The 2024 election is shaping up to be a “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know” kind of contest.
That saying is rooted in ambiguity aversion bias. Even if a situation is bad, individuals would rather stay with what they know rather than face uncertainty.
So it goes with our presidential nominees, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Our not liking Trump the man may not be enough for Harris to beat him.
Behavioral economists describe ambiguity aversion, or uncertainty aversion, as the tendency to favor the known over the unknown, including known risks over unknown or incalculable risks. In a professional situation, one would prefer to have contact with or do business with a person they already know, even though they don’t like them, than with a person they hardly know. This principle also seems to apply to political candidates and voter behavior.
Voters make choices based on their own information set; this is true regardless of the truth, accuracy or reliability of their information. Their own data set drives their choices, which they believe will result in the best expected outcome.
A recent New York Times/Siena poll illustrated this fallacy in action. The poll shows Trump with a 52 percent unfavorability rating. The poll also has Trump ahead of Harris nationally, 46 percent to 44 percent.
There are certainly voters who will cast their ballots for the former president because they prefer him as a candidate, supporting his leadership or his policies. But a majority of the electorate find Trump distasteful, whether it was his actions surrounding the 2020 election, the events around Jan. 6, 2021, his felony convictions, the fact that he is an adjudicated sexual abuser or just his obnoxious social media posts. Yet despite all of that, a majority of voters may just pull the lever for a Trump/Vance ticket because they are unsure about Harris/Walz.
Harris has done only one recorded interview. While Americans did get to see her on the debate stage Sept. 10, she did not give many details on her administration’s plans. It took five weeks for the Harris campaign to add an “issues” section on her campaign website, and even then, it was remarkably vague. To date, Harris has not taken questions from the press pool and, as of this writing, has no other interviews scheduled, all of which impedes voters getting to know her better.
It remains to be seen whether there will be any further debates between Harris and Trump, although Trump indicated on Sept. 12 that there would be no more, which again would deny voters additional opportunities to learn more about Harris.
The dominant narrative is missing the ambiguity aversion by assuming that Americans will be so turned off by Trump they cannot possibly vote for him. However, rightly or wrongly, many Americans think back nostalgically on the pre-pandemic economy or remark on how there were no wars going on while Trump was president. While they might not like Trump’s character or behaviors, they felt more prosperous and safer in contrast to the uncertainty of a Harris administration.
Thus, Harris needs to move beyond her strategic ambiguity, as it is likely hurting her. Voters want to know more about her policies and agenda, and broad, sweeping statements may not cut it anymore.
Unless voters get to know Harris better and like what they see and hear, they might just default to the devil they know in November.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and editorial board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She wrote this for The Fulcrum.
