Beyond Red and Blue: The U.S. Election as a Test of Adult Development

Whichever side you might be on, the imminent U.S. election is a choice between starkly different worldviews. What might vertical development teach us about the candidates and this moment?

Like many around the world, I have been hanging on the edge of my seat, anxiously scrolling through news feeds, waiting to see what kind of a world I will be waking up in on November 6th. Depending on where you might be, the upcoming U.S. election might feel like a life-changing, history-shaping moment or perhaps simply a strange spectacle - entertaining, shocking, even frightening at times but ultimately inconsequential for your day-to-day existence.

As a Romanian-Australian, I am privileged to live in one of the safest democracies on Earth. Compared to the turmoil elsewhere, our news cycle is quite boring (and that, to me, is a very good thing!). From this far, it seems less important who occupies the White House come January. At the same time, the perspective shifts dramatically when I tune in to my roots and talk to my parents who live a stone’s throw from Romania’s border with Ukraine. What happens in the US feels suddenly much more consequential.

I’m sharing all of this to clarify from the get-go that I’m no objective observer. I do have an opinion and hope for how this election will go, and if your preference for a candidate is different from mine, that’s perfectly fine, as this is not what this article is about.

Beyond my own bucketload of emotions, I cannot help but watch this event unfolding through my lens as an adult development and leadership researcher. For those of you new to the concept of adult development, this is a branch of developmental psychology that studies how adults continue to evolve through ever-increasing stages of cognitive, emotional, interpersonal or moral maturity throughout their whole lives.

These stages very much shape the way we make sense of the world, what motivates us, what we pursue and how we engage with other humans. One of the most widely used stage models in leadership lists seven stages: Opportunist, Diplomat, Expert, Achiever, Redefining, Transforming and Alchemical. If you’d like a bit more information on each, I have described them in this podcast:

What is Vertical Development and Why Does It Matter?

The bottom line is these stages evolve from very immature, simple ways of conceiving the world (Opportunist), to complex, sophisticated and nuanced perspectives (Redefining and above). This difference in worldview has major implications for all sorts of contexts, particularly for leadership.

In my research, I compare these stages to the octaves on a piano. If you are not familiar with the term - octaves are groups of eight notes, repeating at ever higher pitches as you move along the keyboard. When we talk about someone’s ‘developmental repertoire’ we mean their capacity to make sense of the world in an ever more sophisticated/nuanced way. The research is clear: the more ‘octaves’ a leader plays on their developmental piano, the more effective they can be, particularly in roles that involve a lot of complexity. How many leadership roles are more complex than that of a President of the United States?

Stages (octaves) of development impact how leaders understand and use power, what they strive for, how they make decisions and how capable they are to take multiple perspectives. They also determine how self-aware they are, how they understand, follow or challenge rules, how well they can regulate their emotions and reactions and how they are able (or not) to collaborate with others.

Bottom line, a leader’s stage of development tells us a whole lot about what we might expect from that leader - so being developmentally informed can actually make a big difference for a voter seeking to make a wise decision in electing a candidate more likely to work in the public’s interest.

This brings us to the two leaders now competing for what is likely the most powerful political position in the world.

Unlike psychological pathologies, which require specialised diagnosis and cannot ethically be put forth unless a trained expert has directly consulted a person, developmental estimates can be made on the basis of language people use - its nuance and complexity can tell us a lot about the developmental frame of the user.

Research shows that about 5% of leaders are stuck at a developmental stage called “Opportunist” (most people outgrow this stage before or during their teenage years). People operating from this stage tend to talk about the world in black and white, more concrete than abstract. They tend to use language as a weapon and take a perpetually defensive stance. The way they talk about power tends to be as “power over/ us versus them”. They usually have one perspective - their own. Whoever has a different perspective is an enemy. They see rules as impositions unless they somehow favour them and they don’t have an internalised moral compass - so they won’t hesitate lying, cheating or changing the norms of the game to favour them. They are very much self-centred - because they cannot comprehend others’ perspectives and they judge the world almost exclusively through the filter of their own needs and wants - it’s very hard for people at Opportunist to have empathy for others or understand altruistic motivations of any kind.

At the same time, the Opportunist has a superpower that many people at the later stages lose. They are not afraid to shake up the status quo. Because they have very little self-awareness, they also tend to have very little self-censorship. Cultural tabus don’t bother them much. This gives people at Opportunist incredible courage to speak the unspeakable (and do the undoable).

If any of this is starting to sound familiar, that’s surely no accident!

The Opportunist is a stage most of us have outgrown long ago and one whose unfettered expressions are often shunned by society. This is why it can be jarring to see a leader bringing the full repertoire of this stage on display on the global stage. From a developmental perspective, my sense is that the incredibly polarising reactions Donald Trump creates are very much the result of his almost complete embodiment of the Opportunist. The Opportunist is the root of his outrageousness and perhaps in many ways also the source of his appeal. His courage to say exactly what he wants, when he wants it has been, in many ways, his superpower. He is able to channel the collective visceral anger, the righteousness, the woundedness in ways that are impossible for leaders who operate from later stages of development. At the same time, because this stage is so limited in its capacity to care about anyone but self - he also ends up self-sabotaging systematically by saying and doing things that alienate the very people whose support he most needs. This developmental immaturity impedes him from following through with strategies that would ultimately serve his own interests. And it’s this same immaturity that fuels his lack of discipline - the Opportunist is the most impulsive of the stags - which so many of his allies have decried.

The Opportunist is also virtually incapable of collaborating - the default at this stage is ‘do it alone’. This is very much visible in Trump’s inability to create a functional team or in the internal wars he stokes between his allies or employees. The Opportunist’s stance in relation to other people is mostly transactional - I give you what you want if you give me what I need. Anybody who has read Trump’s stance on international alliances - such as NATO - can hear that transactional approach: “Look, if they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect. OK?”.

The Opportunist is also practising ‘power over’ more than any other stage. Hence Trump’s infatuation with dictators and his decrying of any limitations on presidential power which, in his mind, should be boundless. His response when asked if he would be a dictator if reelected: "No. No. Other than day one."

Interestingly, most of the time adults play more than one octave. Trump is hardly the sole politician with a strong Opportunist drive, but he does seem unique in making it his one and only lens on the world. Most others balance their ‘Opportunist’ with capabilities of later stages. You could see the Diplomat stage on full display in the way J.D. Vance showed up in his debate with Tim Walz - he was polite, almost different - a far cry from his aggressive stance at Republican rallies. J.D. was sleek, skilled with words, and made his points in a congenial tone that Trump is clearly incapable of. Walz too seemed to have a strong Diplomat energy - this likely contributes to the perception that the NY Times summarised nicely: “The governor succeeded in projecting an avuncular image.” The Diplomat is the stage of belonging - it allows people to fit in, to speak the language of their group. It’s not an accident that both Trump and Harris chose running mates whose image could complement their own and whose style could appeal to voters they themselves might not directly reach.

You can see the next stage - Expert - at play in the way Harris, Walz or Vance talk about numbers and statistics, just as you can see the Expert playing out in the way fact-checkers work to show how close (or not) to facts politicians were.

The Expert is a stage of reason, of facts. Kamala’s reliance on the Expert throughout her career has helped her build her credentials as a prosecutor. It also became, particularly at the start of her campaign, a limitation - as people demanded to see more of ‘her’. It’s hard for the Expert to be vulnerable, or self-revealing and that seemed to be a developmental stretch Kamala Harris took in her stride as she leaned in more and more into unscripted interviews and interactions versus the tightly controlled, rigorously prepared interventions of the early days.

Disinformation strikes at the core of the Expert’s need for certainty and deals a huge blow to the very idea of ‘Truth’. The fact that Trump called his social network ‘Truth Social’ speaks volumes about the way the Opportunist mindset twists the Expert’s genuine need for truth. For the Expert there can only be one truth (the downside of that worldview is rigidity and a black/white mindset). For the Opportunist, anything counts as ‘truth’ as long as it serves their purpose. Vance embodied this developmental distinction when he declared: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do”. He clearly understands the power of Expert, but his moral compass seems stuck at Opportunist.

As we move past Expert in the developmental continuum, we start to see the distinctions between the two campaigns. The next stage is the Achiever - whose core focus is on the pursuit of goals. Kamala Harris expressed this stage when she said: “On Day One if elected, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” “When elected, I will walk in with a to-do list.”

It seems that the Achiever is also animating Trump’s campaign team and allies. All their efforts to have him stick to the message, urging him to talk about the economy instead of going on tangents - seem to be rooted in the Achiever’s focus on reaching the goal. There is real pragmatism to the Achiever, but also a capacity to listen, collaborate and stay disciplined in pursuit of a goal - all of which are missing from the Opportunist outlook.

This is glaringly obvious in the countless instances during his rallies when Trump seems to be ignoring (and at times openly mocking) the advice of his own team, giving in to the impulse of indulging in grievances or attacking his enemies. “I have a gut, and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” - he once said. What is missing from this statement is that ‘gut’ plays out very differently at different stages of development. And what the gut tells us is very much informed by our psychological maturity - with Opportunist being ‘all gut’ and later stages being ‘reason’ with ‘gut’ as a partner.

Turning our attention to Harris - beyond the Achiever’s goal focus, we can also see the discipline and hard work of this stage play out in the way she shows up. The assiduousness with which she prepared for the presidential debate with Trump - knowing that live debates were not her strong suit - is telling of this stage, which some researchers call ‘the conscientious’ stage. Her Expert-Achiever stance is also revealed in her propensity to stick with the facts and policy - boring as they may be.

What is fascinating, and has become more obvious in the last few weeks as this contentious election nears its climax is Kamala Harris’ capacity to tap into the very late stages of development - Redefining and Transforming.

At these stages, leaders shift from ‘power over’ to ‘power with’ and ‘power to’ others. She has proven time and time again that she is capable of building and leveraging meaningful alliances, appealing to a diversity of stakeholders by touching on what matters to them, but also building deep relationships and communities - like her alma mater sorority - Alpha Kappa Alpha (part of a group of nine historical black sororities of great impact in the community) - which Trump has derided as ‘going to a party’. In the Opportunist mind, there is no room for interdependencies. In the Redefining frame, that IS the way the world works and building meaningful relationships over decades is something that makes perfect sense if you see the world as an interconnected place and power as distributed and harnessed through relationships rooted in trust and mutual respect.

More recently, the very late stage of Transforming shone through in Kamala Harriss’ unifying message. In this one phrase: “I pledge to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make and to people who disagree with me.” - she captures the essence of the Transforming mindset. People at this stage are much more capable of balancing action with inquiry - curiosity with determination. They practice ‘power with’ - which means they don’t feel threatened by those who oppose them but in fact value divergent opinions because they believe constructive conflict leads to progress. The very fact that Harris committed to include a Republican in her future cabinet says a lot about her worldview and the value she puts on inviting divergent points of view.

At Transforming people are also more aware of their limitations - of their ‘shadow’ - the darker side that is bound to come out. There is a vulnerability in acknowledging that shadow, which Harris leaned into as she declared: “I’ll be honest with you: I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. But here’s what I promise you: I will always listen to you, even if you don’t vote for me.”

At the late stages, people start to be motivated by values rooted less in their self-interest and more in higher aspirations and ideals. The very idea of “universal human values” is the expression of a mature stage of consciousness. So when Harris says: “There’s something about people being treated unfairly, or overlooked, that just gets to me” or “I have lived the promise of America. And today, I see the promise of America in everybody who is here. In all of you, in all of us. We are the promise of America.” - beyond the political speech, this touches on a completely different worldview than the ‘I’ and ‘mine’ version of the Opportunist.

Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw from the race, despite his own ambitions, in service of a higher purpose - was a great example of late-stage thinking in action. Transforming is a worldview where collectively held ideals matter. Where values matter. Where principles such as ‘fairness’ can be placed above immediate self-interest or gratification.

It’s 5 November here, in Australia. Just a few more hours until the American people choose which octaves of the collective piano they want to be playing for the next four years, but also what type of ‘piano’ they want to create in their country. What they choose will impact countless others, thousands of miles away, in myriad ways.

For quite some time, developmental research has maintained that we need more late-stage leaders in the world. They tend to act more wisely and more in the collective interest rather than their own. They tend to be less likely to be blinded by status. They tend to rein in their impulses, seek counsel and not act alone. They are able to put guardrails on their own power, as they understand how dangerous unfettered power can be. The research shows that such leaders are also more effective at creating profound, positive transformations in teams, companies and, perhaps, societies. The question is, is such a leader capable of winning the trust of the American people in an incredibly short amount of time and will that leader if given the chance, be able to live up to the promise?

Time will tell. For now, I’ll get back to the edge of my seat. Tomorrow will surely put the theory to the test!

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