Election Analysis: Humanizing the Dehumanizable

The beagle - a white person's dog: How could Warnock 

possibly be a monster?

The New York Times published a fascinating piece on how Raphael Warnock used a cute puppy dog in political ads to make himself seem less threatening and more human to white voters in Georgia. The ad campaign indicates a sophisticated knowledge of cognitive biology and social behavior. The NYT writes:

The dog had a lot of work to do.

He was co-starring in a political ad that had to showcase the candidate’s good-natured warmth. But the ad also needed to deflect an onslaught of racialized attacks without engaging them directly[1], and to convey to white voters in Georgia that the Black pastor who led Ebenezer Baptist Church could represent them, too.

Of course, Alvin the beagle couldn’t have known any of that when he went for a walk with the Rev. Raphael Warnock last fall as a film crew captured their time together in a neighborhood outside Atlanta.

“The entire ad screams that I am a Black candidate whom white people ought not be afraid of,” said Hakeem Jefferson, a professor of political science at Stanford who studies race, stigma and politics in America.

While there is no singular factor responsible for victories this narrow — Mr. Warnock won by less than 100,000 votes out of roughly 4.5 million and the other new Democratic senator, Jon Ossoff, won by even less — there is bipartisan agreement that the beagle played an outsize role in cutting through the clutter in two contests that broke every Senate spending record.

“The puppy ad got people talking,” said Brian C. Robinson, a Georgia-based Republican strategist. “It made it harder to caricature him because they humanized him.”

By the end of the campaign, Warnock aides saw dog references popping up in their internal polling, supporters hoisting up their own puppies at campaign rallies in solidarity and beagle-themed homemade signs staked into front yards. They even started selling “Puppies 4 Warnock” merchandise.

All of which would probably come as a surprise to Alvin. After all, he wasn’t even Mr. Warnock’s dog.

“He knew he was going to be perceived as a highly racialized candidate,” said Andra Gillespie, a professor of political science at Emory University in Georgia and the author of multiple books about race and politics. A key question for his campaign was, she said: “Can you be racially transcendent and the pastor of arguably the most prominent Black church in America?”

There has been some discussion that the beagle — the kind of breed “we psychologically associate with white people,” as Dr. Jefferson put it — was another subtle yet intentional effort to explode racial stereotypes. Mr. Magnus said the reality was more mundane: “The dog needed to be very cute, somewhat relatable and he needed to be able to hold the dog.”

A shot of Alvin in Mr. Warnock’s arms would be the punchline.

“Get ready Georgia, the negative attacks are coming,” the candidate said, predicting smears about everything from eating pizza with a fork and knife to hating puppies.

“And by the way, I love puppies,” he added, cradling Alvin. (emphasis added)

An OP here from last October discussed the intensity of tactics that candidates need to use to have a chance of being competitive. In that case, the democratic candidate's life fell apart and he psychologically broke down and withdrew from the race. 

The more this kind of information is known, the better able people are to understand that modern politics is based on sophisticated science and tactics that work to humanize a candidate and/or to dehumanize the opponent. Dehumanization can be (usually is?) coupled with lies, unwarranted character assassination and partisan motivated reasoning. The effects of such campaign speech are powerful and subtle at the same time. The human mind is unconsciously responding to such content because it is designed to work unconsciously. That is the epitome of subtlety.

Probably no average white voter consciously thought of Alvin as a white person's dog being used to humanize Warnock. They saw something cute and responded emotionally. Political operatives knew exactly what was going on.

Footnote:  

1. Warnock not directly responding to the attacks on him is an example of a politician refusing to step into the opponent's frame (discussed here and here).