Air Date 7/4/2022

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, in which we shall take a look at the difference between the kind of political messaging that feels like the right thing to say, and the reframed messages that actually get political results that allow for progressive policies to get past sources today Include how we win future Hindsight.

The Tom Hartmann program deconstructed and start making sense with additional members-only clips from how we win. And two quick notes before we start. The first is that the Stitcher podcast app is shutting its doors, and so this is just a public service announcement that if you happen to use that app, you should export your playlist of shows to another app, a sap if you're looking for a recommended alternative.

I've been using. Pocket casts for a lot of years now. And the second note is that we're launching a membership drive this month with memberships available at a discount for July Only. More details at the end of the show or read about it at Best of the Left dot-com slash support. There's a link in the show notes to [00:01:00] find it.

Why Behind The What with Gretchen Barton - How We Win - Air Date 6-21-23

GRETCHEN BARTON: We did a project called Yellow Brick Road where we interviewed -- and I remember telling my husband, by the way we're gonna hate each other before this election because we're just gonna be in interviews all the time, but it was worth it because we had to get Trump out -- but we interviewed 45 people every week, the same 45 people for four weeks, undecided voters, for about half an hour to an hour each, to understand their process and what was happening to them as it was getting closer and closer to game day. What was going to make their decision between Trump or Biden or Mickey Mouse or whoever the hell?

And there was a -- I'll call him Steve, even though we know his name. But Steve is a --

STEVE PIERSON - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: Does it have to be Steve? Okay. It can be Steve. That's fine.

GRETCHEN BARTON: There's always a Steve, I dunno. This fellow was an incredible African American businessman who was not sure whether he was going to vote for Trump or Biden. And I remember the things that he talked -- he talked about encounters with a KKK and his ancestors. He had a very emotionally resonant story about his [00:02:00] experiences as a Black man where he lived. And he had a bunch of kids and he had a business. And I remember him saying to me, look, they can call me the N word as long as my taxes are low. I remember him saying this and being like, oh my God. But then two weeks before the election, he saw how Biden talked about race in America, and he saw how Trump talked about race in America. And his son had been pinned down in a mall and held down at gunpoint that week. And I remember he kept on talking about how his son was a nerd. His son was a nerd. And he wasn't a troublemaker. He was a nerd. He was a nerd. He was a nerd. He couldn't do that. And he realized at that moment that he said, we've been settling for crumbs. We've been said it was okay to sit at the table, but we couldn't afford to eat. And Biden is gonna be somebody who can help us with race in America, and Trump doesn't care about us at all. And so that was what shifted it for him, seeing his son and seeing the effects of racism on his immediate family.

So I remember that. I remember that distinctly. I also remember talking to [00:03:00] this one woman who was on disability and she talked a lot about shootings in America. It's funny cuz there have been times, and I'm continually in field work and I hear a lot of people tell stories about the fear that they have around guns in America. But this one woman was talking about it and she likened just getting ahead in America as climbing a ladder, and that every time there was a shooting, the rung of the ladder would fall out under her feet. She couldn't catch her breath. She couldn't get ahead. And she wasn't able to work. And she talked about how she knew in her heart, she knew that she didn't matter in America because she didn't work. She didn't work, and so she was useless. And it was one of those moments that was so painful, but it really illuminated for me, for us at the time, oh wow, and this goes really deep how we think about work and how we think about value. And it led to this understanding that we did a national poll where we learned that 65% of Americans don't feel like they matter at all in America.

STEVE PIERSON - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: Whoa. Wow.

GRETCHEN BARTON: So that led us [00:04:00] down in a whole course of thinking and now as a result of that, we're looking at things like, do you matter? Do you feel that? Do you feel like you're in control? And that's something we explore as well. People do not feel like they're in control.

And so how do we then speak to that state, but then also restore those things that people have need for?

So yeah, those are some things that I've learned along the way. But, I'm so grateful for the amazing people who have shared so many thoughts and feelings with me, with us in our research.

Winning a Trifecta with Mike Lux - How We Win - Air Date 5-31-23

STEVE PIERSON - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: You co-founded Air America, which I miss dearly. I loved listening to Air America. How has your thinking on progressive media changed over the years? What do you think is needed the most? I mean, obviously right-wing, when it comes to alternative media, right-wing voices own the battlefield, and we are just fighting to inch back every bit that we can. But what's your thinking on that?

MIKE LUX: It's a very scary landscape and it's gotten scarier over the years. There are now [00:05:00] three media corporations which are far right-wing in nature. Sinclair is the one that everybody knows, but there's a couple of others that are sort of sisters to Sinclair in terms of their right-wing ideology. Those three media companies now own 50% of local TV stations. So they control the news on those local TV stations. And it's like a propaganda, it's like a local Fox News. I'm just in the process right now of doing an analysis in different battleground states, and they just dominate in those kind of small- and medium-sized markets. You know, Youngstown, Akron, Flint, you just go down the list. The Quad Cities, in Iowa and Illinois. State after state. And these right-wing media outlets just dominate them. So, we really need for progressive funders and small dollar [00:06:00] contributors to really engage in the media balance to support media outlets that are more progressive or that are just -- frankly, I would just take like an outlet that was neither progressive nor conservative, 'cause right now we've got so much of the far right. And we just need a variety of different kinds of media outlets.

Now the good news is that a lot of people now are getting their information from a wide variety of sources. They're getting information now, not just on their local TV station, but on podcasts and on different kinds of radio stations and on online, different news outlets that are based online.

So there's a lot of different places where people go are going to get their news. But I can tell you that the landscape right now is overwhelmingly tilted toward the Right, the media landscape.

JENIFER FERNANDEZ ANCONA - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: The TV news media landscape.

STEVE PIERSON - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: And alternative. Yeah. And alternative.

MIKE LUX: And radio too. And radio too, but [00:07:00] especially TV.

STEVE PIERSON - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: I mean, if you look at the podcast charts, the conservative podcasts are consistently flooding the top podcast ones, even. the big shows like Pod Save America, and those often are dwarfed by the -- I don't wanna name the names, but the not so truthy ones.

JENIFER FERNANDEZ ANCONA - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: The fake newsy ones.

MIKE LUX: Yes. The Alternative Facts Station.

STEVE PIERSON - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: Right. Well, we wanna let you go and we appreciate your time. It's so great to have you on. But we'll finish with the last question that we ask all of our guests: What brings you hope right now? You already gave us a whole lot of hope with your memo, but what's bringing you hope right now?

MIKE LUX: You know, what's bringing me hope is that the American people, the voters are rejecting right-wing extremism. They did it in 2018. They did it in 2020. They did it in 2022. Not everywhere. There's still plenty of right wingers win an election. But the overall trend is that Americans [00:08:00] are rejecting that kind of extremism, even though it's being spoonfed them on the local TV stations, even though it's being spoonfed them on Fox News, right? But they're rejecting those basic ideas. And that to me is a great sign. And it means that we can be hopeful.

Winning Messages Anat Shenker-Osorio - Future Hindsight - Air Date 4-13-23

MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: So, speaking of voter suppression, there is a growing threat of election subversion, and as we learned, of course, on January 6th, 2021, there was a plot to overturn the results of the 2020 election. And we all know that fact checking is incredibly boring, but in the meantime, Democrats and Republicans are calling completely different things, the "Big Lie". You know what the Democrats say it is is different from how Republicans are using it. So, how do we fight election subversion with no agreed facts?

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: Oh, it is very, very difficult. You're absolutely right. One thing that I [00:09:00] wanna pick apart: the adherence to the real "Big Lie", that there was any kind of malfeasance in the 2020 election when in fact it was the most observed, the most counted, the most verified election that we've ever had in our lifetimes. Yes, we see that around 30% of American voters actually continue to believe that not only was there some form of manipulation, but that it was enough to actually have an impact in the results. And of course, the majority of Republicans by quite a bit believe that.

But when you actually unpack it, let's just take my home state, I don't live there anymore, but I'm from there, Wisconsin, there are people who live in Wisconsin who fundamentally cannot wrap their brain around the fact that the majority of people by a very slim margin, but still the majority of people, the majority of Wisconsinites rejected Donald Trump. [00:10:00] That is the thing that they cannot conceive. They cannot conceive that the majority of their neighbors picked Joe Biden and did not pick Donald Trump, especially because they picked Donald Trump, the slim, slim majority of them, in 2016. And you know, we could say this about Michigan, we could say this about Pennsylvania, Georgia, et cetera.

And because they live in these communities where everyone around them also voted for Trump. So they're simply like, Well, who are these people in Wisconsin or in Michigan or in Pennsylvania? Pick your state. I don't know any of them. They don't go to my church. They're not at my kids' school. You know, they're not at the fish fry. I'm still using the Wisconsin example. Like, what are you talking about? I've never met them. And so when you live surrounded by a reality which is then at odds with what you see as an outcome, then you have to come up with some sort of causal explanation and, "helpfully", Donald [00:11:00] Trump and his lying enablers came up with an explanation for them. It's not, in fact, that this is what occurred. In fact, something else nefarious was going on.

So, I think one of the mistakes that we've made is we've actually not attempted to message about that. We've accepted the opposition's terms and now we're gonna fight about them. So they're gonna say there was the "F word" - fraud - there was fraud, there was fraud. And because of the illusory truth effect, which is a cognitive bias that causes us to rate things that are more familiar... so, things that are repeated, people are more likely to believe them to be true if they feel familiar. It's one of many cognitive biases that is why repetition is so incredibly important in messaging.

So, they say there was fraud, there was fraud, there was fraud. And what do we say? We say, There was no fraud. There was no fraud detected. We conducted extensive investigations and the instances [00:12:00] of fraud were blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Did I say fraud again? Have I mentioned fraud? There was no fraud. Can I say fraud again? How about I say it some more? And so first of all, In negating the other side, we are actually reinforcing their argument because we are, again, in this case, for example, using the F word. But even more broadly, even if we were to make the first immediate fix, the first immediate fix is to say, not, There is no fraud, but rather, This was the most observed, recounted, well administered, and verified election of our lifetimes and every trusted election administrator from across parties has reaffirmed the correct result. So you say what did happen, you don't push back against what didn't happen.

But even with that, what we actually need to be saying is, Joe Biden won by a greater [00:13:00] margin of popular votes than ever in our history. Joe Biden won more popular votes than any person running in our history. Joe Biden was elected by record numbers of Americans, Americans across race and place, big cities, small ones, suburbs, farms, picked Joe Biden to be our leader. That's what we needed to have been saying

Democrats Can Win If They Follow These Rules Featuring Ken Weber & Daryl Weber - Thom Hartmann Program - Air Date 12-14-22

DARYL WEBER: Branding is different. We make sure to be clear how it's different from marketing, especially in the political world. We think Democrats are pretty good at the sort of marketing of politics, where they're getting out yard signs or mailers, and they're doing it for each individual candidate, each campaign as it comes up.

But the key thing, and that's what we're focusing on here, is the branding is actually much more long term than that. It's much deeper, much more emotional. A brand stays with you for a very long time. It stands for deeper, something emotional, and it affects how you make decisions and how you think about something.

So, for Democrats, we [00:14:00] see each campaign comes up, every candidate has to create their own individual personalized brand. Whereas there should be a much clearer, cohesive, overarching Democrat brand that goes over all of them, so that every Democrat can use that and benefit from it.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: And the GOP has been doing this successfully since the eighties in a big way. Ask any random person, what does the Republican party stand for? And they'll say -- and good branding and good messaging, typically, the rule of threes -- they'll say, low taxes, deregulation, and small government. And now the Republicans have been very successful in trying to brand the Democrats as the party of gay people and trans people who are a threat to your children. And obviously we don't agree that with that statement, but that's how they're presenting Democrats or that --

KEN WEBER: It's gay, socialist, communists. That's what they are.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: Yeah, exactly. Or the Democrats are the party of black people. And this is the message that they've been using on conservative Hispanic radio in a big way -- from my colleagues in the [00:15:00] radio business, what I'm hearing is that conservative Hispanic radio is basically pumping that message really hard.

So you've got Republicans trying to brand Democrats and doing it successfully, I think in many areas, many parts of the country, and Democrats not branding themselves. Is that a reasonable analysis?

DARYL WEBER: That's right. Like you said, we see, you see it in focus groups actually. People are able to list off what Republicans stand for, what they care about, what they're fighting for, and it sounds emotional, it sounds reasonable, it sounds like things they want, like you said. But then you ask them what Democrats stand for and they're not really able to tell you. They might know a few policy ideas here or there. They might know what one candidate said at one time, but there's not this overarching sense for what does that whole party believe, what are they fighting for? What are their values? Those things are not clear for people.

KEN WEBER: And the irony of course is that Democrats do have a whole long list of things almost 98% of Democrats care about. So that's what the book is about, how to get that message out for the long term.

And we have step-by-step suggestions about how Democrats can and should do [00:16:00] that.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: You talk about how 2017 was a perfect case study of what we did wrong. Can you describe that? In chapter one, you say, "Ossoff in 2017 was a perfect case study of what we do wrong. He pushed local rational messages rather than a powerful emotional message that resonated." What does that mean?

KEN WEBER: Yeah, we contrast Ossoff back in that 2017 election, and Darryl was down in Atlanta at that point, living in Georgia, compared to Senator Ossoff and how he changed. If you recall, back in 2017 the election 2018, there are a lot of Democratic candidates who wouldn't even say whether they supported Obama, whether they would even vote for Obama. So it's each individual Democrat out there, "No, vote for me. I'm on your side." And they all lost. Remember, Obama used the term "we got shellaced." we lost something like 65 house seats because they had no brand, they had no values, they had no core values that they imparted to the electorate. Ossoff talked about he wanted to make Atlanta a world class [00:17:00] transportation system or something like that. In the second election when he ran for senator, he was a Democrat, a progressive Democrat who cared about healthcare and women's rights and LGBTQ rights and the environment, the things that Democrats en mass care about. And he won in a generally considered a red state, Georgia.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: In the book, in your second chapter, you talk about, in fact you explicitly suggest that Democrats should be wary of focus groups and consultants. I couldn't agree more. But please elaborate, either of you.

KEN WEBER: Well, yeah, I will turn that over to Daryl because he runs focus groups and he is a consultant. So he is the one who put them down.

DARYL WEBER: So I do this for brands all the time. I'm running focus groups even today. But what I see, the way Democrats use them is backwards and different from how Republicans use them.

So Democrats right now will go to focus groups and say, what do people care about? What are the issues on people's minds? What should I be talking about to reach them? And they listen to that and that's good. I guess we should know that. But that's different from [00:18:00] leading and telling them what we care about as a brand, as a party.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: So you're talking about essentially push polls.

DARYL WEBER: Yeah. Using focus groups as push polls.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: I mean, this is what, what's his name? The Republican who is on Fox News all the time does with his little focus groups.

DARYL WEBER: Frank. Yeah. Frank. Frank Lutz.

THOM HARTMANN - HOST, THOM HARTMANN PROGRAM: I find myself yelling at the TV when he does this because he's not really running a focus group, he's running a push poll.

DARYL WEBER: Well, they go to their base and say, these are the things we want to talk about. They make 'em up. Critical race theory is a great example. It didn't exist. It's not something that came from their voters, right? They said, we are gonna make this an issue, and then they message it and they put it out there and then lo and behold, you end up hearing it back in focus groups.

So I think Democrats can do better and say, these are the values that we know people care about. We actually have a great product to sell here, if you can think of the product versus the brand. If you take the Democratic branding away, people really agree with our Democratic stances on the environment, healthcare, Social Security, all these things that we just mentioned. But as soon as you layer them together or try to put them as a Democratic brand, it falls apart a little bit. And that's where I think we can say, we have this great [00:19:00] product, but we need to create, say, what are those messages that are gonna get those across to people in a very clear, emotional, powerful way, that will show these are the things that Democrats care about, it's the same things you care about?

A Dmitri Rebuttal by Messaging Expert Anat Shenker-Osorio - Deconstructed - Air Date 6-2-23

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: So, the first time that you came up in the conversation with Dimitri was around defund the Police. We can play that clip here.

DIMITRI: On crime, what are they going to say? And what they're going to say is that there is a currently sitting member of the Democratic Party in the United States Congress, who openly and expressly advocates for the end of funding to police forces. And there are quite a number of other Democrats who are in power now in administration positions and in Congress who don't agree with that extreme position of there should be no funding of the police, but when asked if they believe in Defund the Police will give a complicated answer other than, No, we should fund the police.

Now, my friend, Anat Shankar-Osorio, who's another person that we have funded in the past, will tell you that if we say the words [00:20:00] "fund the police", that's bad because it's increasing the salience of an issue. And if you run a poll real time and you ask people, Hey, nothing else is going on in the world, it's more than a year away from the next election, I'd like you to take a poll and you drop in the phrase "fund the police" out of nowhere, that will probably raise the salience of crime in that survey, and you'll read the poll and you'll say, Ah, saying the words "fund the police" or attacking the Defund the Police movement from the center left attacking the left, those things actually reduce the poll results that you get in this survey a year and a half away from election day.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: What would be your response? Is he accurately kind of capturing your take that you shouldn't say "fund the police"?

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: He's definitely capturing that part. I think that there's a lot going on in that clip, so can I kind of take it apart?

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Absolutely. Yeah.

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: Okay. So, first on the saliency point. One of the things that happens in [00:21:00] research, and again, this is one of the perils of in-channel testing and in-field testing is much, much more expensive and you can't, you know, it requires doing both things after the fact. So, you do have to test things in survey and in RCT. I do it as well, so I'm not saying I don't, it's just you have to recognize what the limitations of it are. If you have a survey and you're basically out of a clear blue sky saying to people, Hey, what do you think about defunding the police? Or, what do you think about funding the police?, you're already introducing that idea to them in order to register their approval or disapproval of that idea, where they may or may not necessarily have that top of mind. To wit, I have been part of a consortium called the Research Collaborative, where we have been conducting qualitative research, so not quant, but focus groups, two to four focus groups a week, every single week since October of 2000. So, when you add all those people together, that is a pretty [00:22:00] large number of people. And we frequently ask them and this, you know, is anyone from base voters of various races, ages, configurations, genders, et cetera, and then also swing voters, same thing, different kinds of configurations over all of these years in groups, when you ask them, What is your beef with Democrats?, I can tell you that none of them, and I really do mean none, the first idea that comes into their own head is they wanna defund the police. Their beef with Democrats, I mean, I would allow you to guess, I'm sure that you can guess, that they're slow, that they're bad on the economy, that they spend too much money that, you know, a whole litany of things. And in fact, one of the fun exercises we often engage in is we ask them, If you had to liken Democrats to an animal, what animal would you pick? We do the same thing for Republicans. And generally speaking, the animals that they give us for the Democrats is [00:23:00] a snail, a sloth, a turtle, some permutation of a thing that doesn't do much and does it slowly. So, people don't volunteer that answer about Democrats.

Now, where does this feeling and idea, and here I think that Dmitri rightly made this point, the thing that people think about Democrats doesn't come out of what Democrats say. I frequently say, That would be a wonderful world and I'd be on vacation in it, but it's not our world. The thing that people think about Democrats is made out of all sorts of impressionistic things out in the world, a combination of the media, but also what is said about Democrats. So, this saliency question, that is what that point is, is sort of, it's difficult in a survey to actually capture how do people feel about this thing, because in order to capture it, you have to introduce the thing. Does that make sense?

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Yes. I guess his argument is, the thing is out there. Like, it's a big thing. Republicans are talking [00:24:00] about it, so you don't have a choice.

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: So, yes, of course, when the thing is out there, you're going to have to have a response to it. And so I wanna say I two different things. The first is if you wanna win the debate, you have to set the terms of the debate. As long as you are responding to their terms of debate, you are already losing.

And so the trouble with a defund the police / fund the police kind of back and forth is that regardless of which one of those you are tossing out there, by definition you're making people think about the police. Right? I mean, that is most of what either of those phrases are made out of. When we think about what is going on with people's feelings around crime or "law and order" or policing, yes, [00:25:00] they are concerned about those things. Absolutely. But the reason that they're concerned about those things, the actual underlying psychological motivation and feeling is a desire for safety. What people actually want in their life is to feel safe. And they have been taught - and we see it, it's very evident, it would be silly to deny it - they have been taught to make a connection between safety and police, that exists and is real. But the hunger and the desire is not for police. It is for safety. And so there is a different way to approach this message. It is not a sort of A or B, defund or fund. It is understanding what voters actually want and coming up with a message, which I'm happy to share with you, that actually talks about that and delivers it. [00:26:00] Because, if you attempt to say, No, I wanna fund the police, then basically what you've done is you've said to them, Okay, the way to think about this safety issue, the way to think about this thing that you desire, is how much police is there gonna be? And regardless of what you support or espouse or say, they are always going to pick robocop over mall security, if you tell them the way to think about this election is, Who is going to be toughest?, because that is the Republican brand strength. You've basically said, we agree to have your debate. We're gonna, you know, play soccer. We're gonna pick the side of the field where we're staring into the sun and try to make goals. That way. Doesn't work.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Anything else that jumped out at you in the interview with Dimitri that I didn't get to that you wanted to hit?

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah. What I wanna say, and in a way this is partially a reaffirmation of some of what he said, with which I agree, and in [00:27:00] some ways perhaps a difference that we share between us, is that first of all, politics isn't solitaire and so we need to recognize that people don't just hear from us, they hear from the other side. And our message needs to act not just as a motivation, but also as a rebuttal to what the other side is saying. And I think that he would probably agree with that. I just think that the approach of doing that by presenting ourselves is essentially the B- version of our opposition, right? They say they wanna secure the borders, we say we wanna secure the borders. They say they wanna fund the police, we say we wanna fund the police. That's not actually a rejoinder. That's not actually a, Hey, you don't want Pepsi, you want Coke. It's basically saying, Hey, no, Pepsi is good and we are also Pepsi. That's very confusing for people. It's demobilizing for our base, and it doesn't draw [00:28:00] that contrast that we actually require with swing voters. And so I just wanna really hit that point hard.

The other point that I really wanna hit hard is, It's really challenging to break a signal through the noise. Getting a message out into the world, let alone getting it repeated and so it can actually be heard, is one of the toughest things that we have, even if we land on some kind of perfect message that we have, you know, focus-grouped and RCT'd and surveyed, and we are absolutely certain that this 100-word paragraph is the greatest 100 words that have ever been compiled together. If the base won't repeat that, if they won't wear the equivalent of the red MAGA hat, that means that the middle isn't gonna hear it. Because even if they see your one ad that is perfectly crafted that one time, they are also seeing a billion [00:29:00] other ads and seeing flyers and hearing other things. And so if you don't attend, To what your base actually believes and is willing to repeat, you can't persuade the middle. If your words don't spread, they don't work. That's sort of the underappreciated piece of this.

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Reid Hoffman doesn't have enough money to get those paid ads in front of enough people for it to matter. You have to get people to do the work for you, and to do the work they gotta be a little bit motivated. Is that a good way of putting it?

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah. I mean, all of the money in the world does not actually create saturation and things that people see in a TV ad are far less convincing to them than social proof.

Social proof is what I sometimes call the middle school theory of messaging. It's the fact that people believe the thing they think people like them believe. And so for example, when it was socially sanctioned and even sort of widely okay [00:30:00] to think, you know, gay men should not be able to get married. Right? This was not that long ago. Or lesbian women should not be able to get married. It's anathema. It's...

RYAN GRIM - HOST, DECONSTRUCTED: Or marijuana should be illegal.

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: Yeah, marijuana should be illegal. You know, there's all sorts of social attitudes that have changed really, really rapidlly, that we've witnessed, and part of that change is this kind of broad idea, let's take marriage equality, of pivoting away from, This is a really contentious issue and people feel conflicted about it, to essentially messaging from inevitability and saying Love is love, instead of saying, you know, this is our right and we should have this right, and this is about being equal and this is about this the kind of taking your policy out in public and instead claiming the moral high ground and having a message that a person in line at the grocery store might actually repeat to someone else. Unless you're there, you're not getting saturation. If you're not [00:31:00] getting repetition, saturation, you are not getting social proof and you cannot move the needle.

MarkerHow Democrats can win Working-Class Voters - Start Making Sense - Air Date 6-21-23

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: Well, this study done by Jacobin, YouGov, and the Center for Working Class Politics, where you're on the board, had a great method. Instead of asking people whether they preferred Biden or Trump, the poll described a pair of hypothetical candidates, each with a biography and a campaign platform, and asked respondents which one they preferred. And the respondents were not eligible voters or registered voters, they were working class swing voters and what the scientists called low propensity voters. Non-voters, we call 'em. Democrats don't need to win over all the working class Trump supporters. If they just get some swing voters to swing back and get some non-voters to vote Democratic, that would be enough to win. And if Biden wins 50% of the [00:32:00] non-college vote next year, he will almost certainly be reelected we are told. And if he wins only 45%, he will probably lose.

And there's one more relevant thing here. Progressives have won a lot since Bernie's 2016 campaign, but those victories have been concentrated in the well-educated, relatively high income, and heavily Democratic districts. Even when progressives have won primaries in working class areas, they've generally done so without increasing total turnout or winning over new working class voters, which has been one of the progressive goals going way back, especially with Bernie. So, overall, progressives have not yet made good on that one key goal to transform and expand the electorate significantly. So, this research project was one of yours. What did you focus on?

KATIE RADER: What we're trying to do in this research and [00:33:00] all of our research is approximate real scenarios, and we're also interested in congressional races, not to say presidential politics isn't important, but for exacting a lot of things we want... uh, we want to see a win. That means winning Congress and getting particularly a majority in the Senate. But we were really interested in this comparing more moderate positions and talking points to more progressive policies. This sort of idea, and it gets reinforced by, sort of, centrist members of the Democratic coalition, that to win, especially in purple states, in swing states, and working class districts, you need to run to the middle, you need moderate policies, you need to moderate, and we just, we have not found that to be exactly the case.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: So, let's talk about the survey findings about messaging. What kind of issues did you find working class voters prefer?

KATIE RADER: So, the biggest takeaway, and here, if we could have just one message, I think, to deliver [00:34:00] to Democrats, it's jobs. Running on jobs, running with populist rhetoric around jobs policies, those are really popular. So we had two different jobs policies. We looked at the sort of more moderate position, was incentivizing small businesses to create jobs or provide job training programs. And the other was this federal jobs guarantees. Now, both of those... jobs policies across everything we looked at, we had another list of economic policies, we had some social policies, it was those jobs policies that were most popular both that moderate and progressive position, were popular across the board. Really interestingly, we saw some pretty fascinating class divisions as well. So the jobs guarantee was really popular with working class respondents, not just Democratic respondents, but also Republicans and Independants, which we think is really, really important and really fascinating, and not as popular among higher class respondents, which was another thing we tried to do in [00:35:00] the survey was really pick apart and look at the class profile of respondents and capture that in different ways.

JON WEINER - HOST, START MAKING SENSE: So, a federal jobs guarantee you found to be kind of the number one issue that appealed to working class swing voters and working class low propensity voters. But don't Democrats already know the power of jobs as an issue? Don't most Democrats run on jobs?

KATIE RADER: You might think so, but if we are looking at candidates, what they said, particularly in 2022 primaries, only about 18% really talk about jobs in a concrete way. And websites, you know, those are open spaces, they can include sort of the kitchen sink on there, when it actually gets to what kind of policies they're gonna put their weight behind and push forward, you know, another thing we looked at in the article, despite the sort of, I think many ways surprising popularity of a jobs guarantee, given that, you know, it's not something we hear Democratic candidates talk about very [00:36:00] often, yet it's strikingly popular. The closest you get in Congress are things, you know, pilot programs trying to create, you know, possible job training for similar types of activities.

So, yes, Democrats talk about jobs, but also they could be talking about them much, much more given I think what we know about the history of the party and the working class backbone and the popularity of these messages. So we actually, we have another survey coming out, another report coming out soon where we broke down, we looked at things like, uh, job training, more of a moderate type program, ending bad trade deals, so thinking about manufacturing, uh, deals like NAFTA, $15 minimum wage, looking at sort of the package of policies included in the Pro Act, the right to unionize, increased protections for gig workers, and also incentivizing job creation within manufacturing.

Now, all of those, basically, this is a little preview of what's coming out, but all of those were basically majority support. You start to lose [00:37:00] some Republicans as you raise the minimum wage. We looked at 15, we looked at 17. But basically all of those have majority support, including those more progressive... uh, I picked out, what did I pick out? Uh, providing more protections for gay workers that was in the 60s, between 60 and 70% support among Democrats and Republicans. So, Democrats don't talk about it enough and they could talk about it more, and in very concrete terms that appeal to particularly working class voters.

Winning Messages Anat Shenker-Osorio Part 2 - Future Hindsight - Air Date 4-13-23

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: so I do empirical testing and research and analysis to try to figure out why it is that certain messages resonate where others falter. So I will analyze current discourse on some issue, looking at how advocacy talks about it, how the opposition media, where it is applicable popular culture, and then look for patterns.

In language to understand what are the metaphors at play? What are the frame semantics? How is it construed on the left? How is it [00:38:00] construed on the right? And from there, draw hypotheses around. Oh, it seems like this is a problematic metaphor, and if we keep talking in this way, it will lead people to conclusions that are not progressive.

And then from there we do testing. We actually create different kinds, sometimes of experiments, which I can describe, and then sometimes more traditional testing that I think listeners will be more used to. Like surveys online, dial surveys. We also do qualitative research to try to figure out what are the wording choices, orderings and images that will be of greatest impact.

And then finally, Because it turns out to not be enough to just do giant research projects and hand people talking points say this. Don't say that. I actually help create full on campaigns, so that means digital ads, memes, slogans, branding, color [00:39:00] choices in order to bring that better messaging to life. So

MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: if we start with my premise, which is that we need to find better ways of talking about voting, do we do a good enough job?

Talking about

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: voting, I feel like we're not, so first let's just state what is likely obvious, which is that when we are in an era, at least in the United States, in which we have one party that is acting as a political party, i e attempting to court voters, and then we have essentially a faction that is trying to keep people from voting some of our issue.

Is not a messaging problem. No one in any place should be standing in line for any number of hours in order to exercise their most basic and fundamental right. So I do wanna say that and the stuff that is under our control, i e, how we speak about this incredibly important act of voting, the words that we use, [00:40:00] the images, the choices that we make.

So yes, we need to be doing a better job. And the first thing that we need to recognize, and this is hard for deeply politically engaged people to believe, but what all of the research and experimentation over decades, because voting behavior is one of the most studied aspects of political communications.

What we know of voting behavior is that it's actually a matter of habituation. I like to tell people that vote is a verb. It's an action that we need people to take rather than a belief that we need people to hold. And so oftentimes, I. We think, oh, the message should be about this issue. We will talk about the climate, or we will talk about reproductive rights, or we will talk about schools and we will target that to this particular population that cares most about that issue.

And that seems like a totally valid hypothesis that you should, you know, find that issue sweet spot or we'll have [00:41:00] candidate focused messaging and that's what will drive people out. But in point of fact, what we find. At the risk of sounding just tautological, people who vote, vote and people who don't vote don't vote.

It's a little bit like flossing. So it's really more, is this your habit or isn't this? And so what that means is that the most effective way to get more people to vote more habitually is actually to talk about voting.

MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right, so, well, who is doing a good job talking about voting?

ANAT SHENKER-OSORIO: I. I think if we look at what just happened in the last two US elections, so I'm speaking about 20, 20 and 2018, what we saw is, and you know, how many times can we overuse and abuse this word during the course of the Trump years and the pandemic?

So apologies [00:42:00] but unprecedented. Unprecedented turnout. And when I say unprecedented turnout, when you look at the numbers over time, since folks have been measuring turnout in elections, so going way, way, way back, the bump up in 18 and 20 is double the size of any previous bump up. So we're talking about sort of like lightning strike kind of change in level of participation.

Why was that? Well, part of that, of course, was being in decided opposition to Trump, but we also need to note that turnout was up in 2020 among all sorts of voters. Turnout was up all around. So we look at who was doing a good job, who was truly well, and mobilizing people well, let's look at the states that we flipped, Wisconsin, Michigan, [00:43:00] Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia.

Georgia, what did they say to people in the recall, which happened in January after the November election? They said to voters, our work is not done yet. I. Our work is not done yet, is a voter agency message. It is a message that positions as the central figure in the frame, not the party, not the candidate, not the opposing party, nor the threat from the opposing party, but the voter themself.

And so what effective voter messaging does is it builds a sense of agency and it speaks to the voter about their own power. So for example, in 2020, we turned out in record numbers and we. Delivered stimulus checks and lifted however many million kids out of poverty, and in [00:44:00] 22, we're gonna do it again.

You are the vital voters that are going to deliver for this country rather than X, Y, Z party is gonna deliver for you.

MILA ATMOS - HOST, FUTURE HINDSIGHT: Hmm. That's a very powerful, like you said, it empowers the voter. It puts the onus on taking action onto the voter to come to the poll and cast a ballot.

Why Behind The What with Gretchen Barton Part 2 - How We Win - Air Date 6-21-23

GRETCHEN BARTON: So, this was an incredible study. We, we were able to spend time with Floridians over the course of their entire legislative session to understand how they were processing. Um, you know, from the far left to the far right. And everyone in between how they were processing just a flurry of aggressive extreme legislation on everything from gender affirming care to, uh, education policy to tax policy, uh, to, you know, the ability for DeSantis to run and not resign.

Uh, we learned quite a bit, and look, Florida is always gonna Florida. Um, so, and I, and I love them down there. What an [00:45:00] incredible crew of people working on that state and working with the state and, and all of that. But, you know, there's definitely some things that are culturally always true. There's. A, a skew a conservative SKU in Florida.

Mm-hmm. Right. They're very much, the, the freedom is absolutely a deeply resonant thing for them. Heavy handed government intervention is absolutely something that they're not into. Um, they deeply care for their kids, of course, as, as do we all, and, and, and they look for as much control for themselves as possible.

What was interesting was to see this state. And see the state of the people and see the actions of the legislature, which really, uh, imposed a lot of government intervention, a lot of government control over things that people really felt strongly that, you know, parents should. Have a say in local government, should have a say in, um, you know, doctors should have a say in, but, but not DeSantis.

And so, you know, we heard people talk about, you know, look, [00:46:00] DeSantis talks about being number one. We're not number one. Mm-hmm. We, um, we feel like we're losing freedom. We, they say that we're the number one state in the nation for freedom. We're not, um, people brought in a lot of images of, of being in handcuffed, being shackled.

Being trapped, right? Um, something that was kind of neat. We did it both in, in English and in Spanish, and so we were able to hear it from different voices and different, you know, media centers, how people were processing things. But ultimately we really got a lot of, um, insights into, you know, what Floridians really want and how someone like DeSantis is taking the state in a direction that serves him, um, and, and doesn't serve the people of Florida.

Um, you know, sometimes I think about how Florida has this image of like, Florida man, and it's kind of like, oh God. And I dunno if you've heard that joke of like, you know, if you, if you had to get rid of one state in the nation, In the United States, which one would it be and why would it be Florida? Um, [00:47:00] I like that joke.

Sorry. And I love, I love the people of Florida, but I we love

STEVE PIERSON - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: our Florida listeners too. Think too that, just saying, just throwing that in there. We love,

GRETCHEN BARTON: we love, absolutely. Going down there is amazing. Um, but I'll just, I'll just say this, like, I think sometimes that like idea of like, Ugh, Florida. Is crazy, kind of helps someone like DeSantis, right?

Where they just, people kind of like put it aside and say, you know, screw that state. They're crazy. They, you know, they run around with gators on their head or whatever the hell, you know, as opposed to saying, look, this is a state where someone is coming in with a authoritarian tendencies and really hurting people.

You know? Um, I can't tell you, we saw a lot of videos of people crying, talking about the fear that they had with the gun, the permitless gun carry. Um, I. That, that he had pushed through. You know, I mean, this is affecting people's lives in a real way. Um, and so, you know, we got to see, you know, how what the government is doing is really not in the step with what the people are wanting, um, and even conservative people.

And [00:48:00] it, and it really was quite illuminating. So, yeah. Fascinating.

JENIFER FERNANDEZ ANCONA - CO-HOST, HOW WE WIN: Well, two questions. The first one is, um, if you could tell a little bit, tell us a little bit more about the, what it will take, because that's totally fascinating. Yeah. In terms of looking at the kind of qualities people are looking for in a woman president, we could finally break the glass ceiling.

Something I think we all really want. So if you wouldn't mind sharing like a tiny bit about that and where that's at, that would be great. And then we always like to end our interviews with what gives you hope so. Maybe, maybe what gives you hope is related to this question. So I wanted to give them both to you at the same time.

Oh, you're the best.

GRETCHEN BARTON: You're the best. Um, yeah. Thank you so much. So yeah, what I'll take as a project, I'm, I'm really excited about. I've been studying leadership. We have been studying leadership for quite some time. We always ask in some fashion, right, what's, who's your ideal leader? What are you looking for in a leader?

All of that. And I had done a sort of a study to kind of understand what Americans were looking for. And their [00:49:00] national leader and their next president really. And in so doing, I found, um, you know, six critical qualities that Americans were looking for. And, and this is something that, you know, I. In a quite cool way.

Held, um, over a number of studies, over a number of campaigns that I looked at, all of that. But basically people are looking for a challenger. Um, someone who bends or breaks the rules, you know, kind of a coach vibe. Um, has everyone bring their, a game, a nurturer, someone whose mission is you. Uh, a little bit of a Mr.

Rogers type, you know, nurturing peacemaker, who's strong, stable, and visible. Who meets the moment, you know, history kind of plucks them out of obscurity. Bring, they bring a team together, um, and, and they rise to the occasion. Want an innovator, someone who's a visionary, and someone who's fundamentally American, which is problematic, is crazy.

But here it is. It is all about earnest optimism, American dream, embodying that. Um, the rock, by the way, shows up here as fundamentally American, just as an fyi. [00:50:00] You bet. Uh, but anyway, that was, I realized, uh, too much to my sugar. Women were milling, uh, pretty much from half of the qualities in the initial qual.

And I thought, what the hell? That's, that's insane. And, uh, we had some time and we looked over 11 different studies, um, about 800 participants hand coded all of these responses across the nation and found that yes, indeed women are significantly underrepresented. When people are asked, uh, about their, uh, ideal leader, in fact, women only come up.

23% of the time, and this is among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 23% of the time people will bring in women 65% of the time. They'll bring in images, videos of men. 12% of the time, they'll bring in images of that are non-gender specific, many of which are dogs by the way. So you see that women are just overdog, oh man, in terms of this spontaneous, it is a freaking problem.

Why does that, yeah, [00:51:00] why does that not surprise me? Right, right. Uh, there's a lot more to it, but what we found was that in these qualities, there are certain things that we realized women are. As, as candidates as politicians can immediately lean into where they're not sort of spontaneously, you know, perce perceived to be, to be, um, you know, certain things.

So for example, women are, are not perceived to be innovators. So leaning into that, women are not perceived to be fundamentally American. Leaning into that. But the larger project, I know it's, it's, it's insane. But the larger project is working with a lot of friends and producers in Hollywood. Um, and we're working with folks right now to tell a larger palette of stories about women and change the way that we talk about things.

Um, and we really believe that we've got an opportunity here. Um, the story that I say is, look, Men and love, love all men, all but men have an established runway with a cool ass [00:52:00] plane. With women, we've got a busted runway and we rely on a unicorn to fly over this busted runway and we just say, look, we'll just wait for the unicorn.

Right? But for me, and I bet for you too, you're tired of waiting for. The unicorn. I wanna do something and I think we all can do something. So the work really is expanding out our cultural imagination of what a woman is, changing perceptions about women, women in leadership, um, ultimately to, to repair that runway and give women a real shot to run for and win the presidency.

So this is my hope, um, my hope. Is that we, that we can change these stories, um, and that we can expand, uh, for, for multiple audiences across America, the perception of women, so that people bring in more images of women than they do of dogs. When they think of idea leaders, they bring in at least [00:53:00] half of the time, they bring in images of women and they start to associate and realize that we have incredible women leading.

In the country right now and across the world. I think that we leave so much talent on the table when we don't consider, um, our full population, uh, for leadership. And, and I, I sincerely hope and, and believe that we can make a difference. So, Yeah. Wow. That's what we're working on.

Why Behind The What with Gretchen Barton Part 3 - How We Win - Air Date 6-21-23

Oh, you're the best.

All of that. And I had done a sort of a study to kind of understand what Americans were looking for. And their national leader and their next president really. And in so doing, I found, um, you know, six critical qualities that Americans were looking for. And, and this is something that, you know, I. In a quite cool way.

Rogers type, you know, nurturing peacemaker, who's strong, stable, [00:55:00] and visible. Who meets the moment, you know, history kind of plucks them out of obscurity. Bring, they bring a team together, um, and, and they rise to the occasion. Want an innovator, someone who's a visionary, and someone who's fundamentally American, which is problematic, is crazy.

But here it is. It is all about earnest optimism, American dream, embodying that. Um, the rock, by the way, shows up here as fundamentally American, just as an fyi. You bet. Uh, but anyway, that was, I realized, uh, too much to my sugar. Women were milling, uh, pretty much from half of the qualities in the initial qual.

[00:56:00] 23% of the time, and this is among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 23% of the time people will bring in women 65% of the time. They'll bring in images, videos of men. 12% of the time, they'll bring in images of that are non-gender specific, many of which are dogs by the way. So you see that women are just overdog, oh man, in terms of this spontaneous, it is a freaking problem.

Why does that, yeah, why does that not surprise me? Right, right. Uh, there's a lot more to it, but what we found was that in these qualities, there are certain things that we realized women are. As, as candidates as politicians can immediately lean into where they're not sort of spontaneously, you know, perce perceived to be, to be, um, you know, certain things.

So for example, women are, are not perceived to be innovators. So leaning into that, women are not perceived to be fundamentally American. Leaning into that. But the larger project, I know it's, it's, it's insane. But the larger project is working with a lot of friends and producers [00:57:00] in Hollywood. Um, and we're working with folks right now to tell a larger palette of stories about women and change the way that we talk about things.

Um, and we really believe that we've got an opportunity here. Um, the story that I say is, look, Men and love, love all men, all but men have an established runway with a cool ass plane. With women, we've got a busted runway and we rely on a unicorn to fly over this busted runway and we just say, look, we'll just wait for the unicorn.

So this is [00:58:00] my hope, um, my hope. Is that we, that we can change these stories, um, and that we can expand, uh, for, for multiple audiences across America, the perception of women, so that people bring in more images of women than they do of dogs. When they think of idea leaders, they bring in at least half of the time, they bring in images of women and they start to associate and realize that we have incredible women leading.

Final comments launching our overdue membership drive

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips today, starting with How We Win describing interviews with 2020 voters and to the ideological political landscape. [00:59:00] Future Hindsight discussed the Big Lie and how those kinds of lies should be refuted. The Thom Hartmann Program discussed the need for better branding or conveying the big ideas the Democratic Party should stand for. Deconstructed spoke with Anat Schenker-Osorio about a variety of political messaging issues. Start Making Sense discussed the messages that help win elections. And Future Hindsight looked at how to form the habit of voting.

That's what everybody heard, but members also heard bonus clips from How We Win diving into some of the political messaging in Florida, and How We Win also looked into the messaging hurdles women face when running for president.

Now, to wrap up today, speaking of the importance of supporting independent progressive media for the sake of helping us get our message out -- not that I timed it this way on purpose -- we're kicking off our overdue membership drive here at Best of the Left. This time, I figured I wouldn't overthink how best to entice new members and just decided to offer an unprecedented [01:00:00] 20% discount on memberships for this month only. In fact, I don't think I've ever offered any discount before, probably because I'm not good at business. But that changes this month.

For context, we should probably be running membership drives about twice a year. I mean, PBS and NPR have been showing the way my whole life, so I should have figured that out earlier as well.

But I think it's now been about a year and a half since our last fundraiser, so we're in slightly worse shape than usual, or maybe more than slightly. We should have had a membership drive last summer, but maybe you recall that on the 4th of July one year past, I released episode 1500, in which I tried to convey almost every good political idea I'd ever heard of or thought. If you haven't heard it, I'd definitely recommend it. Well, that episode was weeks in preparation and I think I was in recovery for weeks afterward, so I forgot to have a membership drive around that time. And then the winter rolled around and we should have had an end-of-year membership drive. [01:01:00] But I have ADD and that's exactly when I started having other ideas of major projects I should launch and started working on them one at a time before discarding each for a new idea that I thought was better. Classic ADD.

So here we are a year later and in somewhat desperate need of an infusion of new members. We are a small team working on a very small budget. So every new member really does make a difference. And right now, You can save 20% on a membership for as long as you keep it. So that means it's not 20% off for a year and then the price goes up or anything. When you sign up now, you lock in that discount for the life of the membership. Which is also a great reason to never cancel. Just saying.

To sign up, you can go through our site at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. Or if you're already a Patreon user, you can find us there as well. Of course, there's a link in the show notes where you'll find all the details.

And don't forget about the benefits: members get ad-free versions of the show that also have bonus clips and chapter markers [01:02:00] embedded in them to make identifying and navigating the clips easier. And on top of all that, we do round table discussion bonus episodes featuring all the minds behind the show. I mean, if you like the regular episodes, you have producers Deon and Erin to thank for it, and you can really only get to know them by listening to our bonus episodes, in which we talk about substantive news stories and long form articles, all while trying to make each other laugh, mostly so we don't cry. But that's basically what it's like to be a progressive in the world today. I'm sure you can relate.

So get all of that at a discount and support the show when we really need it, all at BestOfTheLeft.com/support. Thanks in advance.

That's gonna be it for today. As always, keep the comments coming in. I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's episode or anything else you like. You can leave us a voicemail or send us a text at 202-999-3991 or simply email me to [email protected].

Thanks to [01:03:00] everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show, and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our Transcriptionist Trio, Ken, Brian and LaWendy for their volunteer work helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work on our social media outlets, activism segments, graphic designing, web mastering, and bonus show co-hosting. And thanks to those who've already supported the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships at BestOfTheLeft.com/support.

And if you want to continue the discussion, you can join our Discord community; there's a link to join in the show notes.

So coming to you from far outside the conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left podcast coming to you twice weekly, thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com.

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Jay Tomlinson published this page in Transcripts 2023-07-04 17:37:21 -0400

#1569 Winning Progressive Policies with Better Messaging (Transcript)