PART TWO
The Mechanics of Persuasion

CHAPTER 4
Targeting the Persuadables

Politics without targeting is like a fire hose without a nozzle. Yet advocates routinely point their spray of messages at the whole population. And then they are surprised when their political house burns down.

Any communications effort—from one person chatting with the neighbors to an entire presidential campaign—has limited resources. And any political decision—from the selection of a grant recipient to the election of a mayor—is made by a limited number of “deciders,” in the lingo of George W. Bush. For example, Bush received sixty-two million votes in 2004, representing just a little more than 20 percent of the U.S. population. Democratic candidates for the U.S. House received forty million votes in 2006, representing about 13 percent of Americans.

But the crucial audience is even smaller. In a general election, most voters are partisan Democrats and Republicans who can never be persuaded to support the other party’s candidate. Only a sliver of voters might vote for either party’s candidate—these are the persuadable voters. The proportion of persuadables is usually a bit larger in local elections, and larger still when you’re trying to galvanize support for an issue instead of a candidate.

A good campaign aims its stream of messages—via television, radio, direct mail, telephone, and door-to-door canvassing—at those persuadables. This is called targeting, and it is the first rule of advertising. You won’t see a skateboard ad in Modern Maturity—that’s demographic targeting. You won’t see the Tuscaloosa Dairy Queen advertising in the New Yorker—that’s geographic targeting. If you’ve worked in a political campaign, you know that registered voters are targeted, at a minimum, by party, gender, age, neighborhood, and past history of voting. In high-profile elections, voters may be micro-targeted by both parties based on their race or ethnicity, religion, profession, interests (indicated by organization memberships and magazine subscriptions), and what they told telephone solicitors during past campaigns.

Figure 4.1

Votes for President by Candidate Affiliation, 1964–2004 (percentages of total vote)

Now, just how small is the target we’re aiming at? How many of the voters are persuadable? In a presidential campaign, not many (see Figure 4.1). Even at the peak of liberal ascendancy, Barry Goldwater still received 38 percent of the 1964 vote. And when conservatism was at its height, Walter Mondale still garnered 41 percent in 1984. For the past forty years, no major-party candidate has pulled in less than 37 percent, even when independent candidates ran strong campaigns. So at a maximum, only about one-fourth of American voters will swing from one major party to the other in a presidential election.

Figure 4.2

Targeting in the 2004 Presidential Campaign

Looking back at the 2004 presidential campaign, pollster Mark Penn reported that only 21 percent of those who voted for President were persuadable—everyone else was committed to Kerry, Bush, or a minor candidate. Take a look at the numbers in Figure 4.2.

In 2004, only 26 million of 295 million Americans—fewer than one in ten—were persuadable voters. In 2006, pollster Stan Greenberg found after the midterm election that only 23 percent of actual voters had seriously considered casting a ballot for the congressional candidate who opposed the one they eventually voted for. In fact, in that year only one in fifteen Americans was a voter and persuadable.

Although the target may be somewhat larger in other situations, especially issue advocacy campaigns, savvy politicians and activists focus their resources on persuading the small fraction of Americans who can make the difference between victory and defeat. That means our job is not to persuade everyone, it is to persuade the persuadables. Your Aunt Myrna will never vote for the Democrat, so don’t waste your time!

Figure 4.3

“Care a Good Deal” Who Wins the Presidential Election, 1964–2004 (percentages)

Now that we’ve identified the target, how do we lure persuadables to our side? First, we have to understand them.

Who Are the Persuadables?

Persuadable voters aren’t like you and me. They don’t pay much attention to public policy. They are neither staunch conservatives nor avowed liberals. They don’t often read the political news. They don’t even like to watch it on TV. In general, they’re the citizens who are least interested in politics. After all, if they paid attention, they would already have taken a side.

To political activists’ ears that may sound like an insult; it is not. The persuadables are normal people. Instead of fixating on the next Democratic presidential nominee, they are thinking about what to fix for dinner tonight, chores that need to be done next weekend, and how to pay for the kid’s braces next year. Just by reading this book (or by writing it), we’re singling ourselves out as oddballs.

Almost by definition, persuadable voters don’t care a whole lot about who wins elections. Every four years, polls for the American National Election Studies ask Americans if they “care a good deal” or “don’t care very much” which candidate wins the presidency (Figure 4.3). Persuadables care about the presidential victor much less than partisans do. (An interesting side note is that everyone’s interest in the winner skyrocketed in 1992 and has remained at a higher level since.)

Figure 4.4

Awareness of Which Party Controls the U.S. House, 1980–2004 (percentages answering correctly)

Question: Do you happen to know which party had the most members in the House of Representatives in Washington before the elections (this/last) month?… Which one?

Not only do persuadables care less, they’re substantially less aware of what is going on in politics. The set of poll results displayed in Figure 4.4 might scare you. Persuadable voters usually cannot identify which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives. Their ignorance is particularly acute in election off years. For example, in 2002 only 15 percent of persuadable voters knew that Republicans were the majority Party in the House. (Note also that until recently, Democrats have been less informed than Republicans.) This is just one measure of persuadable voters’ lack of political involvement. According to other polls, they’re less likely to be registered, less likely to vote, less likely to volunteer in a campaign, and less likely to pay attention to election news on television and in newspapers. I’m sorry to say this, but it’s true: you cannot underestimate the political knowledge of persuadable voters.

The point is, what you say in an electoral or issue campaign is very important, because persuadable voters probably do not know much on their own. When voters don’t know who controls Congress, they don’t know who to blame for congressional ineptitude. When they lack basic political information, they can be led to believe that a candidate who backs some of the most mean-spirited policy in American history is actually a “compassionate” conservative, or that legislation designed to increase air pollution will give us “clear skies.”

You must be thinking, “Yeah, maybe voters just don’t know the facts.”

A Campaign Can’t Change Minds

It’s true that millions of Americans don’t know the facts. But no matter how clearly a contrary truth is proven, people rarely recognize that “facts” in their own heads are wrong. Consider the results from a Harris poll on Iraq conducted in October 2004 (Figure 4.5). Not one of the statements in this poll is the slightest bit true. As to the last statement, none of the 9/11 hijackers was Iraqi.

More than eighteen months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, following exhaustive debate and discussion on television and radio and in newspapers and magazines, and immediately before a vitally important presidential election, how could so many Americans be so wrong? “Facts” had been planted in their minds first. They were convinced of the danger of Saddam Hussein and the link between Hussein and 9/11 before the truth was acknowledged in the mainstream media. When the 2004 election rolled around and the “facts” mattered, they weren’t going to change their minds.

I’d better pause here to defend myself. It is possible for people to reject an old set of beliefs and embrace a new one, but it usually takes a catastrophic event or years of exposure to new information. A political campaign is not the place to educate voters—it’s the place to persuade them. Politics is not a battle of information; it is a battle of ideas.

Yikes! What am I saying? Do we have to give up all hope that democracy will work?

No, but we have to change the way we craft our arguments to voters. We have to realize that people hear what they want to hear. They hold fast to their beliefs, and they’re primarily looking for information that is consistent with those beliefs. When facts are contrary to their fervent beliefs, people discount or ignore the facts.

Figure 4.5

Americans’ Beliefs About Iraq, October 2004 (percentages answering “true”)

Scientists at Emory University used brain scans to study a group of partisan Democrats and Republicans during the last three months prior to the 2004 election. The subjects were given statements by President Bush, Senator Kerry, and nonpolitical people, such as actor Tom Hanks. Each statement was followed by factual information that clearly contradicted it, “generally suggesting that the candidate was dishonest or pandering.” The subjects were asked to consider the discrepancy.

Guess what? Partisans denied obvious contradictions for their own candidate that they had no difficulty detecting in the opposing candidate. Yet both Democrats and Republicans responded objectively to contradictions for the nonpolitical control targets, such as Hanks.

Throughout all these questions and answers, the subjects were observed with functional neuroimaging (fMRI) to see what parts of their brains were active. Here’s what the researchers found:

 

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” says Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory, who led the study. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”…

 

Once partisans had come to completely biased conclusions—essentially finding ways to ignore information that could not be rationally discounted—not only did circuits that mediate negative emotions like sadness and disgust turn off, but subjects got a blast of activation in circuits involved in reward—similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix, Westen explains.

 

“None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged,” says Westen. “Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.”

 

This is the way everyone’s mind works—it’s not a phenomenon limited to politics. For example, I first believed that people hear what they want to hear, and then I went looking for a study to support my view. (That doesn’t make the evidence any less true.)

Let’s put it another way. Think of an elephant (Figure 4.6). George Lakoff tells us that when we hear the word elephant it activates preconceptions in our heads—we are reminded of what an elephant looks like, how one sounds, and perhaps even how one smells. But our preconceptions depend on who we are. For example, when you heard that Wal-Mart was opening up health clinics or offering low-cost prescriptions, this is how you reacted: if you liked the Wal-Mart corporation before, you thought this new information was entirely believable (the elephant’s face); if you despised Wal-Mart before, your reaction was, “This is some kind of scam to help the company, not the employees or customers” (the elephant mooning us).

Come on, let’s admit that we all have biases! It’s not a criticism. In fact, it’s reasonable for people to formulate beliefs before they “know” all the facts. No one can know everything. But to understand how to communicate our political ideas, we have to remember that everyone has preconceptions. When new facts don’t fit voters’ existing beliefs, they are far more likely to reject the facts, not the beliefs. None of this is new; pollsters have known it for years.

Figure 4.6

Think of an Elephant

So, to accomplish our goal of persuasion, we have to find a point of agreement and work from there. We need to provide voters with a bridge from their preconception to our solution. Our goal is not to change people’s minds, it is to show them that they agree with us already.

What About the Nonvoters?

Time to explain myself again. You’ve probably been biting your tongue since the beginning of this chapter, wanting to tell me a thing or two about nonvoters. Only 20 percent of Americans elected Bush! So the solution is to get the nonvoters to vote! Isn’t it?

Darn right it is—but it’s only a solution in the long term.

Generally speaking, Americans don’t vote when they don’t see the point. Those folks lack the motivation to vote for one of two reasons: either they don’t see a real distinction between the contenders, or they can’t imagine that their effort to register and vote will make any difference in the outcome.

Okay, millions of people didn’t see the difference between Bush and Gore. Some voted for Nader or another protest candidate, and others just didn’t bother to vote. But there was no such excuse in 2004. Even such die-hard leftists as Noam Chomsky supported Kerry, get-out-the-vote efforts were well funded and well organized, turnout skyrocketed across the nation, and Bush still won. The nonvoters who weren’t motivated by the breathtakingly important Bush-Kerry election have their minds made up—they’re convinced that their vote makes no difference.

To get those nonvoters to vote, we’ll have to change their minds. And I hope I’ve made clear what a long, hard job that is. We can do it, but not in time for 2008, 2010, or 2012. No, the nonvoters won’t be flocking in to save us any time soon.

So it’s back to the persuadables. We want to show them that they agree with us already. We can only do that if we understand what the persuadables believe.

What Do Persuadables Believe?

A persuadable voter is like someone who says she prefers artistic realism but loves Kandinsky’s play of colors, Chagall’s dreamy visions, and Calder’s whimsical contraptions. Actually, she prefers modernism, but the concept hasn’t yet been presented to her in an appealing way.

Persuadable voters prefer the general principles of conservatism. But when presented with specific policies, they like universal health insurance, stricter pollution standards, elimination of tax loopholes, smaller class sizes in schools, a crackdown on predatory lending, treatment instead of incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders, and a foreign policy that stresses international collaboration. They understand progressive policies—but they can’t understand progressive principles because we haven’t explained them. So they lean right on principles and left on policy.

Let’s look at this problem from various angles.

Persuadable Voters Believe in Free Markets

Americans of all stripes believe in the conservative conception of free markets. When asked to respond to the idea that government should let “the free market work by staying out of the way of business transactions,” one slice of the electorate agreed by a margin of three to one. They were the Democrats. Persuadables were even more enamored of the free market, and Republicans favored the concept by more than five to one.

Figure 4.7

Government That Steps in to Stop Unfair Competition Versus Government That Lets the Free Market Work (percentages)

Question: For [the following] pair tell me which one is closer to your opinion: The best government is one that steps in to stop unfair competition, or, The best government is one that stays out of the way and lets the free market work.

Gee, I hope you’re not surprised. This is America.

The ideological difference begins when the question turns from free market generalities to a specific choice between progressive and conservative positions, as demonstrated in Figure 4.7. Unfortunately, although Democrats want to “stop unfair competition,” persuadables side with the Republican base, continuing their support for the so-called free market. Our Celinda Lake poll got similar results when we forced a choice between fair competition and free competition. In fact, the idea of the free market is so powerful that we have to discard the term entirely in order to win the argument.

Figure 4.8

Government That Stays Out of Economic Transactions Versus Government That Enforces the Rules, by Affiliation (percentages)

Question: For [the following] pair tell me which one is closer to your opinion: The best government is as small as possible and stays out of economic transactions, or, The best government acts to enforce the rules so that the playing field starts out level for everyone.

What’s the difference between a government that “stays out of the way and lets the free market work” (described in Figure 4.7) and a government that “stays out of economic transactions” (described in Figure 4.8)? In the minds of persuadable and Republican voters, quite a lot.

Incidentally, Lake Research tried the same test with the words “the best government acts as a referee” instead of “the best government acts to enforce the rules.” That language also worked well—it was just a bit less popular with women.

Persuadable Voters Believe in Limited Government

Democrats, Republicans, and persuadables favor both small and limited government. As with the concept of free markets, public opinion is overwhelming. Democrats favor small government by two to one and favor limited government by three to one. Persuadables like both concepts more than Democrats do; Republicans like them even more than persuadables do. There is some comfort in the fact that limited government is a more popular concept than small government, because it’s easier for progressives to endorse limited government than small government.

Figure 4.9

Cut Health Care and Energy Costs Versus Support Lower Taxes and Less Spending (percentages)

Question: Tell me whether the first statement or the second statement comes closer to your own view, even if neither is exactly right: With people financially pressed, we need representatives in Congress who will work to cut health care and energy costs, or, With people financially pressed, we need representatives in Congress who will support [lower] taxes and less government spending.

Again, as the question moves from big principles to practical matters, Democrats and Republicans sprint off in opposite directions, as displayed in Figure 4.9.

Partisans think the answer to the question of cutting costs versus cutting taxes is obvious, although the two sides are diametrically opposed. Persuadables are split almost right down the middle. But when presented with a serious problem they want solved, voters set aside their philosophical concerns over the size and scope of government, as illustrated in Figure 4.10.

Figure 4.10

Agreement with Government Involvement in Making Health Care More Affordable (percentages)

Question: [Tell me what you think about government involvement in] making health care more affordable, using a scale from 0 to 10. Ten means you think the government absolutely should be involved and 0 means you think the government should not be involved at all.

Persuadables strongly support the idea that government should get in there and solve the problem of spiraling health care costs. And by a margin of more than four to one, even card-carrying Republicans favor government involvement—because they see an advantage for themselves.

Persuadable Voters Believe in Individual Responsibility

Individual responsibility is at the very heart of the difference between progressive and conservative solutions. And voters cherish this value. Lake Research asked voters to rate, on a 1 to 10 scale, how important individual responsibility and personal responsibility are to this nation. Among Democrats alone, the average score for individual responsibility was 9.0 and the average for personal responsibility was 9.2. Obviously, progressives won’t get anywhere opposing either concept. But is there another type of responsibility that progressives can stress? Consider the findings in Figure 4.11.

Figure 4.11

Individual Responsibility Versus Mutual or Community Responsibility

Question: [Tell me what you think about government involvement in] promoting individual responsibility, community responsibility [and] mutual responsibility, using a scale from 0 to 10. Ten means you think the government absolutely should be involved and 0 means you think the government should not be involved at all.

Scores are a little lower in Figure 4.11 because this question is more practical than the last; it asks if government should be involved in promoting responsibility. Individual responsibility, the conservative value, still tops the progressive values of community or mutual responsibility, but the competition is fairly close. It is interesting that Democrats favor mutual responsibility over community responsibility while persuadables and Republicans take the opposite view. Bill Clinton spent eight years stressing the word community whenever he spoke, reaching out to persuadable voters.

Figure 4.12

Government Asks Individuals to Take Responsibility Versus Government Provides Basic Protections (percentages)

Question: For [the following] pair tell me which one is closest to your opinion. The best government is one that asks individuals to take responsibility for their own affairs, like their wages, health insurance, and retirement, or, The best government is one that provides basic protections on wages, health insurance, and retirement.

Once more, voters respond differently when the question turns to the very practical (Figure 4.12). Persuadable voters are willing to set political theory aside when offered a practical benefit.

Persuadable Voters Believe Society Should Help the Vulnerable, Not the Undeserving

It is one thing for voters to expect individual responsibility from able-bodied adults. But it’s quite another to demand that the vulnerable in society—such as children, the elderly, and the disabled—take care of themselves (Figure 4.13). These results should surprise no one. They do, however, explain some well-known message frames. Ronald Reagan’s denunciation of “welfare queens” was intended to insinuate that program beneficiaries were undeserving. Bill Clinton’s steady repetition of “work hard and play by the rules” was designed to signal that the beneficiaries were fully deserving of government’s help. Similarly, illegal in the term illegal alien implies undeserving, whereas worker in undocumented worker suggests deserving.

Figure 4.13

Agreement with Helping the Vulnerable but Not the Undeserving (percentages)

Question: Do you agree or disagree with [this statement] I don’t have a problem with the government helping the vulnerable, I have a problem with the government helping the undeserving.

Progressives can overcome voters’ concerns about undeserving beneficiaries. The easiest way is to argue that the progressive policy—like making health care more affordable—directly benefits listeners and their families or friends. The listeners have no doubt that they are worthy! When that’s not possible, we can still win by showing that program beneficiaries deserve help. That’s one reason why we have been able to gain health insurance for children but not for adults, and prescription drug coverage for senior citizens but not for the rest of the uninsured.

So, to recap: persuadable voters believe in conservative principles, but they also believe in progressive policies. Put another way, persuadables side with either progressives or conservatives depending on how the political question is framed. Now we’re getting somewhere! What does it mean to frame a political question? How do we do it?