# Steve Bannon — "Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls" > [!quote] "We got elected on Drain the Swamp, Lock Her Up, Build a Wall. … This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls." > — Steve Bannon, 2018 ## Context [[Steve Bannon]] said this in early 2018, looking back on the 2016 victory and forward to the midterms. The three slogans he names — Drain the Swamp, [[Lock Her Up]], Build a Wall — were the campaign's central mobilizing devices, and Bannon credits not their policy content but their emotional charge for turning out voters. ## Why this matters This is a strategist describing his own method without euphemism: negative emotion, not persuasion or program, is the turnout engine. It is the affective theory underneath the "flood the zone" information strategy — saturate the environment with grievance and threat, and the anger does the mobilizing. As a receipt it documents the deliberate, stated reliance on fear and anger as the operating principle of MAGA campaigning, useful for any analysis of [[Political Psychology]] and right-wing voter mobilization. ## Verification - **Reporting:** Quoted and analyzed by [CNN, November 2021](https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/16/media/steve-bannon-reliable-sources); see also [Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-warning-donald-trump-enemies-fear-1903830) on Bannon's recurring "we want you to fear" framing. - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[Steve Bannon - flood the zone with shit]] — the information-warfare method that this affective theory powers.