Salience, Identity Formation, Field Tactics, and Political Strategy

This document aims to make sense of the inconsistent effects of different types of political campaigning and organize them into a coherent theory. It aims to be short, so things are articulated and are asserted but not proven.

Key Concepts/Assumptions

Identity Preservation/Cognitive Dissonance Minimization: People make choices in order to construct and reaffirm their conceptions of themselves. When multiple components of their identity are in conflict, they resolve these complex choices by choosing the identity, not by choosing the identity, by choosing who they are, often according to the component of their identity that is most meaningful or easiest to perform.

When it comes to voting and political participation, many people are socialized into explicitly partisan identities (Democrat or Republican) and filter information and make decisions in order to reinforce those self-conceptions.

For others with weak partisan identity, understandings of themselves as being compassionate, considerate, or “making an educated choice,” or participation in a particular subculture or group may be strong. Thus, they vote and act in a way that reinforces and is consistent with that self-conception. Other self-conceptions that often require particular political orientation in order to maintain consistency are numerous - think parent, professional, environmentalist, “hard worker”, etc.

Whenever a particular decision must be made a certain way in order to avoid identity conflict with a specific opponent for someone, we can say that self conception X “requires” decision Y or, in the weaker case, “suggests.” For example, we can say that Bob’s “hard worker” identity requires an anti-immigrant stance in order to make sense of why his wages have stayed stagnant despite his hard work.

Issue/Election Salience: There is a common usage of the term “salience” in the electoral context, which is usually thought of as how often someone hears about the election. I’ll suggest an additional or different definition (which maybe should just be a different word). Rather than how often someone hears about the election, salience can be re-conceived of as the degree to which components of voters’ identities are suggesting specific orientation towards an election at all.

In a low salience election, most voters have no relationship between their self-conception and the electoral choice, and it is easy to vote in any direction without cognitive dissonance.

In an ultra high salience election, like the recent presidential election, potentially all of someone’s identity components are suggesting some orientation towards the question. Oftentimes, all of those suggestions or requirements will point in the same direction and they will have an easy time making a decision.

When they are in conflict, the individual may be undecided, may have a difficult decision, and will have to choose which self-conceptions to preserve or deprioritize as part of navigating the choice. Thus, the choice of who to vote for is also a choice over who you are and what is important to you.

For example, consider this 0-therapy 5 minute outline of some of the components of how I see understand myself and how they influence my thoughts on the 2024 election:

Overall, you can see that it wasn’t too difficult of a decision for me. Most of my identity components suggested the action I took, and the only component with any kind of pro-Trump valence (my dude masculinity) is felt relatively weakly.

Probably the only time I felt any sort of nag was when I listened to the Theo Von interview with Trump. While listening, I recognized him as somewhat of a human, felt somewhat refreshed that he was having a real conversation about the difficulties of substance abuse, and felt some pull towards bringing that attitude, which I clocked as honesty, into our politics.

At some points I felt some small pull towards not voting at all from my anti-zionist politics, but my overall self-conception as a Jeet Kune Do socialist steered and qualified that expression.

Why are all of these words worth it?

One reason it’s worth laying this out is that certain puzzles of politics, such as why voters frequently vote against their economic self-interest, disappear under this analysis. The object of self-interest for a voter is not strictly economic well-being, but the self-interested desire to maintain a continuity of personal and group identity.

Of course, I am making no grand claims at this moment about how these identity components are formed and how people come feel that certain things are required or incongruent, but just suggesting that this is the right level of analysis.

For example, consider the much discussed working class man who swung towards Trump in 2024. The question: “Why would they vote for Trump? Did they really think tariffs would make things better?” is the wrong one. The right one might be something like: “What about their identity as a ‘hard worker’ who can provide for those they care about was threatened by the last 4 years, and what solutions did Trump and Harris offer for avoiding conflict with that self-conception?”

When might light touch ID/persuasion canvassing work?

I believe it is relatively difficult for a regular short canvassing interaction to either change someone’s self-conception or break any requirements that existing identity components are placing on their likely voting behavior.

However, canvassing should still be effective when these conditions hold:

1. The voter has no or few existing requirements on their chosen voting behavior
2. Canvassing (either the information provided, the fact that they were canvassed, or any commitments made during the conversation) create new suggestions between a vote choice and identity components of the voter. These could be specific policies or general framings and ways of thinking.

In general, it should not work very well in high salience (using the new definition of the word) conditions. Additionally, as an election becomes more salient, any suggestions created from an initial canvass contact will likely be overwhelmed as the interacts between the vote choice and their identity components saturate.

Thus, this type of canvassing can only create a type of weak support. There are actually a lot of situations where weak support is enough to win, and many voters in even the highest salience elections for whom drawing new connections in short 1-1 conversations can be decisive.

In these terms, what is base building?

Base building, often alluded to as the answer to left-wing electoral loss (we haven’t built a big enough base yet), is not and cannot be the simple accumulation of biggest numbers of weak support, because we should not expect that support to consistently survive conflict with other components of people’s identities in higher salience fights.

At the very least, base building must mean changing people’s self-conception, and creating new identities that point towards durable alignment with our politics. Ideally, it would also mean building institutions which continuously develop these self-understandings like “worker / union member / tenant / neighbor”, and to build these self-conceptions in ways that are require political action.

If you get to this point, and you’re thinking that I’m just describing class consciousness and working class institutions in more boring terms from sociology, then yeah, I think I that’s right, I’m think I’m just describing class consciousness, sorry about that.

If you already thought there was no way to build a left-wing political movement that could achieve governing re-alignment without create class consciousness in large numbers of people, and you already thought that it is is close to impossible to create durable class consciousness that can survive Neuralink propaganda injections without creating new self-conceptions and bringing people into specific relationships that continuously re-enforce them, then ok sounds good to me.

So, what should we do?

One more idea that might fall out of this analysis is that anything other than strong, over-determined support is a mirage, or paper tiger, or maybe temporary tiger. If our base (defined as the number of people in relationships that re-enforce self-conceptions that require pro-socialist political activity) isn’t big enough, we can still win races sometimes, and that might often (and even usually) be worth doing.

However, I believe that our goal is not to win something, anything as soon as possible. Our goal is to, as quickly as possible, achieve a situation where we continuously win most things under even the toughest conditions. We should be charting the fastest path to that.