Volts podcast: how the left can suck less at messaging, with Anat Shenker-Osorio

In this episode, messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio — a
researcher, campaigner, author, and speaker — discusses the
elements of an effective message, what’s required to spread
messages, and the right way to test whether they’re working. We
also get into the best way to craft climate messages and the
current debate over “popularism.”


Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Anat Shenker-Osorio,
December 20, 2021


(PDF version)


David Roberts:


People involved with politics are obsessed with messaging: what
to say, and how to say it, to sway voters or politicians to their
side.


Everyone has strong opinions about messaging, but almost
everyone’s opinions are drawn from their personal experiences,
preferences, and priors, which are rarely reliable guides to what
works in practice.


There are, however, people down in the trenches doing real
message testing in the field, as part of real grassroots
campaigns, like Anat Shenker-Osorio, head of ASO Communications
and author of the book Don't Buy It: The Trouble with Talking
Nonsense about the Economy. She helps campaigns communicate for a
living, and she discusses the lessons learned from successful
campaigns on her podcast Words to Win By.


Shenker-Osorio is a co-founder of the Race-Class Narrative
project, which is developing a coherent response to America’s
familiar racial dog-whistle politics. She has advised several
environmental campaigns and done a lot of thinking about the
right way to message around climate change, as well as its place
in the race-class narrative.


As long-time readers know, I have a love-hate relationship with
the subject of messaging, so I’m happy to dig in with Anat to
figure out what we really know about good and bad message
testing, the elements of a good message, how to actually get
messages to voters, and how to talk about climate change in a
compelling way.


Without further ado, welcome, Anat, to Volts. Thanks for coming
on.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Thanks for having me.


David Roberts:   


I'm excited to talk about messaging. I want to start with a
distinction. The side of messaging that people think about most
often is word selection: choosing your words, slogans,
catchphrases, and verbiage for your ads. But the other side of
messaging is about the infrastructure that allows you to get the
messages you've developed to voters: the spokespeople,
institutions, media outlets, social media pages, civic groups,
all the mechanisms that allow those messages to reach their
intended audience. 


It's always seemed to me that it is on this latter side of
messaging where the left is really getting its ass kicked. It
seems like the right has a robust ecosystem that's very
coordinated and capable. If they have a new message — you know,
“Critical race theory is taking over schools” — they can get that
to the ears and eyes of every single conservative in the country
basically at will. The left, it seems to me, lacks that ability.
What does it need to do to build that kind of
infrastructure? 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


There are so many ways into this question.


First, of course, I agree with you. That's something that I have
remarked upon myself, frequently: A message nobody hears is, by
definition, not persuasive. It doesn't matter how fancy your
survey or RCT or field test, everything that you did to create
that thing: If nobody hears it, it didn't persuade them. 


I think it is too simple a distinction to put those things in two
buckets, and here's why. Part of the problem we have is, if your
base won't carry the message, then the middle isn't going to hear
it.


Yes, it would be amazing to have an actual functional media that
would properly do its job. Yes, it would be amazing to have a
left-wing specialized media infrastructure of the size and
capability of Fox News and OAN and conservative talk radio and
all the rest of it. Yes, those would all be great things to have,
and we would be much, much better off.


But we do have the knowledge that a message is like a baton that
needs to be passed from person to person to person, and if it
gets dropped anywhere along the way, it is, by definition, not
persuasive. 


Why was it possible for the left to spread the message “love is
love” and “love makes a family” and with it shift culture, shift
perception of gay and lesbian unions (what used to be called gay
marriage and is now properly called marriage equality)? Why was
it possible in city after city and then state after state to
spread a message of Fight for $15?


Why was it possible in the post-election for us to create
content, with a crackerjack team of designers and artists, that
said Count Every Vote? Those memes were viewed more than a
billion times, and that's just a domestic US audience. There are
times when we have broken a signal through the noise, despite all
of the disadvantages that you point to — and those have been the
times when we have properly attended to that wording question.


So again, I don't disagree with your diagnosis, I just think that
the way that we resolve this issue actually has to do with the
messages that we're putting out, at least partially.


David Roberts:   


Let's talk about how we figure those messages out, then. Another
one of my longstanding beefs with the endless messaging talk that
I hear — and I'm mostly coming from a climate perspective — is: I
frequently read studies and survey groups telling me how people
react to messages when they see them in isolation, one at a time,
in the calm of a focus group, or assembled by an academic. Then
they take the different ways that people react to these messages
in that context and vastly over-interpret them regarding what
kind of messages work out in the world. 


It's pointing out the obvious, but the way people encounter
messages in the wild bears no resemblance to that whatsoever.
When people encounter messages in the wild, it's in the midst of
the noise and chaos of our modern information system. They get
partial messages, and the messages are surrounded, often, by
counter-messages from the other side. So the way people encounter
and absorb messages in the real world seems to me so distant and
different from the way these focus groups are done that there's
just not a lot to learn from the latter about the former. 


So how do you messaging experts, or testers, figure out how a
message will perform not just in isolation, but in the scrum of
an actual political fight in the actual world?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


I feel like you are an audience plant for me, raising up all of
my core beefs and things I yell and scream and write and tweet
and bang my head against the wall about.


Yes, you're absolutely right. In-channel testing is any kind of
empirical test where you are providing stimuli to the respondents
and asking for their feedback about that stimuli in the same
moment at which they are receiving it. So that's a telephone
survey, that’s an online dial test; even more sophisticated
processes like using a randomized control trial (RCT) and not a
sequential survey is still in-channel testing. Same with focus
groups. 


First of all, you are literally paying them for their attention.
That is what you are doing: providing them a financial incentive
to listen to your thing, watch your thing, and tell you about
your thing. You have their undivided attention — or at least you
have their somewhat undivided attention, because remember, a lot
of this testing is happening digitally, which means that, like in
the way when people are on Zoom calls, they also have seven tabs
open. So you're still getting some level of distraction, because
people are not just listening to you. The same goes for when
they're taking a phone survey; they're also making dinner and
yelling at the kids or whatever's going on. 


But yes, it is what you say. So how do we deal with that?


We understand that each tool is useful for its purpose and not
for another. Things like in-channel testing — qualitative and,
more importantly, quantitative — can be used in order to
understand whether one frame is more effective than another, or
whether one frame is more comprehensible, logical, clear than
another.


What it can't be used to do is determine effect size. You can't
see an effect size in an in-channel test, say, “This moved people
8 percentage points,” and believe that that's actually what's
going to happen in the field. That's not true, for the reasons
that you say.


Number two, you can design those tests to be closer to the real
world by making them legitimate combat tests, having people in
the survey exposed to more opposition messaging than our own —
which, of course, is what is happening in the real world — and
testing our messages against what the other side is saying. This
is one of my 5,700 beefs with a lot of academic research, that
they do this test-tube experiment where they don't expose folks
to opposition messages. 


Next thing you can do, you can be a lot smarter about what you
are rating the message to do. That's when we're doing message
testing, which, by the way, is not what's happening most of the
time. What's happening most of the time is that people are doing
polling; they are doing research to take the temperature, not
doing research to change the temperature (metaphorically
speaking).


That, of course, is the way that the right wing approaches all of
this testing. They don't say, “let's figure out where people
already are on our issue.” Something that I say frequently is
that it's not the job of a good message to say what is popular,
it is the job of a good message to make popular what we need
said.


So apropos the example that you offered, they started their
critical race theory attack, and even today, most people don't
know what critical race theory is. They have no idea about it.


David Roberts:   


They certainly didn't start by polling and finding out that
Virginia parents were natively concerned about critical race
theory. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Because they weren't. They were like, what is that? Is that the
name of a coffee shop? A new kind of NASCAR race? What is
that? 


They decide where it is they want to take people, and then they
use message testing to figure out the articulation that is going
to be most effective of the path that they have already decided
to walk. They do message testing to try to change the
temperature; they don't do testing to take it. 


When we're doing message testing, it means not asking for facile
self-reported ratings like, “did you like this message? Did you
find it convincing?” That is asking people to have a conscious
response about something that is happening unconsciously.


David Roberts:   


Right. This is one of my beefs about polls and surveys too:
People are not necessarily the best judges of what's going on
inside their own heads. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


They are definitively not. People only tell you what they think
that they think. Because most of thought is unconscious, so we
don't actually know why it is that something moves us or
doesn't. 


So what does it mean to structure a better test? It means, for
example, to structure a test in which you ask people a
pre-question like, “would this make you want to convert the
entire electricity grid to solar, even if it meant you had to pay
this much more in taxes?” Why do we ask that that way? Because we
don't want it to be a unicorns and rainbows question where people
are like, sure, whatever.


David Roberts:   


Do you like good things? So many poll questions are like that: Do
you like positive things? People say yes, and then they send out
the press release: People love this thing!


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Right. So you ask a higher-bar-ask kind of question, and then you
expose people in different treatment groups, relative to a
control that doesn't get any message, to a single message, and
then you ask them a post-question. Or, you don't ask, you do a
control, and you just ask the hard question after, so that you
can attribute a difference between the control group that got no
ad or message or slogan to the treatment group. Then you can say,
“the people in treatment group C, who got message C, they had
this however-many-point shift.” You can just do better
research. 


Then finally, the gold star is to do in-field testing, to use
in-channel testing to get the lay of the land, understand what is
probably best, and then do much better research — if you can
afford it, because in-field testing is expensive. Instead of
asking for people's self-reporting, you do something like send
100,000 postcard A to voters in this block, and send 100,000
postcard B, and then you actually measure the voter file. You're
not asking people, you're checking.


David Roberts:   


That seems much more likely to give you good information.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Yeah. People who know what they're doing do a combination of all
of those things.


David Roberts:   


Good segue to my next question, and I guess we can use the
critical race theory example to get at this question too.


It seems to me one of the reasons that they were able to start
from nothing — parents having no idea what critical race theory
is — to parents freaked out about critical race theory in an
incredibly short period of time is that they were not starting
from nothing.


The background presumptions of the critical race theory message —
Blacks are getting unfair advantage, whites are constantly
criticized, whites are the most discriminated-against group in
America today, they're trying to program your kids to be
socialists at school — that foundation has already been laid
through 40 to 50 years of repetition, of having institutions and
politicians and media outlets say that over and over and over
again.


So when you come along with this new example, most of the
persuasion job is already done. The parents who have been hearing
your stuff all those years are primed to believe this new
example. 


Similarly, I think back to the cap-and-trade debate in 2009-2010:
All the right had to do was say, “oh, this is a tax,” and that
got them 95 percent of the way they needed to go, because the
foundation was already in place. Everybody's been told for 50
years now: taxes are bad, they're unfair, government’s
incompetent. All of that’s already in place, so it's pretty easy
to just apply it to the next thing. 


In contrast, the left has not spent the last several decades
laying that kind of foundation. There are, as far as I know, no
left think tanks or organizations devoted exclusively to telling
Americans that government works, government is good, lots of the
things we have in our society are traceable to government. So
because that foundation isn't laid, they're just starting from
scratch every time, with every new messaging battle.


In the cap-and-trade example, the other side is saying “tax!” and
then the left is saying, “well, no, you see, we set the emissions
at x level, and then you divide it up into permits, and you can
trade the permits, but over time the cap on the permits … blah,
blah, blah …” People tuned out a long time ago. Total asymmetry
there. 


The right has been doing messaging about its foundational
worldview, repetitively, over and over again, through multiple
channels, over decades, and the left just isn't doing that. It
approaches every new issue or every new piece of legislation or
every new fight from scratch, and it's constantly on the back
foot. 


So my question is a) do you agree with that diagnosis, and b) if
so, how can that be remedied? Whose job is it to be laying that
basic foundation, the basic left worldview, beneath all the more
specific points?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


I definitely agree that that is an exact characterization of what
the right has done successfully — that they basically have one
message, or very, very few messages. What you're describing is
essentially the oldest political trick in the book: divide in
order to conquer. The right-wing use of dog whistles, of racially
coded speech … not just in this country. I just came home from
Brazil: it's Bolsonaro; it’s Duterte; it's Orban in Hungary; it's
Brexit, Boris Johnson; I lived in Australia, it's the discourse
of the right wing there. There's nothing new under the sun. 


Basically, there is one storyline they have, and it is to pick
some Other to vilify and tell aggrieved white people, white men
in particular: this is the source of your pain and problem, and
here, we are going to alleviate it for you. We are going to
deliver to you this wonderful vision of a world in which we “Make
America Great Again.” We will take you back to a time when you
were on top of the pecking order: women knew their place, and
Black people did too, and so on and so forth. 


They accomplish all this magically, through the use of this
racially coded speech, without actually explicitly naming race,
thereby maintaining some measure of plausible deniability, and
acting affronted that we dare to say that they've somehow made
racist remarks. They say, “I never mentioned race. I just talked
about illegals,” when, of course, when they talk about “illegal
immigrants,” what comes to mind is not the Swedish backpacker who
has overstayed their visa. 


This is exactly what they've done. It's why critical race theory
fits so seamlessly; they just keep remixing the exact same story.
That is why it is so effective. And it is absolutely true the
rest of what you say, that the left: we are very smart, and we're
very creative, and we like to make a brand new thing for each
thing. 


David Roberts:   


We are so clever — way too independent-minded to ever just go
around repeating what other people say, goodness no.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


There is an entire thing I call “not-invented-here syndrome,” and
partly, that is structural. Look at anything that used to be a
mass movement — the labor movement, the women's movement, civil
rights — that has gone through the maturation process all of
these things go through and become professional organizations.


I don't want to use any one example, because it sounds like I'm
impugning that sector, when this is just part and parcel of the
architecture. If you're going to be a Sierra Club, a World
Wildlife Foundation, a National Resources Defense Council; if
you're going to be a Planned Parenthood, a NARAL, a National
Women’s Law Center: you need to have your own message, your own
branding, your own campaign. Otherwise, what are you showing to
your funders to say, “look what we did! This is what we did this
year” or “this is what we did this quarter. This is why you
should give us more money.”


Responsible nonprofit executives want to pay their employees’
salaries. That is not a bad thing to want to do; you should want
to be able to pay the people that work at your institution. 


So the incentive is against having an echo chamber. There is a
financial incentive on the left toward this cacophony of
differentiated messaging, which is completely and totally
anathema to persuasion and mobilization. It is a visible contrast
to how things used to be when we didn't have professionalized
organizations: we had a women's movement in which
undifferentiated people were in the streets all chanting a
similar thing, just to take one for instance.


David Roberts:   


The right has professional organizations, but does not seem to
have this problem. What is the difference between our
billionaires and their billionaires?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Their billionaires cut checks for general operating. The end. It
is a nested set of ironies that they believe in this highly
competitive, highly individualistic, highly unconnected
worldview, and yet the way that they operate in political space
is through an incredibly clustered, pro-social, collective
endeavor. 


The way that organizations, think tanks, spokespeople, etc., are
funded on the right is that they are given money to just do their
thing and are not required to produce justifications. I have 7
billion critiques, and one of them is of progressive
philanthropy. Philanthropy is, at its core: If you're giving
people money, that is supposed to be about the redistribution of
power; otherwise, it is meaningless. If you give people money and
you are still saying to them, “well, how did you spend my money?
What did you do? What was the outcome? What was the output? What
were you planning? What was this accounted for?” That's no
different than me giving you a sweater for your birthday and
every time I see you, being like, “why aren't you wearing my
sweater? My sweater is so much better than what you're wearing!
Why are you wearing that thing?”


That's not a gift, if I am asking you endless questions. You're
either giving away your money and therefore your power, or you
are simply pretending and still wanting to retain your power by
asking endless questions and not allowing the work to get done.
So that is my giant diatribe. 


To your actual question — who is doing this on the left, who is
responsible for this — obviously, I am not objective, but there
are examples. There are campaigns where we have successfully done
this. Let me just start with one. In 2018, after having done a
giant body of research that we call the Race-Class Narrative
(RCN) — which was created in part and in partnership with a legal
scholar named Ian Haney López, who wrote the book Dog Whistle
Politics and is one of the originators of this idea — we did this
giant messaging project, which we have since implemented in many
places, starting most robustly with Minnesota in 2018, with a
campaign that we named Greater Than Fear. 


As part of Greater Than Fear, we had scripts about taxes, public
education, driver's licenses for undocumented immigrants, solar
panels, etc. What that meant was that not only did we have
Greater Than Fear posters and memes and social media channels and
ads, organizers who were going door-to-door during that midterm
campaign were echoing each other. It was successful enough that
the politicians in the state — Tim Walz, who was running for
governor and now is governor, the two senators who were running,
folks at the state level — they adopted that messaging. Several
of them had a closing get-out-the-vote tour which they named
their Greater Than Fear Get Out the Vote. So there are times
we've done that. 


We've done that with Fight for $15. We've done that with “love is
love” and “love makes a family.” We've done it with Red for Ed,
the educator strikes that swept in a wave in 2018. There are
times we have done this; it's not that we never have. When we
have done it, it has been because organizations — unions, civil
society, candidates, parties (to the extent that it is legally
permissible, obviously not across the firewall) — have pre-agreed
that the most important thing is that we need to be able to break
a signal through the noise. They have suspended ego. They have
gotten funders to recognize that this is incredibly
important. 


We did the same thing in the post-election. The message was
“count every vote, count every vote, count every vote, count
every vote” — instead of saying “let's call it a coup” or “let's
talk about Trump” or “let's talk about authoritarianism.” Then
the message shifted to “voters decided.” That seems like an
facile and simple thing; it was actually incredibly
well-structured, well-coordinated, and well-executed, and that
message got across.


David Roberts:   


It seems like a sane movement, or let's say a sane billionaire,
would be seeking such successes and then trying to fund the
organizations behind them so that they can build on those
successes in the future and repeat those same narratives in other
contexts to the point that those basic narratives become very
familiar. That just doesn't seem to be happening.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


I agree with you, although you might want to rethink the phrase
“sane billionaire,” because I don't know if that's a thing. 


David Roberts:   


Ours have a different kind of insanity than theirs, I guess. Ours
are the wrong kind of insane. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


But also, how does one become a billionaire, which is an entire
separate conversation. There is no innocence in capitalism.


That aside, I only know what I know, and what I've done, and what
I'm fighting to do more of, and it's the reason why I emphasize
campaigns we have won and how we have won them. It is doing
exactly what you have described: having a simple, coherent
message that recognizes that politics isn't solitaire and that
messages don't land in a vacuum. People are hearing relentlessly
from the opposition. If we're not attending to what they're
saying, then our message isn't going to work. The message has to
be engaging to the base. 


But the answer, at least from my vantage point, about why people
aren’t doing this, is because there is still a live debate,
unfortunately, going on in left and left-of-center parties —
again, not just in the US, but I also work abroad — around what
it is that works. There is a level of fear, people clinging with
their fingernails to what little we have, what little gains we've
made. When people are acting from a place of fear, their behavior
is never that great. People are terrified to try new
things. 


The truth of the matter is that a lot of what passes for polling
and message testing on the left is the world's most expensive
form of copy editing. People are essentially testing ecru against
offwhite against eggshell. They're testing a series of messages
which are largely the same argument but with tiny wordsmithing
details. Then it's a garbage in, garbage out problem; message D
or message E or message whatever is marginally better, but it's
not that distinct from the other ones, because people are not
considering the range of ways we could make that argument. 


The reason for that, which you already know, is because the kinds
of solutions that you advocate, that I advocate — the kind of
world that we know that we need — is not the kind of world that a
lot of people who are in charge presently actually want. So it is
challenging to do projects, to do testing, to develop messaging
that makes an impassioned, interesting, engaging, humorous,
base-mobilizing case for true economic prosperity, for a livable
planet, for an end to poisoning ourselves voluntarily in order to
make a handful of billionaires richer. People don't want to do
that.


The basic truth of the left is that we have to beg the master for
money to buy tools to take down his house.


David Roberts:   


That is very well put. In the spirit of thinking through these
foundational left messages that can undergird more specific
case-by-case messages, you refer to the race-class narrative.
That's become a big thing in recent years. Can you explain what
the basic building blocks of the race-class narrative are and
talk a little bit about how it can be applied to climate change?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


The race-class narrative is a messaging architecture. It is a way
of talking that has a very deliberate order and structure, and
that order and structure is built off of years of testing what is
more and less persuasive. So first, let me talk through the
structure, and then I’ll give you an illustration of what it
sounds like in language. 


You begin the first sentence with a shared value that explicitly
names race, or explicitly names any kind of difference that the
right wing has been exploiting in order to divide us and impede
our progress. So you start off with: say what you're for, say
what you're for, say what you're for — in contrast to a standard
leftist message, which is almost always either, “boy, have I got
a problem for you,” “this is the Titanic,” or “we’re the losing
team, we lost recently, so you should join us.” So far we have
not seen a lot of efficacy out of those three hellos that the
left is keen on. 


So it begins with a shared value. It then moves from value to
villain. It names the problem that we're confronting second, not
first, and it does so identifying a clear cause, as opposed to
saying things like “homes were lost,” “the gap between rich and
poor is growing,” “children of color are experiencing the least
qualified teachers,” or, to get into your area, climate change
has now in our language become personified to a degree that,
“climate change is raising sea levels. Climate change is making
the weather weird. Climate change is creating these deadly
storms. Climate change is this and climate change is that.”


The issue with that sentence structure is that you can't actually
pass a law on climate change any more than you can pass a law to
make it be high tide at 10:30 a.m. You can pass laws about human
behavior. 


So what we find is that climate change itself has become this
frozen phrase which is unhelpfully meaningless and seems to be a
causal agent, instead of talking about what actually matters to
people, which is air you can breathe, water you can drink, and a
statement that at least implies causation, like “damage to the
climate.”


Damage to the climate suggests that someone is actually doing the
damaging, as opposed to “this thing is occurring.” As opposed to,
it is some sort of self-inflicted wound, or climate change itself
is an agent. 


It's a little bit like talking about “systems and structures.”
There's no f*****g “system and structure,” there are people
making decisions, and those people have addresses. Unless you
talk about it in those terms, you don't have an organizing model.
Are people supposed to mass mobilize at systems and structures’
house? Are they supposed to do a Twitter storm at systemic
inequality? There's no organizing to be done around that kind of
problem definition. So step two is that it names the problem with
a clear villain. 


Then step three, it resolves the cognitive dissonance
intentionally created in that contrast between the shared value
opening and the villain problem statement second, and that
closing vision statement is one of cross-racial solidarity toward
the kinds of outcomes that almost every single one of us
desires. 


What does that actually sound like? For example: “No matter what
we look like, or where we come from, most of us want to care for
our air, land, and water and leave things better off for those to
come.” Second sentence: “But today, a handful of politicians and
the fossil fuel CEOs that fund them are trying to divide us from
each other, hoping that if they can distract us from the fact
that they are profiting off of poisoning, our families will look
the other way, while they put the clean energy solutions we know
work out of our reach. By rejecting their lies and joining
together across race, across origin, across ZIP code, we can make
this a place that we're proud to leave our kids for generations
to come.”


Something like that. I mean, I would wordsmith it and make it
shorter, but that's basically it in a nutshell. In the middle,
you have to call out what the other side is doing and ascribe
motivation to it. Otherwise, you are not guarding against the
efficacy of their lies.


David Roberts:   


And what they're doing is always some version of dividing us so
that they can screw us.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Pretty much. If they can convince you that Juan is taking your
job, when Juan is in fact sitting in front of Home Depot trying
to get some day labor — and, by the way, does not possess the
means to make public policy, because he's denied even the ability
to vote in the country in which he lives and works and
contributes — if they can convince you that Juan is taking your
job, then you will not notice that, in fact, Jeff Bezos took your
job. There's nothing new under the sun. 


If they can freak you out about “law and order” or crime, or if
they can make you believe that the problem is “those people who
just don't want to work” or “those people who just don't come in
the right way” or “those people who just won't teach their
children the right thing,” then you can be made to hate and
resent government and to be against collective solutions, because
your understanding of government is as an evil force that takes
away from “hardworking people,” who are coded as white, and gives
it away to “profligate people,” who are coded as black and brown.


Then you resent them, and you don't like the government, and
you're willing to vote against it. Everything is some big
government socialist program that is evil and taking away your
freedom.


David Roberts:   


It's sort of hilarious that they've been at this anti-government
thing for so long now that government spending is self-evidently
bad in their world, government regulation is self-evidently bad
in their world – and that's what governments do. That pretty much
covers the waterfront. So governments doing what governments do
now is self-evident evidence that something nefarious is afoot,
on the right.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Completely, and that government acting, having collective action,
is somehow an abrogation of your freedom. In point of fact, I
don't know about you, but when I go to a restaurant, I'm not
really keen to be on the hook for deciding whether or not the
kitchen is full of salmonella. I don't know much about that. I
would like when I enter a building for the roof to be
load-bearing; I know absolutely nothing about how you check that,
I just like to have it happen. When I flush the toilet, I'd like
the stuff to go away. 


So partly, it's been on us. One of the other messaging mistakes I
point out frequently is that we like to sell the recipe instead
of the brownie. We like to have our policies be our message, and
that is a very bad idea. People like paid family leave, don't
mistake me, but you know what they like even better? When we say,
“you're there the first time your newborn smiles.” They like
clean energy, but you know what they like even better? “You can
feel great about the water you drink and the air you breathe.” We
have to sell things in terms of the payoff, in language that gets
at the lived experience of being inside that better policy.


David Roberts:   


Let's talk a little bit more about some of your work you've done
on climate messaging. One of the things I found interesting is
what you found out about the Green New Deal. Tell us what results
popped up when you tested that.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


I say this gingerly because of the point that I made earlier,
which is, again: it's not the job of a good message to say what's
popular, it's the job of a good message to make popular what we
need said. So to the extent that the left could make the Green
New Deal a thing, it's important to have an undergirding,
galvanizing slogan that is central and so on. 


That said, what we have seen in the research is that, at least
the last time we tested it, “Green New Deal” is not a
particularly effective thing to say. Just the name of it, without
knowing other details — which most people do not and never will
because most people do not have the bandwidth to be paying
attention to that degree — it signals not that ambitious, not
that much. A deal is a bargain. It doesn't tell people “your life
is going to be better,” as a phrase.


David Roberts:   


It's hard not to draw the comparison here to critical race theory
again. “Critical race theory,” to most people, was an empty
phrase, and they introduced it with the explicit goal of filling
in that phrase with everything that made parents nervous or
anxious. The emptiness of it at the beginning was almost part of
the point, because they could just paint whatever they wanted
into it. 


You could imagine the same thing happening with Green New Deal:
We introduce this empty phrase, and then the entire left
mobilizes to fill it in with everything good that people
associate with clean water and all the rest of it. But instead,
we introduced this phrase, and instead of filling it in, the
right filled it in, and the left poll-tested it and found that it
was already filled in, so they retreated from it. So the right
did the “critical race theory” thing to it, too. 


I always thought the Green New Deal was incredibly powerful
because it was mostly empty at the beginning and it could have
been associated with all the positive things we want to put in
this new world — but we just didn't have the wherewithal, the
institutions, the mentality. It's such a telling contrast, those
two cases.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


You were just making a more succinct articulation of what I was
trying to say, which is that if you have a vessel and there's
some utility to that vessel, then yes, it should be your job to
fill in that vessel for people. I was simply reporting to you
people’s present evaluation of the vessel. That was not, “do
this, don't do that.” I was delivering information.


David Roberts:   


Yes. It's not filled in yet. Or filled in mostly negative. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


So the choices are: Do you say, this is enough of a vessel, there
is enough agreement among organizations, institutions,
politicians, etc. on the left that this is our boat and we're in
it, so we better make it the nicest possible boat? In which case,
yeah, let's do it, and let's be very clear and good about instead
of selling the recipe, selling the brownie; instead of selling
the names of policies, actually selling the outcomes, which is a
big part of the problem in the way that the Green New Deal has
been described. It's been very much taking your policy out in
public, which is unseemly, should not be done. 


Or you can say, no, we need a vessel that is more clearly
positive, which — just to give you a shot in the dark, out there
illustration — would be something like the Freedom to Thrive Act,
which at least suggests to people, oh, that sounds like a thing I
want. I like thriving, I like freedom.


Freedom is a value that's closely associated with the US. That is
true across demographic groups. When you ask respondents, “what
value do you most closely associate with the US?” across the
board, without exception, the number one thing named is freedom.
That is a value that the right wing has claimed as their own for
a long time, when in point of fact, it is a deeply contested
concept. Core to marriage equality, the freedom to marry; core to
the civil rights movement; core to the women's movement. There's
a lot in freedom that is very much a progressive idea.


And not for nothing: the renamed bill is Freedom to Vote. That
was a very deliberate choice.


David Roberts:   


Getting back to these core narratives, one of the elements of the
right’s core narrative is negative liberty: freedom means people
will leave you alone. Freedom means fewer rules, fewer
restraints. There’s this other way of looking at freedom, which
is by taking collective action and structuring markets or
societies in certain ways, we enable people to have things they
otherwise wouldn't have been able to have. So they have the
freedom to get a good education; a good education provides you a
certain kind of freedom, but it's a positive freedom. It's a
freedom of new opportunities, not just people leaving you alone.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


In fact, in this project that we just wrapped up, looking at how
to make a full-throated positive case for public education, soup
to nuts, in the era of this anti-CRT nonsense, the name of our
messaging guide is Freedom to Learn. Because one of the things
that popped up as most potent and effective, besides saying most
of us believe that our children should be taught the truth of our
history, the good and bad, so they can reckon with the mistakes
of our past and understand our present …


David Roberts:


Do most of us believe that? 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Yeah, in fact around 80 percent of people do. 


David Roberts:   


I guess the other percent are loud. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


That's exactly what's going on. But what I was going to say is
that Freedom to Learn, this idea that our kids deserve the
freedom to learn who they are, where they're going, where they've
come from, is very powerful, and an effective rejoinder to this
CRT thing. 


What the right does so incredibly well is avail themselves of one
of arguably the most persuasive things that anyone has in their
arsenal, which is social proof. So it looks to the average person
who is not paying attention to political details when they turn
on their local news and see a bunch of parents yelling and
screaming at a school board: “Huh, I guess people who look like
me, who have kids that are like mine, think this way.” When in
point of fact, both in our polling and in all of the publicly
released polling, 80 percent, 83 percent, 85 percent of parents
(it depends which poll), when you ask them, want kids to be
taught the truth, the good and bad of history. They don't want
books censored. They don't support these things. It is not a
popular position. 


But the right doesn’t care what is popular. They understand that
the job of the message is to keep their base engaged and enraged.
Because as long as that base — even if it is only 15 percent, 12
percent, 20 percent, depends on the issue — is yelling and
screaming, that is what is persuasive to the middle. The middle
is reading social cues to understand what is common sense and how
the world works. Meanwhile, parents on the left, the vast
majority of whom actually do support a clear, honest,
race-forward, inclusive public education curriculum, they're not
out there saying anything.


David Roberts:   


Yes, this is such an important point. I feel like the left,
especially Democratic leadership, doesn't get this. A lot of
people don't know that if you look at polls from the early 1960s,
you find that most people were fine with equality, most people
thought racism was bad, most people were ready for the Civil
Rights Act. In terms of mass opinion, it was in the right place.
But everybody thought that everybody else was still racist.
Everybody thought that they were the exception or the
minority. 


So how do they find out that they're not? How do they find out
that they actually have the majority? It requires someone
standing up and yelling. So this will on the right to suppress
the people who actually are in the majority from standing up and
yelling and signaling to one another, they can keep minority
opinions in place. 


You can see that happening now, too. I bet it's the same on
climate change. If you get people in isolation and ask them,
“Should we go for it? Should we clean everything up?” most people
will say yes, but that's just not who they see yelling when they
turn on their TV. I think that's so important. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


It’s absolutely the case that we are not just creatures driven by
emotion, we are creatures driven deeply in our political beliefs
by our identity, and our desire to preserve, protect, and
maintain identity. So we are constantly reading in our
environment social cues that tell us, what does my kind of person
think? 


Take a very specific case. It is common and frequent for folks on
the left to do a lot of hand wringing and to verbalize, “oh, XYZ
demographic group aren’t voting: young people aren't voting,
Latinos aren't voting, African-American turnout is down.” We can
see through experimentation — this is not self-reporting — that
when you send the message to demographic groups, “your
demographic group isn't voting,” it lowers voting. Similarly,
talking about vaccine refusal increases vaccine refusal.


David Roberts:   


That's like the thumb trap: the harder you try to get out of the
trap, the more you're in it. If you watch what consumes political
dialogue on a day-to-day level, it's constantly the right acting,
accusing, establishing things, and constantly the left talking
about what the right is saying: fact checking it, refuting it,
but talking about it, constantly. So it's what gets talked about.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


My standard joke is that if the left had written the story of
David, it would be a biography of Goliath. We talk about our
opposition all f*****g day and then we're like, “oh, why don't
people want to be motivated?” Because the truth of the matter is,
the thing that we see in test after test, is that believe it or
not, our opposition is actually not the opposition. It's
cynicism. It's not that people don't think our ideas are right,
it's that they don't think our ideas are possible. So why bother
even trying, when we speak relentlessly about our opposition?
Talking about Trump in 2016 is how we got Trump.


David Roberts:   


What a nightmarish thought that is. We conjured him into the
presidency through our fear.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


When you take your kid to a pool and your kid is running, a
competent lifeguard will yell, “walk!” because if you yell “don't
run!” at a kid, they will run, either out of defiance or because
you literally just yelled “run” at them.


The core messaging lesson when I do presentations is, “forget
everything else that happened today, I just want you to remember
one thing: Say what you're for. Say what you're for. Say what
you’re for.” You have to tell people what we want them to do, and
stop telling them what we don't want them to do. We have to yell
“walk!” not yell “don't run!” 


In the climate space, I know, for example, from my work in
Australia, the percentage of jobs in the coal industry is
something like 0.1 percent. But when the average Australian is
asked to take a guess what proportion of jobs are in coal, people
guess anywhere from 5 to 20 percent. I would guess if you asked
Americans, it would be the same. They wildly overestimate how
many jobs in our economy are in the coal industry. Why is that?
It's because we talk about coal all the f*****g time. We talk
about coal every goddamn day. So it is no wonder that people
routinely overestimate its centrality, importance, size,
contribution, and number of jobs.


David Roberts:   


One of the big things that lefties in the climate space who view
themselves as virtuous talk about a lot is a just transition for
coal workers. They think, by making that a common point of
discussion, they are signaling their good intentions and their
virtue, that it's safe for coal workers to embrace this, blah,
blah, blah. But I worry that we're having the effect you're
describing, which is vastly overstating the significance and
number of coal workers in the world and making the transition
more difficult. Now you’ve got everybody thinking about this
beleaguered group that's going to get ground up by the transition
and overestimating their size, etc. How do you navigate that?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


The way you navigate that is by having more of an overarching
message. I'm wordsmithing it on the fly, so forgive me, it's not
going to be copy edited, but it would be something like: “Whether
we're Black or white, rural or urban, young or old, we all want
to be able to care for our families and do work that we're proud
of that leaves things better for those to come. But today, a
handful of politicians and the fossil fuel CEOs that fund them
want to keep people tied to a wage they can't live on and a job
that is hurting their families, our air, and our water. By
joining together to demand both clean, reliable energy that's
homegrown, made from the wind and the sun, and jobs for people
coming from any industry, we can make this a place …”


You just do it like that, more broad strokes, instead of zeroing
in on, “we're going to specifically rescue you from the coal
mine,” which does reinforce this idea that we're talking about
several million people, and we're not.


David Roberts:   


I want to get to popularism before we're done. The idea behind
popularism is that the commanding heights of the Democratic Party
have been overtaken by young, educated, urban liberals, but the
majority of Democratic voters are still non-college-educated
white men. The idea is that all these effete urban liberals are
pushing organizations to message and talk in a way that flatters
their worldviews and their sensibilities. They cite “defund the
police” and all these policies that only resonate among that
crowd, but do not resonate among the non-college-educated white
men that Dems still need to win. 


The idea, I think, is Dems need to readjust their messaging to
appeal to the great, not particularly progressive,
non-college-educated white masses, the way that used to be very
en vogue. That was Bill Clinton's whole thing. Obama, to some
extent — this is an argument popularists make that has some merit
— really did go overboard in almost every case to at least
rhetorically check that box, to acknowledge the worldview and
fears and sensibilities of non-college-educated white people,
even as he was pushing for liberal progress. 


All the messaging organs have been taken over by these educated
liberals, and they're out of touch with the masses, and that's
why the masses are turning to Trump or tuning out. So we're going
to end up with an entirely urban, educated demographic, which,
because of the various distortions of the American constitution
and governmental system, are clustered in cities and cannot form
majorities. Basically: the left is screwing itself. 


You want to be tuning your message to the sensibilities of the
bulk of your audience, and we're not doing that right now, and we
should do that, say the popularists. What's your take on all
that?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Oh, boy. First of all, have you ever taken The New York Times
“guess my political ideology” quiz?


David Roberts:   


No, not yet. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


You take that quiz. The first question it asks you is your race,
and if you tell the quiz that you're white, the second question
that it asks you — do you want to guess what it is? It's trying
to figure out political ideology. It's taking you through
essentially a decision tree; what's the second question you think
it asks?


David Roberts:   


I would think it would be about education.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


But you'd be wrong. Because in point of fact, education is not
the strongest predictor of political ideology. 


David Roberts:   


Wait, second guess: the population density where you live. Do you
live in a city or a suburb or rural area?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Good guess, but it’s religion. It’s religiosity.


If we want to operate in a simplified world where we only look at
people as two variables, or we only look at white people as one
variable — which is a silly thing to do — the most determinative
single variable is not education level, it's religion.


So first of all, this idea of education polarization as the most
meaningful data point is demonstrably false. There's some
veracity to it, obviously, we're talking about tendencies, etc.
But if you're trying to reduce a massive population, which is
white men, then the way to cut through it, if you're only making
one cut, is whether or not they're evangelical. That's the first
thing. 


The second thing is that, what the popularists fail to understand
is what we spoke about earlier: that politics is not solitaire.
If we choose to be silent about race, about police, about
immigration, about all of these things that are purportedly
anathema for us to talk about, that doesn't mean those
conversations go away. It means that the only thing our voters
hear is the unrelenting race-baiting of the other side, which
means our economic promises cannot cut through.


We've seen this over and over again, when we go to our voters and
say, “I'm going to increase your wages, you're going to have
better working conditions,” the voter has just been canvassed two
hours earlier by some right wingers saying, “Juan is taking your
job” or “you can't even drive into the city because it's too
dangerous and you're going to be murdered and there's crime.” Our
economic promises have no ability to break through and penetrate
because the right wing is engaged in this unrelenting
scapegoating and fearmongering, and if our messages are not
attending to that, they don't work. 


Number three: Let's take Obama as an example. Let's take, more
specifically, his attempts to appease frightened, anxious white
people, these non-college white people, by deporting more people
than any previous president and using the discourse of getting
tough on the border and cracking down and deporting and deporting
and deporting.


I'm just stating facts. That is what occurred. It’s not a
message, that is what happened.


Republicans still said he was for open borders, still said he was
creating this entire ethos and era. Obama himself said that he
had to be tough on the border, he had to crack down, he had to
deport. Same with Clinton cracking down on welfare — this idea
that you have to genuflect at the altar of the terms the right
puts on you.


David Roberts:   


And worse, that policy is the right way to respond. As though
policy will change the rhetoric, as though policy will change the
discussion. One of the first political posts I ever wrote in my
entire life was yelling at Obama about this. You can change
policy all you want, but people's political opinions are only
tenuously connected to policy realities, if at all. That's just
not the lever. If you want to change politics, you don't pull the
policy lever, you pull the politics lever. You do politics.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


How else do you explain that the former senator from MasterCard,
who is now our president, is a “socialist?” How do you explain
that Chuck Schumer reportedly wants to defund the police? The
point is that regardless of what Democrats actually say and do,
people's opinion of Democrats is not made out of what Democrats
say; it is made largely out of what Republicans pillory them
with.


How would it possibly be the case that public opinion about what
someone stands for and does would actually just be made out of
what they said? That would be great, but that is not the reality.
So the entire idea is a house of cards. It exists only inside of
the rarefied environment, like you said earlier, of a survey; it
doesn't stand up to the real world. 


I forgot what point I'm on because I could make 67 other points.
This is just so deeply absurd. It really is as facile as your
financial advisor saying to you, “you know, you should make more
money and spend less money.” How is this a theory? “You should do
popular things.” That is very “Deep Thoughts with Jack
Handey.” 


David Roberts:   


It seems to me it involves the implicit admission that Democrats
are powerless to change what is popular.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


And that somehow people's opinion of Democrats is made out of
what Democrats say and do, which, again, it isn't. 


And then number … whatever number I'm on: again, going back to
our earlier conversation, if your words don't spread, they don't
work. The fact of the matter is that the Democratic base is
largely people of color, and if we are not attending to issues of
racial justice, climate, women's rights, immigrant rights, etc.,
we have a mobilization problem. We have people not turning out.


Something people do not realize is that Biden won 2016 voters by
around a 1.5 to 2 percent margin; he won 2020 first-time voters
by 12 points. It matters to turn out new people. Those voters
that turned out in 2018 and 2020, in those unprecedented turnout
elections, I call them vital voters.


That’s it. If we are going to hold on in ‘22, our only hope is to
engage in what I call “re-turnout” — get those people back. The
way that we get those people back is speaking authentically and
full-throatedly to the things that they care about in their daily
life. For a Democratic base, that means that they should be able
to wander through their neighborhood and make it home without
worrying whether or not the police are going to kill them. If we
are not standing for people's basic human rights, why would they
turn out to vote for us?


David Roberts:   


I am trying to imagine the paradigmatic non-college-educated,
white, exurban man who was going to vote against Democrats, but
then Joe Biden says something implicitly racist, and the white
guy says, “hey, well, he seems like a guy like me, I'm gonna vote
for him instead.” I am having trouble envisioning this swingable
group of voters in the middle that are going to respond to
signals like this relative to how they respond to economic
conditions or other big forces. I have trouble seeing these
messaging tweaks having the large-scale effects that the
popularists seem to think they will.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Completely. Again, they're testing these things inside of this
fake environment where you're paying people for their attention.
They're not actually attending to the fact that you have to get
your base to carry that message. 


Let's take a concrete example. For years and years, there was
this advice that we should talk about raising wages in terms of,
“we should raise wages because we have a consumer-driven economy
and people need money so they can be customers in our stores.”
Or, “hard work should be rewarded; we can't survive on $7.25.”


The issue with both of those narratives is that they eclipse from
view the fact that the money to pay people comes from their work.
It doesn't come from the magical money pants of the “job
creators,” which is a term that was deliberately selected in
order to mirror that biblical creator who may or may not reside
in the sky. 


So this language that “we should pay people more so they can be
customers in our stores,” which is language that was created in
order to make us seem like the reasonable people in the room, the
adults in the room who get things done and are practical and are
not asking for outlandish things — I don't know about you, but I
don't wake up in the morning like, “I'm going to check on the
GDP, I'm just really passionate about economic growth. I'm super
excited to go take to the streets to march for the GDP.” People
aren't going to go and act on behalf of that. 


Instead, in the Fight for $15, the message swapped to, “people
who work for a living ought to earn a living,” which is a
fairness frame. It's a moral high ground. People would go strike
and march on behalf of that. They would not march and strike on
behalf of, “this will increase GDP growth.”


David Roberts:   


This better approach to messaging, with better research and a
more proactive, aggressive mindset: Is that catching on with
young activists? Because if there's one thing we've learned over
the last few years, it’s that existing Democratic leadership,
whose average age is 137, seem completely at sea in the modern
information environment. Is there a young vanguard coming up
that's better at this?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Yes, absolutely. You see them on your TV; they're called the
Squad. There are definitely folks who are much better and who are
making an impassioned, full-throated case for legitimate
multiracial democracy, a livable future, everything else, the
whole list. But I self-identify as pathologically optimistic. I
can not do my job unless I'm optimistic; I have no choice, I have
to believe that something else is possible.


I am also in a dark place, mostly because what the GOP learned
from 2020 was that it was far too easy for people of color to
vote and far too hard for them to cheat, so they've set about
fixing both of those “problems,” and Democrats seem to be
pearl-clutching and finger-wagging in response.


David Roberts:   


Can you be a deer in headlights for four solid years? Apparently,
yes.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Unless we can still have elections in which everyone could
potentially vote and all of those votes could potentially be
counted, I'm not really sure how we do everything else. 


That said, yes, there are people who are doing much better. There
is greater sophistication. There are people who are being more
thoughtful and deliberate about engaging the base, understanding
that that is, in fact, the way that you persuade the middle.


Even if your only aim was to get white people in Midwestern
diners to flip, still the way that you would do it would be to
engage the base, because in point of fact, social proof is real.
We know that what moves white people in Midwestern diners is
seeing other white people out marching, for example, during the
summer of protests after George Floyd's death. 


David Roberts:   


The Women's March was so powerful in that respect. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


People's minds change when they're like, “oh, people who look
like me think this. Okay, I guess I think this. Cool.” But the
main thing is these vital voters of the surge in ‘18 and ‘20.
That is what distinguishes 2022 from every previous time that
we've been in a midterm, in which (spoiler alert) the incumbent
pretty much without exception gets a shellacking.


But this time around, what is different is that we have just come
off of two cycles in which we mobilized an enormous number of new
people and got them to the polls. So it is an arguably easier
lift, because it is not turnout, it is re-turnout. We have a lot
of hard evidence of what did it, so we simply need to recreate
it.


David Roberts:   


You see a debate now in Democratic circles. One side is saying,
“our election messaging in 2022 and beyond needs to be about the
concrete changes that Democrats have made to make your life
better — our ‘kitchen table’ issues.” (I'm so sick of hearing
about the kitchen table.) “What we do for you,” not, “why they’re
bad.”


The other side says, “the fact that the other side is explicitly,
right out in the open, planning to steal the f*****g election
seems relevant. That is something we ought to convey to voters,
because for the vast majority of them, they don't know, even
though it's happening right out in the open.”


It's social proof again. I can understand the average voter
looking out and saying, “they seem to be openly talking about
putting election officials in place that are willing to steal the
thing for Trump; it seems bad, but I don't see other people
freaking out, so I guess I'm not supposed to freak out.”


So the other side of the messaging fight would be: people need
the social proof that yes, this is a freaky, bad, apocalyptic
thing coming down on us. They need to see that it's okay to freak
out about it. 


This is the quintessential messaging debate of ‘22, and ‘24, I
expect. Where do you come down on that?


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


It definitely is.


First of all, I think it's just — real talk — going to be very,
very hard to sell a topline message which is, “Democrats
delivered for you. Aren't Democrats lovely?”


David Roberts:   


Reality does constrain your message somewhat. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


That's tough. Unless we come back in ‘22 and we're in a
completely different reality, which, hey, I would take. I would
love that. Maybe they have some deep thoughts and reflection over
the new year and they come back and actually pass things. That'd
be cool.


Yes, I'm aware of the filibuster, and yes, I'm aware of the 60
vote threshold. I know all of the things, so I'm preemptively
striking against that. Whatever. People view Democrats as being
in the majority, and that is the level of detail that they
understand, the end. 


So first, it's very hard to sell the “Democrats delivered for
you” message. Right now what we are seeing in nightly focus
groups — like weekly testing, we're testing stuff all the time —
is basically “a plague on both your houses.” “All of them are
useless.”  “There's no good here.” Or, “politics, I’m just
going to look away from it.” 


David Roberts:


And guess who that serves? 


Anat Shenker-Osorio: 


Yeah. So the message is a little bit of both, and this is the
distinction that I want to draw: first of all, it can't make
Democrats the protagonist. It has to make voters the
protagonists. Always, you want to talk to people about what you
want them to do, not about the candidate or the party or
whatever.


So, “in ‘18 and ‘20, you turned out as vital voters to defend our
democracy and move us forward together.” And yeah, you can do a
shout-out: “And that means we lifted blah-blah-blah kids out of
poverty, and we delivered these stimulus acts, and we did
blah-blah-blah” — whatever you can lift up — but make it the
accomplishment of the voter, the audience that you're targeting,
and say, “now you are going to do it again.” 


The message that they used, for example, in the Georgia runoff —
hot off the heels of Georgia swinging in 2020, they had a runoff
in January — they said, “Our work is not done yet.” That is what
they said to their voters. “Our work is not done yet. You did
this historic thing. You're the reason. You delivered, and you're
going to do it again.”


Obviously, it was also about Warnock, and Ossoff, and “Mitch
better have my money,” but even “Mitch better have my money” is a
voter agency message. It's saying, “you have the power here, and
you're going to make this happen.” So first of all, voter as the
protagonist. 


Then, with respect to the shitty, terrible things that we say
about these shitty, terrible people, is inspiring defiance
instead of fear. That's the distinction I want to draw on the
negative side: It's really, really important that we not give in
to fear-based messaging, but rather have the negative emotion
that we evoke be anger and defiance.


Fear is an inhibiting emotion in most people. It evokes fight or
freeze, but for the majority of people, it's freeze, not fight,
and it only evokes fight in people who are already activists, not
in people who need to engage. 


So what is the difference between fear and defiance? That's the
difference between saying, “if Republicans are in power, it's
going to unleash a new wave of Covid, you're going to get sick,
you're going to die. F**k. Holy s**t.” Or, “Republicans are going
to create these armed insurrections and they're going to come
with militias.” Fear, fear, fear.


Instead, a message that says, “if Republicans think they're going
to silence our voices and block our votes, they’ve got another
think coming.” “We showed up and we showed out in 2020, and we're
going to do it again.” “Not on our watch, not in our state, not
in our country, back the f**k up.” That's the distinction.


David Roberts:   


Well, your lips to their ears, let's hope. Thank you so much for
coming on and taking all this time. This is so incredibly
relevant right now. Communicating well is always important in
politics, but we are at a juncture where it's so vital and being
done so poorly in so many places. So thank you, and good luck
with your work, and we will probably chat again sometime; maybe
we'll reconnect in a year or two and see how we can message about
the wreckage. 


Anat Shenker-Osorio: 


Wow.


David Roberts:


I mean, the surprise victory.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Exactly. You have to manifest.


David Roberts:   


Positive thinking. All right. Thanks so much, Anat.


Anat Shenker-Osorio:  


Thank you. Have a wonderful holiday.


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