Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“ "We don't have time for this shit. We don't have time to be genuflecting at the altar of bipartisanship, and pretending that Republicans are a party, that they are anything other than an authoritarian faction. We do not have time." The stakes, she said, were plain enough: "the survival of the planet-water to drink and air to breathe." ”

“Shenker-Osorio reminded her colleagues about selling the brownie, not the recipe. Once again, so many of the advocates on her side had forgotten about outcomes. "When I say 'outcome,' I mean in whatever space you have it, what it sounds like in terms of lived experience, what it feels like to walk into the doctor's office, get the care you need, and not wonder about the bill that's going to arrive later. ”

“recent surveys showed was that when you asked Americans of all persuasions what values they most cared about, freedom consistently topped the list. It was the top-ranking value for strong Biden voters, tepid Biden voters, tepid Trump voters, and strong Trump voters. A whole country, agreeing on something, at last! "This really, truly is, over and again, the core value that Americans associate with this country" ”

“Don't be wonky; don't assume everyone is one of your activists; paint the beautiful tomorrow; sell the brownie, not the recipe. Don't rally people to care about some arcane word they probably don't understand. Make them think of a pain point in their life—that expensive diabetes treatment—and tell them how ... cracking down on gerrymandering and allowing mail-in voting would empower them to solve their problems.”

“Shenker-Osorio said on the Zoom, was framing democracy reforms in a language of agency over the kind of health care you have, the kinds of roads you have. Don't make the mistake too many on the left do, she said, in assuming that people will value eliminating the filibuster as an end in itself, or cracking down on gerrymandering, or creating national voting standards.”

“economic hardship and a punishing pandemic voters were focused on personal well-being and highly immediate issues, not on seemingly more abstract concerns like democratic decay. In fact, language about a "fair and effective democracy" proved to be the least effective message they tested.”

“"A positive call to action that recognizes 'we are stronger when we work together' is more effective with base adults and persuadables than focusing solely on the politics of division." What they were after was a delicate threading of a small-eyed needle: being true to the problems of the country, being true to the challenges of people of color, being empathetic to ... white working-class voters...”

“Over time, the team found that messages that sought both to defang a racist appeal and to talk about shared economic solidarity outperformed messages that centered race and minimized economics, as well as messages that centered economics and minimized race.”

“It wasn't enough to pump your own, healthier ideas into the air. You first had to prevent voters from being infected by racist appeals, and only then try to win them over to your ideas. You did that by warning people about the incoming hate, explaining why and how it was being used, who was benefiting, how it hurt them regardless of who they are.”

“And then the solution... "By joining together across racial differences, we can swear in new leaders who work for every one of us, no exceptions." Or, "By coming together, we can rewrite the rules so that the wealthiest few pay what they owe and all of us have what we need for generations to come." The details vary depending on the policy in question — health care, taxes, the minimum wage. But the arc is the same.”

“So if you're continuing with that minimum-wage message in a moment of continuing racist appeals from the right, you might say, "But today, a wealthy and powerful few try to divide us from each other" (the obstruction and the naming of names) "so that we'll look the other way while they pick our pockets and hand the spoils to their corporate cronies" (the essential why).”

“With the shared value articulated, you move to what is preventing the principle from being honored. And here, Shenker-Osorio said, it is important to name villains, and important to identify not just what the villains are doing to obstruct the fulfillment of the principle at hand but also their motivation in doing that. What is the payoff for them? ”

“Shenker-Osorio's reason for starting this way reminded me of something Loretta Ross had said. A fundamental thing many people who disagree with you share with you is the desire to feel like good people. If the message is venturing into challenging territory, it helps to ground it first in a shared belief. "You want to call people into their higher angels," Shenker-Osorio has written.”

“"It's not that people don't think our ideas are right. It's that they don't think our ideas are possible, and so why bother?" The message ordering Shenker-Osorio suggests is this: shared value, problem, solution. ”

“Starting with anger doesn't seem to make people believe things can change. It turns many people off of the political process. And when Shenker-Osorio crafted the actual messages, the angry opener also made it harder to pivot to a closing message of hope. You reinforce the cynicism so many voters were already feeling. You ratify the attitude many already had: that nothing will ever change.”

“Over the course of my conversations with Shenker-Osorio, I noticed her to be hyper-attuned not only to what is being said but also, perhaps even more so, to what conversation is being had, and, even more than that, whose conversation is being had, whose terrain you are on.”

“ "Advocates tend to describe concerns by naming processes," Shenker-Osorio wrote in one of her messaging memos. "For example, characterizing the decimation of Medicaid as 'moving to block grants for states' brings the means front and center and sends the ends into the shadows. At the same time, we tend to label our desired solutions in terms of policy, not outcomes." ”

“No one should be alone in his old age, he thought. But it is unavoidable. ”

“how many times had I heard him movingly declare health care a "human right"? But I'm not sure I could recall him painting any kind of picture of what life would look like if universal health care arrived. What awful jobs would people quit, no longer handcuffed to the employer insurance? What businesses would they then start? What stresses would lift from their marriages?”

“Voters aren't stirred to reduce harm, Shenker-Osorio said. They're motivated to create good. "As many have remarked, Martin Luther King did not get famous for saying, 'I have a complaint.' He certainly did not get famous for saying, 'I have a multi-bulleted list of policy proposals.' There has to be a dream." Another mantra: "You've got to sell people on the beautiful tomorrow." ”

“"Our opposition is not the opposition," she said. "It is cynicism. So when you say to people, 'Here's how shitty everything is. Also, it's this shitty. Also, did you know it was this shitty? Here's some additional information about how shitty it is,' most unengaged people's response is like, 'You know what? I might just hang out over here and watch 90 Day Fiance.' " ”

“And, in fact, there are diminishing returns to fear. You're poisoning the commons. Because what we see is that making people more fearful over time makes them more conservative.”

“The email's first sentence read, "Democrats are in big trouble." "It keeps getting you hits," Shenker-Osorio told me, "but what it does not do is grow the base. It does not increase the number of people who want to join your cause. You keep getting hits off of the same people.”

“It's the political activists who write DNC fundraising emails, who dominate Twitter, who make the ads, who put lives on hold to work for candidates. Those people get into what Shenker-Osorio calls a "continuous, incorrect feedback loop, where harms-and-horrors messaging" gets broadcast to the public, and they confuse the adulation they get from their fellow activists with adulation from the actual unengaged base.”

“"we...do...nonstrategic political education," Shenker-Osorio told me. "There are so many terrible true things in the world, and we un-strategically desire to tell people about all those things. But it does not actually move people or build power. We need to think through the lens of 'What do I need this person to believe, and what do I need them to do?' as opposed to 'I need to tell them this terrible truth.' " ”

“she wrote, Right now, most progressive messaging follows a familiar order: lead with problems, move to solution, end with a call to action. Americans got 99 problems and they don't want yours. The desire to sound the alarm about the egregious, systematic and growing harms to our communities is understandable. But that doesn't make it compelling. The problem with problems is that people don't want more of them.”

“"Many progressive and Democratic messages," Shenker-Osorio told me, "basically boil down to 'Boy, have I got a problem for you! Or, 'This is the Titanic; would you like to buy a ticket?' Or, 'We're the losing team. We lost recently, so you should join us.' That's progressive messaging in a nutshell, which is what I've been fighting and screaming to overcome." ”

“To sum up the Shenker-Osorio method thus far: Don't dilute the vision to reach out to a middle that isn't in the middle but is confused. Thrill your base; alienate the people who aren't going to vote for you anyway but will do you the favor, if you're setting the rhetorical agenda, of yelling your ideas all over town. Don't be afraid to call out, to woo the right people and drive away the right people.”

“right-wingers excel: making provocations they know will cause the left to engage in days of outrage parroting. "We get off our game, and we start repeating them in the guise of 'Can you believe they just said immigrants are animals?"" she said. "Can you believe they just said that you won't be able to eat a hamburger? Can you believe they just said that Jews fired space lasers?... And we thereby repeat it." ”