Kamala Harris is holding steady at a 3-point national lead in polling averages—enough to make her the favorite to win the presidential election in November, but close enough that many observers still simply describe the race as a toss-up. (And there’s disagreement about which candidate will benefit more from the Electoral College system.) Every marginal vote that Harris earns through persuasion or turnout efforts over the next month could be critical.
For this reason, the vice president should strongly consider announcing that she believes in—or at the least is “just asking questions” about—ghosts, space aliens, and/or fantastical cryptids like Bigfoot and the West Virginia Mothman.
Why? Well, as historian John Ganz pointed out in a Tuesday post, one thing that Donald Trump’s campaign has been good at is appealing to the United States’ sizable community of people who hold so-called fringe beliefs. Vaccine-autism cranks, 9/11 truthers, QAnon obsessives—Trump will indulge them all and has appeared on most of their podcasts. Indeed, he’s secured the endorsement of America’s King Crank, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., by promising to put him in charge of national health policy. (Were you tired of not having the measles?)
Many such believers were drawn into active involvement in GOP politics by Trump’s embrace of elaborate 2020 election conspiracy theories—a kind of He’s one of us recognition moment. And there are a lot of them, to the point that fringe might not be the right word for their worldview. A 2023 poll conducted by YouGov, for instance, concluded that an estimated 41 percent of Americans think it is “definitely or probably true” that “regardless of who is officially in charge of the government and other organizations, there is a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” This is a mass audience of voters who might not otherwise be engaged with politics were it not for Trump, which could help explain why polls underestimated him in 2016 and 2020.
Harris would be well served to make a play for this audience, or at least to neutralize it as a source of support for her opponent. In a democracy, every vote counts, even the ones cast by people who think the COVID vaccine turns you into a refrigerator magnet. Recently, Harris has been engaging in what a New York Times op-ed called “vice signaling,” by talking about owning a gun and saying she would shoot intruders in her home—i.e., conveying to voters that she isn’t the scolding, uptight kind of liberal. She might benefit in a similar way from having some fringey issues of her own.
At the same time, though, they would have to be issues that don’t have prior right-wing coding and are low-stakes enough not to alienate existing supporters. What about spooky stuff? Amazingly, there is a professor at the University of Delaware named Paul Brewer who studies both political communication and belief in the paranormal. That’s where the terrible visage of the dreaded Mothman—who is, of course, “a humanoid creature reportedly seen in the Point Pleasant [West Virginia] area from November 15, 1966, to December 15, 1967”—comes into play. Brewer generously played ball with the premise of this piece, pointing me to research by Farleigh Dickinson University that suggests that cryptids could be fertile territory for recruiting swing voters:
Democrats and Republicans are equally likely to believe that creatures known as Bigfoot or Sasquatch exist in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. Twenty percent of Democrats say that it’s “somewhat” or “very” likely to be true, compared with 19 percent of Republicans (and 22 percent of Americans overall). Younger Americans are much more likely than older ones to believe that it’s true.
In an email, Brewer suggested that potential Harris voters might be inclined in particular to believe in the Mothman—which, according to witnesses, is a 7-foot creature with glowing red eyes that makes “a screeching sound” as it follows cars through the dark mountain night:
In our own research and more representative surveys, a higher percentage of respondents tend to say they believe in Bigfoot than other cryptids, including the Yeti, Chupacabra, Loch Ness Monster, and, the Mothman. However, our findings do carry a hint that the Mothman in particular might appeal to potential Harris votes: we found that, controlling for other factors, liberals were more likely than conservatives to believe in the Mothman. What’s going on there? One guess is that as an up-and-coming cryptid, the Mothman has a particularly strong appeal to younger and more progressive people. There’s even a recent novel about a young trans boy writing letters to the Mothman.
These beliefs, Brewer’s research has found, correlate with time spent watching YouTube videos; this trend suggests that they could be prevalent in the exact kind of alternative-media demographic segment that Harris needs to make inroads with.
Point Pleasant, West Virginia, also isn’t that far from western Pennsylvania and the greater Pittsburgh area, home to a significant population of swing-state voters who have probably heard about this stuff. Mothman sightings have been reported as far away as Chicago, so the creature seems to get around. Come to think of it, a lot of the current swing states are places where you can make long, late drives through miles and miles of not much at all … the kinds of places where your eyes might end up playing tricks on you (or did they?).
Drawing on the political-communication side of his expertise, Brewer suggested that Harris could maximize her upside and minimize her downside (i.e.) by adopting a “just asking questions” frame:
“Just asking questions” could be effective for Harris (or any other politician associating themself with fringey phenomena like the Mothman) in terms of appealing to believers (who get the signal that she’s “on their side”) without needing to overtly take a fringe stand, and also from the point of view of legitimizing the phenomena: if someone authoritative says “the Mothman is real,” people may tend to counterargue and resist in their minds; if the same person says, for example, “I’m wondering, like a lot of folks, whether the Mothman is real,” or “we should take a closer look at the Mothman,” or something like that, then it suggests that there’s at least a controversy about the Mothman’s existence. You can see the same strategy in how creationists ask for “teaching the controversy” about evolution, or—more to the point—how some high-profile politicians from both parties (like Marco Rubio and Kirsten Gillibrand, to cite two) have been talking about UFOs without ever coming right out and saying they believe in UFOs.
Was a Harris–Walz campaign bus really followed, in the dead of a September night on I-70, by the eerie whir of enormous wings that tracked its path for miles before disappearing suddenly in the direction of an abandoned military research facility?
Would it be unethical of her to tell Joe Rogan that she thinks this may have happened?
Well, how important is it to you to prevent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from deciding who’s in charge of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention?
