The Altum Insight Podcast: Narrative, brains, and changing voter behavior, oh my!

Democratic campaigns often still operate from a playbook that says the right policy point or the sharpest attack ad will get their candidate across the finish line. If the candidate prevails, that's seen as proof enough that the strategy worked.

But with trust in government at an all-time low, industry leaders are asking what role the traditional approach has had in breaking down trust between voters and government. As Adrianne Marsh said,

"Pew Research from two years ago did a study that said twenty two percent of Americans trust government... There is a trust deficit, and we can definitely figure that out. We can strategically move toward a durable majority and be the party that stands for something big and broad and maybe even revolutionary."

In the latest episode of the Altum Insight Podcast, co-hosts Adrianne Marsh and Frank A. Spring break down why traditional messaging falls flat and explain how campaigns can bridge the trust deficit by treating narrative not as an art form, but as a rigorous behavioral science.

This discussion builds on the previous episode about the Stairway Model of Behavioral Change. Instead of aggressively pushing an agenda right out of the gate, campaigns must first engage in active listening. By listening to voters and mirroring their language, candidates can establish the foundational rapport and empathy required to build genuine trust before they ever attempt to exert political influence.

Narrative as a term of neuroscience

While political consultants frequently throw around words like "narrative" and "storytelling," Spring emphasizes that these ideas have precise neurological definitions. When a story is properly constructed, it triggers specific chemical responses in the brain:

Cortisol (The Tension Drip): A well-told story introduces a mystery or conflict, releasing a tiny amount of cortisol. This stress chemical creates the narrative tension that keeps humans engaged. (It's the exact mechanism that prevents you from putting down a good book or pausing a television show.)
Dopamine (Cognitive Closure): The human brain craves resolution. When a narrative tension is successfully resolved, the brain experiences "cognitive closure" and rewards itself with a feel-good dopamine hit.

On the other hand, when political messaging leaves conflicts hanging without a clear path forward, it creates cognitive dissonance, a state of discomfort the brain actively avoids. The private sector has spent decades mastering behavioral psychology and finding ways to help customers complete the story (and buy the product.) This missing step has proven extremely costly for Democrats.

The purposes of narrative

According to academic literature, humans are inherently social creatures obsessed with group status and internal dynamics. Driven by this evolutionary biology, stories serve three essential behavioral purposes:

Making Information Memorable: Data wrapped in a story engages different cortices of the brain, sticking with an audience far longer than raw statistics.
Establishing and Enforcing Group Norms: Stories dictate community boundaries, signaling who "we" are and what "we" believe.
Enhancing Narrator Fitness: Ultimately, stories make the audience trust and like the storyteller.

If a political candidate fails to tell a story that feels authentic and familiar to the group they want to represent, they trigger what Spring calls the Novelty Penalty, a cognitive tax where voters tune out information that feels entirely alien or jarring to their lived experiences.

Three questions every political narrative should answer

According to Spring, in order to successfully bypass the novelty penalty and leverage the brain's love for narrative, a candidate’s political message must clearly answer three compound questions:

"Where are we and how did we get here?" defines the community's current condition and diagnoses the root cause of their struggles
"How are we supposed to feel about that and why?" validates the voters' emotions (e.g., anger, betrayal, hope) based on their lived experiences
"What’s to be done?" offers a clear resolution where the candidate provides voters with the agency to fix the problem, leading to cognitive closure

"One Narrative to Rule Them All"

Altum tested this framework in Montana with a study on how voters across the political spectrum think about democracy. Partisan narratives were polarized and mutually exclusive, as one might expect, but the analysis revealed an Economic Populist Narrative as a unifying force. Spring summarized that narrative as:

"Sometime in the last twenty or thirty years, our democracy just stopped working. And we know who's responsible: they're big money, big corporations, the mega rich. They've been pouring money into our political system for decades. But this is still our democracy. It's not for sale. We can take it back through an aggressive program of campaign finance reform..."

This structured narrative proved to be incredibly potent. Independents favored it exclusively, Republicans liked it significantly (although not as much as they liked their own), and Democrats responded to it more strongly than they did to their own party's narrative.

Check out the conversation here, and be sure to let us know what you think!