What's really motivating voters this election season? A voter psychology story

When people wax nostalgic for a Hubert Humphrey-style Democrat, political scientist Herb Weisberg can’t help but empathize.

Weisberg grew up in the Minneapolis of the 1940s, where Jews and blacks lived in adjoining sections of the city’s Near North neighborhood. At Ohio State University, he devoted his adult life to analyzing how American Jews vote, but can never forget the religious and racial discrimination that was a fact of life for both Jews and blacks in Minneapolis.

“I had two uncles who got degrees in engineering at the University of Minnesota and couldn’t get jobs in the city because they were Jewish,” said Weisberg in a recent telephone interview. To confirm that, he suggested I look for an article, written by Carey McWilliams in 1946 for the monthly magazine Common Ground, which called out Minneapolis as the capital of anti-Semitism in the United States.

It took a fair-minded mayor named Hubert Humphrey to forge a new social contract for the city. Back then, the Lutheran church was a powerful force, so Mayor Humphrey reached out to Pastor Reuben Youngdahl in 1947 to head his Committee on Human Relations.

Minneapolis soon turned over a new leaf. The city passed anti-discrimination laws that opened up innovative employment and housing opportunities for minorities. Humphrey gained national prominence as a progressive reformer. Minnesotans elected him to the US senate in 1948, Lyndon Johnson tabbed Humphrey as his vice president when Johnson became president after JFK was assassinated, and Humphrey just missed becoming president when Richard Nixon defeated him in 1968 by a razor-thin margin of 0.6%.

That was then. This is now.

Minneapolis is once again a national tinderbox of race relations after a white police officer stands accused of murdering a black man, George Floyd. Moderate Hubert Humphrey Democrats are facing extinction in a political world where the term “progressive” has taken on an entirely new meaning. Racism and anti-Semitism are back and out in the open. Polarization — once a concept schoolchildren learned playing with magnets in science class — exerts a negative force on the political system. Public office holders, more than ever, play divide and conquer with the raw emotions of voters to gain a winning edge.

“Scientific research shows people vote with their gut, not with their heads. Elections are won and lost on anger, fear, hatred and rage,” says Dr. Erez Yaakobi, who has worked behind the scenes on analytics for several political campaigns, and on quieter days, is a senior lecturer at Ono Academic College in Tel Aviv. His latest book, Killer Instinct, soon to be published in English, succinctly conveys the predatory nature of today’s triumphant politician. “In the US, and elsewhere, candidates are fueling divisions. Politicians believe that if they strategically divide people into “us” and “them,” and continue to speak this language and frame the debate this way, they will win.”