THE DEMOCRATIC FIELD 5 took place on February 26, 2020, in New York City. There were 7 candidates represented by 7 actors, delivering policy statements on 3 different issues for the first time: Immigration, Climate, and Health Care.
Actors from the Verbatim Performance Lab delivering the policy statements - verbatim - of remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States.
OUTCOMES
Upon entry, the audience voted for their currently-preferred candidate by name. The results of this vote are indicated on the left side of the diagram: Warren and Sanders were significant favorites of this audience, with some support given to Buttigieg. Klobuchar, Biden, Steyer, and Bloomberg trailed.
The actors were randomly, and anonymously assigned to read the policy statements of the candidates they’re next to. All of these statements were sourced according to Verbatim Performance Lab protocols established through the course of this project to ensure consistency of context, duration, and content, and then transcribed and scored by VPL raters.
After the policy statement readings, during which the audience did NOT know the real identities of the candidates speaking, the audience then voted their preference out of Candidate A through G. The results are indicated on the right side of the figure - the field was significantly tighter, with only a vote or two separating the winner (Candidate C) with the 2nd, 3rd, etc places.
Does inhabiting the highly recognizable personas of modern political celebrities with randomized and anonymized actors help to reduce the algorithmically-driven factionalism that make up our contemporary politics?
During the course of the event, the audience is also asked to make guesses about which candidate they think is being inhabited by which actor.
These guesses are mapped below. Mistaken identity, based on a combination of policy positions and implicit perceptions about race/age/gender, can be a telling piece of qualitative data.
On the left, in the order of their voted preferences, are the ‘real' candidates. On the right, in the order of their 2nd ballot ranking, we can see who the audience *thought* you were listening to when you cast those 2nd ballots. For example, Sanders was 2nd in the voting at the outset; by the end of the event he was first (as candidate C) - however three people who heard Sanders’ statements thought he was Elizabeth Warren, and one thought he was Joe Biden.
By reading the figure in the opposite direction, we can see whose statements were attributed to Sanders: a third that were indeed from Sanders, but also an equal amount attributed statements from Biden, Bloomberg, and Buttigieg to him.
Is there any correlation between a candidate’s recognizability by their policy alone - after their persona has been stripped away - to the strength of their candidacy?
