New research suggests that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s “rigged election” mantra may not be enticing as many people to come to the polls as he thinks.
A political experiment conducted by research scientists Adam Levine and Robin Stiles concludes that Trump’s message is not good for mobilizing new voters to participate in the November election.
The scientists conducted this experiment alongside the group Vote.org. The basis of the experiment deals with Vote.org’s Google AdWords ads that appear to the right or directly above the information people googled about voting registration.
The people who clicked on Vote.org’s ads were randomly assigned to see different versions of that ad. Of course in every experiment there is a control, and that control was the baseline version of the ad which says:
“Free Voter Registration
Registering is quick, easy, & free
Register to vote now!
vote.org”
The experiment then tested this baseline creation against other variations of the same ad by replacing the second line. On this second line, one of the following phrases was used:
“Wealthy Buying Elections,”
“The System Is Rigged,”
“Your Voice Is Not Yet Being Heard”
“Be Heard This Election.”
The scientists Levine and Stiles then looked to see how many of the respondents actually clicked on the ad. Generally most people do not click on internet ads; but, some do, and they took a look at the data to see which messages scored a higher number of clicks.
Levine and Styles found that the “system is rigged” message was less effective than the baseline “registering is quick, easy, and free” message.
According to the data, the “system is rigged” message was clicked on five percent of the time, while the “quick, easy, and free” message was clicked on eight percent of the time by respondents.
Two of the other messages were also not very successful. They were the “wealthy buying elections” and “your voice is not yet being heard” second-line messages.
These types of slogans were readily used by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders in his Democratic primary campaign versus presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
They have also been used by Donald Trump to try and sway Bernie voters over to his side of the political aisle. Someone should probably alert Trump that this tactic, according to research, will not yield a very profitable outcome.
While this experiment is not an ideal representation of the current political race, since Donald Trump isn’t buying any internet advertisements whatsover, it does suggest that his current “the system is rigged” message may not influence voter turn out.
Because when you ignore analytics and scientific data, like most Republicans do on issues like climate change, you wind up saying things that sound good in the moment but do not result in long-term effectiveness.
Here is a video clip of Donald Trump using the ineffective “system is rigged” slogan after FBI Director James Comey declined to prosecute presidential candidate Hillary Clinton:
Featured Image: Screenshot Via YouTube Video.
