Dawn Turner Trice, Chicago Tribune
- In their popular book, “Made to Stick,” Chip and Dan Heath talk about the concept of “identity appeal” as they discuss three questions voters invariably ask when confronted with political pitches and opinion issues.
The questions are: Who am I? What kind of situation is this? What does someone like me do in this situation?
For our purposes here, assuming that the answer to the second question is: This is a presidential election; and the answer to the third is: I would vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate, the question remaining is: Who am I?
In this presidential race, we’ve seen many attempts to identify voting blocs: the soccer (or now, hockey) mom, the black voter, the working-class white voter. These groups often are drawn with broad brushes and woefully simple lines.
