that Trump would win. Their research got some light coverage by The Washington Post, but it was mostly dismissed, since the polls told such a different story.

Hidden Red Flags for Hillary

When Spark’s team studied Hillary Clinton’s speeches and ads, the data looked much different. Clinton’s ads scored poorly, largely due to their failure to tell a good story, which neuroscientists have found is the key to driving emotional engagement.

Take her announcement video. It starts strong. “My mother Dorothy was abandoned as a young girl,” Clinton narrates, as we see a black an old black and white photo of her mom. “She ended up on her own, working as a housemaid at 14.”

“She was saved by the kindness of others,” Clinton narrates, as we see black and white footage of a young girl, wild and running.

Listening to it, I was on the edge of my seat. How was her mom saved? This was a side of Clinton I didn’t know. But the story stops there, summed up with a generic platitude (“the lesson she learned stuck with me: no one gets through life alone”), followed by a plug reminding us that Hillary is Methodist. By the 39 second mark, the ad has abandoned any kind of story in favor of reciting her resume.

When Gerrol’s team tested this ad with independent voters, engagement fell off a cliff after the 20 second mark. By the 25 second mark, Clinton’s ad was generating one of the lowest engagement scores possible.

The video hit all of the advisor-approved buzzwords — religion, fighting for children, a commitment to equality. But it lost voters’ attention.

As a card-carrying Democrat, I can’t help but ask: What if Clinton’s campaign had the benefit of this neuromarketing data? They could have built on the strong opening and stuck with the compelling story of Clinton’s mom. They could have encouraged her to tell more personal stories throughout the campaign, instead of reciting her resume in debate after debate.

In politics and in life, stories are key. In our 2018 book, The Storytelling Edge, Shane Snow and I explored the impact that stories have on our brains. When we hear a good story, the neural activity in our brain increases fivefold, illuminating the city of our mind. Great stories also make our brains synthesize oxytocin, a neurochemical that fosters human empathy and connection. Stories are impactful, and that impact is measurable.

Who knows how starting with a good story would have changed the narrative around Hillary’s candidacy — an an election that she lost by just 70,000 key votes.

The Neuroscience of Why Trump Won

Spark’s research was prophetic. Trump won Pennsylvania and Florida, and greatly outperformed the polls throughout the Midwest.

Much of the world is still wondering how. One big reason is that our decision making isn’t rational. As neuroscientists have discovered, emotions, not logic, dictate our decisions. Emotions determine who we vote for and what we buy. It’s why we pay twice as much for an iPhones as an Android with the same features. And it’s why someone like Trump could win.

“It’ not rationally saying: I’m going to vote for this crazy reality TV show guy yelling on the TV,” explained Gerrol. “But emotionally, he’s making me feel something. And so when I get to the ballot box, my emotional brain is going to [respond to that].”

Trump’s win was the most high-stakes demonstration of Gerrol’s theory: that focus groups, surveys, and polls don’t tell you nearly as much about how people feel as their neurological and physiological response.

And that an emotionally resonate story — even one as seemingly reprehensible as Trump’s anti-immigrant screed — has a bigger impact than a rational list of facts.

Neuromarketing tools have the potential to understand us better than we understand ourselves — an idea that’s both exciting and terrifying. And with the 2020 race heating up, it could be an absolute gamechanger for Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Corey Booker, and other 2020 contenders—or even the Trump campaign.

The secret weapon of 2020

In left-wing media circles, such as Crooked Media’s popular podcast, Pod Save America, there’s a rallying cry to abandon focus groups all together, like Beto O’Rourke did in his failed-but-promising run to unseat Senator Ted Cruz in Texas. It makes sense: candidates should just speak from the heart about what they believe in, not just say what they think people want to hear. That’s how you come across as authentic.

I agree that traditional focus groups are a waste of time. Self-reporting is notoriously unreliable. It’s a crapshoot practice that’s hardly evolved over the past 50 years. But neuromarketing can do something that traditional focus groups don’t do very well: help a candidate pinpoint their most emotionally impactful stories, and figure out how to tell those stories better.

Hollywood is already using neuromarketing technology for this purpose. Shortly after the election, In January 2017, Gerrol spun the Spark Brainwave team into a new company, Spark Neuro, and took the tool public. It’s garnered a lot of hype in Hollywood since; Spark Neuro raised a $13.5 million Series Ain August, with Hollywood a-listers like Will Smith and Michael Eisner participating in the round. Netflix, Hulu, Paramount, and NBC Universal are already clients, using the technology to figure out which shows to greenlight.

Immersion Neuroscience — a Spark Neuro competitor — has similar ambitions. In November, they partnered with Dorsey Pictures to test whether 25 TV shows would be a hit. Incredibly, they were able predict hits with an 84% accuracy. By comparison, focus groups were only able to predict hit TV shows with a 16% accuracy. That’s wild.

Like Spark Neuro, Immersion Neuroscience also studied the 2016 electionand found that Trump was secretly dominating the 2016 debates in surprising ways — and pinpointed early warning signs for Hillary.

It’s worth noting that the neuromarketing industry has been plagued by some questionable solutions and science in the past. But industry leaders like Spark Neuro, Immersion Neuroscience, and Nielsen Consumer Neuroscience, the neuromarketing arm of Nielsen, have developed compelling technologies that are earning respect. I’ve tested Spark Neuro and Immersion Neuroscience’s technology personally, and they really do seem to work.

Already, there are signs that the Democratic frontrunners haven’t learned their storytelling lesson and could use some help. Kamala Harris’s announcement video eschewed any attempt at storytelling for a long series of buzzwords (Truth! Justice! Decency! Equality! Freedom!) flashing on the screen to stock music that makes the whole thing sound like a TJ Maxx commercial. If the rest of her advertising continues in this vein, it could easily doom her campaign.

Booker’s announcement video received praise for telling a better story, but I’d bet anything that neuromarketing technology would have helped him tell the same story in half the time.

The big question: Will this technology creep voters out? Maybe! Former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto came under fire in 2015 after the Times reported he had used neuromarketing in his 2012 campaign, leading him to vow to never use it again. But I’d argue that American voters have become accustomed to advertisers and political campaigns using deeply personal info to target and manipulate them, often without their consent. Voluntary focus groups of voters seems quaint by comparison.

Plus, politics in America is basically a high-stakes ad battle. Nearly $10 billionwas spent on political ads in 2016; spend will be significantly higher in 2020. With so much on the line — both financially and in an existential, fate-of-the-world kind of way — each campaign is going to have to look for every storytelling and advertising advantage they can get.

Expect a low-key arms-race amongst the most digitally-savvy campaigns to get the best neuromarketing firms on their side. Neuromarketing could be the secret weapon that online fundraising and social media was for Obama in 2008, and targeted Facebook advertising was for Trump in 2016.

Spark Neuro has already started an independent study of 30 likely Democratic contenders, but hasn’t decided on how they’ll use that data yet, or who they’ll work for. But as Democratic contenders enter the battle royale, I expect some will come knocking — and that it could have a huge impact on who wins.

This story originally appeared on Medium.

Joe Lazauskas (@joelazauskas) is the co-author of The Storytelling Edge, the Head of Content Strategy at Contently, and a business and technology journalist.