A big article in Newsweek about how fear is used in campaigning. Since fear kept cavemen from being the tiger's dinner. It was better for the caveman to react to fear than to use reason to see if a response to fear was appropriate, which means we respond to fear much more readily to logic. As well as guiding us to safety, fear is very good at goading us to the ballot box.
Problems such as global warming and maxed out Social Security are too diffuse, too far in the future, and too foreign to our caveman brain to trigger a fear response. Dwelling on a problem for too long will also drain it of its fear response, as is happening with the War on Terror.
Images invoke a fearful response much more readily than words, though simple words that don't deal in abstract ideas are still pretty effective. Crude uses of fear may drive people away from the intended candidates. At times of great fear people will cling not to life, but to ideals they want perpetuated after they are gone. Terrorize a liberal and he may vote to ensure liberal ideas.
Fear without hope tends to not work (in the same way as hope without fear). Saying, "The bad guys are going to attack again," won't work. Saying, "The bad guys want to attack again and I'm the one to stop them," will.
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