THE DEMOCRATIC FIELD/ IOWA

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THE DEMOCRATIC FIELD/IOWA

SUMMARY REPORT

FEB 2 2020
Prepared by @artistsliteraciesinstitute for @verbatimperformancelab and CSPS Hall and the Mirrorbox Theater

PRE EVENT

On Saturday, Feb 1, we held a 2.5 hour workshop for ten actors from Cedar Rapids’ Mirrorbox Theater.  Facilitated by Joe Salvatore and Keith Huff of the Verbatim Performance Lab, this workshop took the actors through three exercises in listening to recorded audio and seeing it converted into a “flat” transcription on the page; and then in how to score the transcript to visualize the pace, pauses, and cadence of the speech as it was delivered.  Finally the actors practiced reading these scored transcripts, and took a dry run through a brief run-of-show for the Democratic Field event as it would transpire the next day.

EVENT

On Feb 2, we staged a full edition of The Democratic Field at the CSPS Hall in Cedar Rapids, for an engaged audience of several dozen on the afternoon just before the Iowa caucus would take place (including in the very space we were occupying for the event today).

The project was described to the audience, and the audience voted their first ballot, indicating the candidates they were presently leaning toward.  The actors selected their randomized/ anonymized identities, and reviewed the transcripts.  The audience was given their first prompt, to enter onto their worksheets and to discuss openly: what was a quality that they looked for (sought out) in a candidate for president, and what was a quality that they looked out for (were wary of)?  The top answers to this prompt, in order of frequency cited:

The actors then took their places at the reading table.  They proceeded to read policy statements on Foreign Policy (Middle East) and then the Economy, while the audience used their worksheets to make notes on each delivery.  The audience then voted for one of the anonymized candidate/actors (A, B, C, D etc), and while those votes were tallied, we held a talk back with the audience, asking what their impressions, positive and negative, of the different statements and deliveries were.

RESULTS

Vote count and position change-

On the left half are the trendlines for each candidate in the number of votes they received on the opening ballot (left) and once they were anonymized and had read their policies (right).  Elizabeth Warren, for example, was in first place in ballot one, receiving 32 votes; as ‘Candidate C,’ after the reading in which she was inhabited by the actor pictured on the right, she had maintained her 1st place finish but had lost 7 votes, falling to 25.

The most notable changes here are with Joe Biden, who polled with 4 votes in 4th place, but improved to 2nd place with 18 votes after being inhabited as Candidate H by the actor pictured (Jo Jordan).

Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg placed 2nd and 3rd respectively in the opening ballot.  Sanders dropped to 3rd with 8 votes, and Buttigieg fell the furthest into a last place tie, with 2 votes.

Guessing the candidate’s identities-

The audience was also prompted, at the end of the reading, to try and guess the real identity of as many of the anonymized candidates as possible, based only on the policy texts that had been read.  The results of those guesses are visualized below.

On the left are the real identities of the candidates, stacked in order from top to bottom according to the opening vote outcome.  A line connects each real candidate to the candidate an audience member guessed they actually were.  For example, Elizabeth Warren, who received the most votes pre-reading, was correctly guessed to be Elizabeth Warren by a majority of attendees who guessed (18 out of 24).  However 2 attendees guessed that she was Pete Buttigieg, and she was also mistaken for Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, and Tulsi Gabbard by various audience members.

We can see that Warren, Sanders, and Yang were the most often correctly-guessed candidates, by the thickness of the line which connects their left side block to their right side block.  A number of people also guessed that the Sanders policies belonged to Warren.

Looking from the right side, we can also see who people thought each candidate was. For example, Tom Steyer was mistaken for Joe Biden by a majority of those who guessed on their policies.  A significant number of guesses also misidentified Tulsi Gabbard as Biden.  (This only tells us that Biden’s rhetoric, as delivered by Candidate H, was not widely recognized as Biden’s, and the qualities people attributed to these speeches were actually attributed to Steyer and Gabbard.)

A significant portion of people heard Amy Klobuchar and thought that was Pete Buttigieg.  For Pete Buttigieg, there is significant ‘fraying’ into a wide range of incorrect guesses, with as many people believing his words came from Klobuchar as from him (and even distributions of guesses going across the board, to Biden, Bloomberg, Gabbard, Yang, etc).  Reading from the right, most of the people who guessed Buttigieg as the author of a statement, had actually been hearing Biden, Klobuchar, and Bloomberg.