Rallying Hope Against Dark Words: America's 2024 Optimism Test

I am, by training and vocation, a communication scholar. It’s a fascinating field because it knows so few boundaries. ?Why? Because humans are defined by the signals they send, intended or not, and by the messages they interpret, erroneously or not.? It is, I.A. Richards long ago said, “a study of misunderstanding and its remedies” (1936).

Like you, the 2024 election has been making me anxious. Or crazy. Rather than sitting and stewing, or doom-scrolling, I tried to think about it in the ways that comm scholars are trained to. I think there are some useful insights, if not perfect answers.

I wonder how much of the fury around the presidential election is all driven by misunderstanding (of each other), and what it’s remedies might be. That is, to what extent have we been unnecessarily convinced to view our neighbors with ... uh, fear and loathing?

Here are four bits of research to consider:

1.??????? Historically, optimists win elections. The most extensive study of the question looked at all American presidential elections from 1900 – 1984. The more dark and pessimistic a candidate’s rhetoric, the greater likely of losing in a landslide. Not always, but something like 90% of the time in the years following World War Two. (Zullow & Seligman, “Pessimistic Rumination Predicts Defeat of Presidential Candidates, 1900 to 1984,” Psychological Inquiry, 1990). The election of presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama bore the pattern out.

2.?????? Historically, presidents speak far more optimistically than the rest of us. Whether they personally feel optimistic, they’ve seen a call to “the better angels of our nature” critical to their ability to rally Americans to face, address and overcome challenges. “Things are dark and getting darker” is not a message that brings out the best in people or rallies the troops. In short, we expect presidents to help us overcome our fears and doubts. (Bruner, “Better Angels of Our Nature: Warmth and Optimism in Presidential Leadership,” Journal of Leadership, 2024).

3.????? Historically, our preference for optimism is rooted in “American exceptionalism.” Simply put, “American exceptionalism” is the notion that we’re not “just another country, like the rest.” Exceptionalism is grounded in the conceit that we’ve made something new and better, freer and less shackled, more connected and less conflicted than “old nations.” Optimistic exceptional rhetoric peaks in presidential election years, when the candidates speak about the aspirations of the nation as a whole, but wanes in off-year elections when congressional candidates focus on more parochial local interests. (Zullow, “American Exceptionalism and the Quadrennial Peak in Optimism,” Presidential Campaigns and American Self-Images, 1994)

4.????? Optimism works, pessimism fails. Challenges are universal. In the face of them, pessimists find enemies, optimists find opportunities. The psychological research on the effects of optimism is stunning. The champion of such research is Dr. Martin E.P. Seligman, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. His most widely-cited work, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life ( 2006) has been cited by other scholars on 13,100 occasions. In it he argues:

The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. Optimists … are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.

These two habits of thinking about causes have consequences. Literally hundreds of studies show that pessimists give up more easily and get depressed more often. These experiments also show that optimists do much better in school and college, at work and on the playing field. They regularly exceed the predictions of aptitude tests. When optimists run for office, they are more apt to be elected than pessimists are. Their health is unusually good. They age well, much freer than most of us from the usual physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests they may even live longer.

Does that seem like entirely commonsense to you?

If so, you’re in sync with most of the rest of the world. And most of the rest of the world, looking at the current presidential race, seem to have one question on their mind: WTF?? One candidate portrays the election as an opportunity to "move past the bitterness, cynicism, and divisive battles of the past" and "chart a new way forward."

The other has described Detroit as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and warned in October, 2024 that “Our whole country will end up being like Detroit if she’s your president. You’re going to have a mess on your hands.” And, oddly, he says it to cheers.

If American political history, at least pre-2016, were a guide, you’d expect to see a landslide victory for Harris. Optimism works. Optimism unites. Optimism allows us to move forward. Pessimism , the opposite. That’s one of the reasons that literally hundreds of Mr. Trump’s former appointees, 700 former military and national security leaders, and former Republican officeholders as diverse as Arnold Schwarzenegger and former vice president Dick Cheney has endorsed – often reluctantly – Harris. Schwarzenegger’s October declaration captures the logic behind many of those endorsements:

We should be pissed! But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea - that won’t solve our problems.

It will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful ... I want to move forward as a country, and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.

Polls, an imperfect measure of behavior, do not support that prospect. There are many guesses as to why, many of which center on the drumbeat of fear and anger that’s the hallmark of so many “news” and social media outlets. The short version is that fear and outrage are wildly profitable so that that’s what many of us are fed. That outrage corrodes our faith in our leaders and diminishes our sense that America (and “the American ideal”), in truly fundamental ways, matters.

We need to change that. And we can. Step one: raise your voice against the darkening din. Step two: vote. Step three: turn to your neighbor and ask, “how can we make this better, together?”

You matter. Act like it.