Al Owski > Recent Status Updates

“A message that merely left your opposition cold was one thing. But a message that alienated them could throw them off their game. It could make them call you out and talk about you incessantly. And, yes, the talking they would do wouldn't be flattering to you. But they would be talking about your idea, repeating it ad nauseam, your phrases would fill the air... encircling the persuadables.”

“She was looking over various tests done by Democrats and by Republicans, including by the notorious Republican pollster Frank Luntz. Something struck her. On Luntz's tests, which tracked the attitude of base, opposition, and moderates listening to a message, the winning one was defined as that which raised base approval, raised moderate approval, and reduced opposition approval.”

“'We each have our own message, we're each beating our own drum,' and that is, by definition, the very opposite of what we know is persuasive, which is to have the greatest number of people echoing the same exact trope in order to break a signal through the noise. ”

“Even when the left had a good message to repeat, large swaths of it behaved as though disciplined chanting of that message were beneath its dignity. "What is actually effective in persuasion is to say fewer things and say them more often," she told me. “When is "Just Do It' not going to be Nike's slogan? Never. Not ever.”

“Free community college, in addition to being a policy that would combat inequality and restore some measure of social mobility, is an easy and engaging and even thrilling idea for the base to repeat.”

“This base is especially important in an age of widespread distrust in major institutions. ... When your friend, your cousin, your neighbor, or your high school acquaintance posts something on their Facebook page, it is more persuasive than when you hear the same content in an ad—because of the level of suspicion."”

“"Repetition is a really big deal," Shenker-Osorio once said in an interview with The Forge. "More familiar messages are rated more convincing. Never mind the content. Repetition creates cognitive ease, so people rate familiar ideas as more favorable, more convincing, and more positive." ”

“...torn persuadables aren't looking for an average of two positions but rather for what is normal, common sense, how the world works, then the way to persuade them of your view is by making it ubiquitous around them, inescapable. The way she advises campaigns...[is]...giving your most passionate followers something to talk about with their less persuaded aunts and brothers, co-workers and friends.”

“"Between 'immigrants contribute to our culture, we're all the better for having them here' and 'we should put babies in cages,' there is no in between," Shenker-Osorio told me. "That's an on/off switch. What we actually see from persuadables is that they toggle between competing views of the way the world works, and whatever they hear repeated most frequently becomes 'common sense' and 'what everybody thinks."" ”

“I call them [swing voters] the 'Good Point' People because they're like this: 'Good point. But, yeah, good point. But, also, good point.' And so they're capable of agreeing with things that are radioactively conservative, and they are capable of agreeing with things that are progressive." ”

“the swing voter, or the conflicted voter... They are, by definition, non-ideological, do not hold fixed ideological positions on policy issues.... What we see is that they are the most susceptible to toggling back and forth, to having their conflicts be bigger and be more frequent.”

“One way to think of this is that if I offer you a choice between a pizza and a burger, and you can't pick—you're an undecided voter!—it doesn't follow that you want a pizzaburger. Maybe you want a pizzaburger...midpoint between a pizza and a burger. More likely, you will...go with a pizza or a burger... your 'moderate' stance at the beginning as a temporary state-a situation, not an identity.” ”

“"engaging the base to persuade the middle." You didn't conquer the moderates by reaching out toward them and watering down your ideas beyond recognition. You won moderates over by so jazzing the base that they wanted to have what it was having.”

“Again and again, she saw Democrats reaching out in good faith to an opposition that was never, ever going to cave, in the hope that doing so would appeal to a still-undecided middle. Political persuasion was synonymous with reaching right in this doctrine, and even if it never worked, you would try it again next time. In recent years, among some Democrats, there had at last been an insurgency against this thinking.”

“It was a philosophy that she couldn't help but think, if embraced by powerful actors on the political left, might kind of, sort of help save everything, maybe? "ANIMATE THE BASE TO PERSUADE THE MIDDLE"
The cardinal sin of the establishment left—above all, the Democratic Party— was, in Shenker-Osorio's telling, its longing to be palatable to the middle.”

“In this phase of her career, Shenker-Osorio told me, and here, deal about what political actors shouldn't say. But Shenker-Osorio grew more interested in the question of what they should say, she began to feel, empiricism asking people was essential and, in the circles she was in, lacking... comprehension couldn't be assumed, meaning well isn't enough, stimulus doesn't equal response... ”

“He [Lakeoff] argued that political campaigns could do a better job of speaking to voters by understanding the metaphors that underpin their views—for example, the "nurturant family" model that is, for many liberals, a template for a justice-seeking state, and a "strict father" model that guides the sterner, tough-love vision of the state shared by many on the right.”

“Another thing performing taught her, she said, was the art of surprise and, relatedly, of making use of "persuasion windows." That is a term Shenker-Osorio learned from Maya Bourdeau, an expert in psychological marketing. From time to time, something happens in the culture that radically opens people's receptivity to certain ideas and messages.”

“A moment later, she added, "A lot of people who do messaging never actually watch people respond to what they say. They don't look at it. Because they don't look at it, they're able to retain their ideas or assumptions of what 'works,' because it feels like it works to them." ”

“"That has been incredibly useful to me," Shenker-Osorio said, "because the number of times that I have watched focus group participants be like, 'Who wrote this message? This is bullshit. This is stupid. Well, I wrote it, and I'm behind the mirror watching, and I'm eating M&M's." ”

“Whether you are a comic who knows you're funnier than that audience member who isn't laughing, or a message guru who knows you know more than that focus group participant who doesn't like your killer line, subjecting yourself to humbling and edification by the crowd takes discipline and a faith in the rewards.”

“When you actively don't care about that [your political future], it's the political equivalent of having f***-you money. You can't fire me. You can't bankrupt me. I don't value the things you think I value. That precisely is the source of power. The thing that they fear the most is what they don't control." ”

“"The thing that has given me the greatest sense of power is not letting people have power over me," she said. "The way that they try to exercise power over me is, 'You're never going to get anywhere in this party. You're never going to be able to run for anything again.' ”

“I perceived her as being more attracted to being done with politics than to rising higher within it. "There are some days when I do feel that way," she said. "For me, from day one, practicing nonattachment to this has been very important, because that's what allows me to do what I do. If I was attached to my seat, if I was attached to future political possibility, I would not be able to say the things that I say...”

“she was asking herself questions more commonly heard among those much older than her. "How do you know when you're done?" she mused as we spoke that day. "How do you know when you've accomplished what you can accomplish?..." ”

“She went full structural, worrying less about being appealing to everyone than about being unclear. These were her movement's demands.
It seemed she worried about not only an excess of purity but also an excess of outreach. Reach out too far across the chasm, and you fall in.”

“Sometimes there are some folks who make their decisions based on political conditions. Sometimes they make it out of ego. Some people really do pick a side based on who's nicer to them. We don't like to operate as if that is the reality because we don't think it should be the reality. But just because we don't agree with it doesn't make it less true.”

“She likened her work in politics to her father's work remodeling homes. It took many tools, and there was a time and place for each tool, and different people might use different tools.
...
"Their job is to give us the blueprint," she said of the activists.
"And my job is to try to build the damn thing." ”

“She respected the activists who pushed from outside, who reminded her of her; she respected those who, like her, had chosen to go inside. But the loudest voices in politics belonged to those who believed that the only valid approach to change was the one they just so happened to be invested in.”

“Some people are of the belief that electoralism is the only vehicle that we have to enact change... Other people [believe] that electoralism is broken beyond repair and it is a dead end when you look at the profound influence of dark money and X, Y, Z ways that American democracy is fragile, imperiled, or broken. The thing I keep coming back to is that it really isn't one or the other. It's that we need each other.”