Winning Messages: Anat Shenker-Osorio
FEBRUARY 10, 2022
“The number one value people most closely associate with America is freedom.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio is a renowned communications researcher and campaign advisor, the host of Words to Win By, and the Principal of ASO Communications. We discuss how to empower voters, the impact of repetition, and the importance of being clear on what you stand for.
Social Proof Is Real
The most telling sign that a message is reaching the masses effectively is if the public acts on it. For example, the last national election cycles in 2018 and 2020 saw a large increase in voter turnout. It is counterproductive to narrate problems with voter turnout. Instead, we should encourage non-voters to grasp the potential their vote holds. The proof of effective messaging is in the social movements that follow.
Vote Is a Verb
Voting behavior is one of the most studied aspects of political communications. Because of this, we know that voting behavior is best understood as a matter of habituation. Seeing voting as an action that we need to take rather than a belief that we need to hold will create a more effective approach to spurring voter turnout. In order to make voting a habit for more people, we have to talk about it consistently.
Say what you’re for: the Question of Negative Messaging
All candidates should repeatedly state what they stand for because repetition is an essential ingredient in making sure a message is heard. Negative messaging can often be counterproductive because when you’re negating the other side, you are actually reinforcing their argument. What’s more, by focusing on the opposition and not clearly stating your own position, you risk leaving your message unheard. It’s impossible to have a message resonate if no one hears it.
FIND OUT MORE:
Anat Shenker-Osorio is the host of the Words to Win By podcast and Principal of ASO Communications. Anat examines why certain messages falter where others deliver. She has led research for new messaging on issues ranging from freedom to join together in union to clean energy and from immigrant rights to reforming criminal justice. Anat's original approach through priming experiments, task-based testing, and online dial surveys has led to progressive electoral and policy victories across the globe.Anat delivers her findings at venues such as the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Centre for Australian Progress, Irish Migrant Centre, Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and LUSH International. Her writing and research are profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, Salon, The Guardian, and Grist among others. She is the author of Don't Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense About the Economy.
You can follow Anat on Twitter @anatosaurus
Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Anat Shenker-Osorio
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis and Sara Burningham
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Anat Shenker-Osorio Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is the platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like myself the resources once reserved for big business for a free 14-day trial and full access to Shopify's entire suite of features. Go to Shopify.Com/hopeful.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:21] We also want to shout out the Suburban Women Problem podcast. I was a guest on their show last week and it was simply terrific. Tune in for political journey through the minds of suburban women every Wednesday.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:39] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos. The really central idea of this podcast -- the big idea -- is civic engagement. Those action items that we can get done that support a vibrant, inclusive democracy. Civics as something that you do, rather than something you study in ninth grade and leave at the classroom door. And so I'm really interested in thinking about how we can be empowered to stay engaged and excited about civic life. And I'm really interested in how we can do a better job of talking about that. How can we better communicate how vital it is to participate? And one of the main action items to support democracy is, of course, voting. I'm not just talking about voting in general elections, but voting down down ticket, at school board elections, county judge and town supervisor elections, and registering to vote, helping other people to register to vote. How can we do a better job of talking about that? There's only one person. I want to help me figure out some of those answers, and that is today's guest Anat Shenker-Osorio host of Words to Win By a podcast about progressive wins. Anat, welcome to the podcast.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:02:01] Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored. Mila Atmos: [00:02:03] First, can you tell us a little bit more about what you do?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:02:06] Yeah. 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 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 choices in order to bring that better messaging to life.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:42] So 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 voting? I feel like we're not.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:03:52] 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 rights. So I do want to 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, 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 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 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: [00:06:06] Mm hmm. Yeah. All right. So well, who is doing a good job talking about voting?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:06:11] I think if we look at what just happened in the last two U.S. elections, so I'm speaking about 2020 and 2018. What we saw is an, you know, how many times can we overuse and abuse this word during the course of the Trump years and the pandemic, so - apologies, 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 know 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, 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." 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 '22 we're going to do it again." You are the vital voters that are going to deliver for this country rather than x y z party is going to deliver for you.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:38] 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. So in January, despite President Biden finally seeming to put voting rights near
the top of his agenda, legislation to protect the vote failed in the Senate. And it seems to me that a select few here in the United States are panicked about the state of our democracy. But I think most Americans are shrugging it off, even though you just said that a lot of people came out to vote. I also think that the fact that the media says it's a loss for Democrats as opposed to a loss for a democracy doesn't help us. How can we communicate that shows the urgency of our situation to help voters understand what the stakes really are?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:09:27] It's such a good question, and there are so many layers to unpack in this onion. First, let's just underscore how absolutely devastating it is that let's just be up front and boldfaced about it. Democrats win by courting our votes and Republicans win by keeping us from voting. They know it. They are aware they have absolutely nothing to offer people. They stand against us being able to provide for our families, being able to get care that we can rely upon and not get sick. When we think about the bill, they stand against us having air to breathe literally. So when you have absolutely nothing to offer voters, you have to do one of two things and Republicans are doing both. One is, oldest trick in the book, divide in order to conquer: race baiting, fear mongering, scapegoating, as they've always done. And two, you have to silence the voices of Black, indigenous, young and new Americans because you can't court voters, so you have to keep people from voting. And that is the reality. So what do we do about that? It's hard. If I had a magical, perfect answer, I promise I would give it to you. I would like that to be the case.
[00:10:44] But here's what we know. We know number one -- and again, this is through the frequent testing that we're doing all the time nearly daily at this point -- talking about democracy in and of itself, that word, isn't that effective. Democracy is an abstraction. I often like to tell people, "democracy never bought me dinner." It doesn't feel tangible to people. And also, again, some hard truth time. We've never lived in a democracy. We've never had one. We don't have one now. We don't have one now because of gerrymandering. We don't have one now because the Senate, as we know, is a fundamentally anti-democratic institution. We don't have one now because of present voter suppression. Democracy is too important a concept to talk about with unconvincing words like democracy. So instead, we want to talk about, as we renamed the bill and quite deliberately so, the freedom to vote. Freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom. When we do testing and we ask Americans, what
is the value you most closely associate with the United States? Across the board, demographics, geographics, income, race, background, generation, et cetera, the number one value people most closely associate with America is freedom. And for too long, the left has let the right own this value. And pretend that they are the sort of arbiters of, the defenders of freedom.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:12:09] But in point of fact, some of the greatest progressive victories, not just of our lifetime but of generations past. Have been framed as freedom. Right? The Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Movement, the freedom to marry. Freedom is core to how we got suffrage for women. That is a fundamental value that we can't give away. So one thing is to talk about having the freedom to decide for yourself, having the freedom to determine who will govern in your name, having the freedom of an equal say in the decisions that impact our lives. And then the second thing is that we always have to tie voting back to the outcome of voting. Voting is a process. Process messages are generally less successful than outcome messages. The freedom to vote means deciding what our schools will look like, whether our roads will be paved, and whether we'll have hospitals in our rural areas. The freedom to vote means that your kids can be cared for, that you have enough to put food on the table, and are home in time to eat it. So it's connecting that act of voting back to what gets delivered.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:28] I guess the second part to that question about how we talk about voting rights and it is what voters of color or poor voters have known for a long time, you know, that voting is hard, like the process of voting is hard. You maybe have to stand in line for hours because of voter suppression, and maybe your right to vote is questioned when you show up, your registration is thrown out because of a typo, and more and more are coming to experience this reality. How can we communicate about voter suppression in a way that does not discourage voters, that encourages voters to come out despite the difficulties?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:14:07] Yeah, this is such an incredibly important question. And if I may, when we were in the 2020 election and it was still sort of what we now know is the early days of the pandemic, we didn't know that they would be early days. We encounter this exact problem where on the one hand, we wanted to tell people about all the machinations Republicans were doing with the Post Office and DeJoy. And you remember, I'm sure, the post office boxes, those big blue things being taken away
and all of the subversion of actually how the Post Office operates to delay mail and so on. So on the one hand, we wanted to talk about this giant threat to the entire postal system, and we wanted to tell a bunch of voters who newly could vote by mail, in the midst of a pandemic when we were being told to stay away from other people, understandably so. "Hey, you should vote by mail. So basically the Post Office is totally screwed. It's really messed up. You cannot trust it. Also, you should use the Post Office to vote." So I'm very familiar with this conundrum and we are very much in this conundrum right now where we want to do both of these things that you just described. So how do we do it? We very carefully recognize that there are different kinds of negative messages. There are different kinds of ways of framing something negative, something bad, something that's being taken away from you, something that is harmful to you.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:15:42] The most common way and the unfortunate default because it does not work, is to use fear based messaging. The effective way is to spur defiance. So the difference between those two things, to illustrate in a, for example, message and we've done lots of field experiments on that, would be the difference between saying, for example, "Republicans are trying to silence our voices and they're taking away our vote and they're making it impossible for us to even have a say. So you should vote." Versus, "In 2020 we turned out in record numbers despite this pandemic and we delivered stimulus checks for our people. If anyone thinks they're going to silence our voices and sabotage our elections, they've got another thing coming. We're Americans, not Americants, and we know that anything that is worth doing is hard and that any step toward progress is always met with resistance. We have not yet even begun to fight, and we will show up and show out to elect real leaders who govern in our name and enact our interests." So yes, they are doing this thing. Yes, we are going to tell you about this thing, but it's inspiring that sort of F you very much as opposed to the like, "Oh, are you kidding this thing too?" Or what I like to call, "Boy, have I got a problem for you"-messaging, which is not effective.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:20] Mm hmm. What you said in your example is actually only a little bit about what they're doing, but primarily about what you're about to do. You're only saying, Oh, they're trying to suppress our vote or they're doing it, basically. But most of what you said is about what you're doing with your vote. So speaking of voter suppression, there is a growing threat of election subversion. And as we learned, of
course, on January 6th of 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: [00:18:13] Oh, it is very, very difficult. You're absolutely right. One thing that I want to 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 any 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. 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.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:19:43] So they are 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 kid's school. 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 quote unquote helpfully, Donald 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 going to fight about them. So they're going to say there was the F-
word, 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.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:21:07] And what do we say? We say, "There was no fraud. There was no fraud detected. We conducted extensive investigations and the instances 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 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.
Mila Atmos: [00:22:37] When we come back to our conversation with Anat, she's going to help me figure out when going negative works, and when it doesn't. It's pretty good advice for life in general and politics in particular. That's after a quick word about our sponsor, Shopify.
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Mila Atmos: [00:24:16] So last week I've binged a podcast and I want to tell you about it. I was preparing to be a guest on the Suburban Women Problem show, and I ended up listening to a bunch of their previous episodes in which they unpack what's causing the GOP suburban women problem. Now, the name makes sense! Rachel Vindman thought she'd be a card-carrying member of the GOP forever, until President Trump called her husband a traitor. Microbiologist Jasmine Clarke never dreamed of running for office, but then 2016 happened. Now she's the first Black woman ever elected to represent her suburban district. A U.S. Air Force veteran turned economist, Amanda Weinstein, used to listen to Focus on the Family and lecture her peers about abortion until she couldn't reconcile her faith with today's GOP. In the most hotly contested districts in America, suburban women are breaking up with the Republican Party and remaking American politics, transforming their own lives and getting political, for the first time. Each week, Rachel, Jasmine and Amanda find out why. Tune in every Wednesday wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, let's head back to our conversation with Anat Shenker-Osorio.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:28] So you talked about the Big Lie and fraud and a lot of the messaging that's coming from the right, which is primarily negative, right? And like you said, we just take their language and try to debunk it as opposed to having our own messaging on the left. So why is negative messaging so effective and what's the antidote?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:25:49] I'm glad you asked this question because this confuses people a lot. They're like, Well, they use fear. Well, they use negative messaging. Why are you saying it doesn't work? So to get flippant for a minute, you
wouldn't use the same message to sell a Black woman a sports car, as you would use to sell a white man a sports drink. We're selling two different products to two different audiences, so that first and foremost. To some degree, we do have the same task, right? The task is 50 percent plus one. The task is engage your base and get them to repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat in order to persuade the middle, because that's how persuasion actually works. If people in the middle don't hear your message, it is by definition not persuasive. A message no one hears did not persuade them. That feels like a pretty uncontroversial statement. So negative messaging is effective on the right because they need to rile up their base in order to persuade the middle and their base, by definition, are people who are inherently conservative for whom certain kinds of buttons, certain kind of psychological triggers, et cetera work. We need to rile up, engage and maintain our base to not just believe us, but to be our choir to repeat, repeat, repeat. So their base gets excited about "drain the swamp and build the wall and, you know, punish those illegals."
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:27:28] And I'm sorry to use the word, I'm parroting them. What are messages that the Left has reliably repeated in recent history to the point where they overtook popular culture and became, quote unquote common sense? We heard them over and over. "Love is love. Love makes a family." There was a time where everyone on Earth when we were still using Facebook with any regularity changed their avatar to the rainbow. You remember that? That is a perfect example of engage the base in order to persuade the middle. What else? "Fight for 15." That is a message that went from Seattle to the Bay Area to L.A., California, New York at a time when the mainstream, large economic groups said to those folks, I know because I do this for a living. "You're nuts. We can't have a fight for 15. President Obama has come out in favor of $12 an hour. Presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton has come out for $12. If you ask for $15, let alone make it your top line message, you're going to sound like fools. You'll be laughed out of the room. That's more than double the present federal minimum wage of $7.25. No." And so those groups understanding that the job of a good message is not to say what's popular, it's to make popular what we need said, said
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:28:48] "Fine, you don't think this works as a national message. Cool. We're not going to fight with you. We're going to go find a spot where it works." And they proved the canard that nothing succeeds like success. And now $15 is the benchmark for most places when they are considering a minimum wage hike. That's
sort of a go-to and in point of fact, because of where populations are centered in this country, Americans mostly live in places where $15 an hour is the minimum wage because between California and New York, that's where most people live. So negative messaging does have a role, but you have to give people something to vote for because otherwise they're just going to sit at home, right? There's three candidates running in any race. There's your person, their person, and stay at home. And stay at home has the home team advantage because people are already at home. They don't need to do anything to get there. There has to be something to vote for. There has to be a sense that taking this action could yield some sort of result, otherwise why bother? And insofar as we are using negative messaging because it is a mix, there is a role. We want that negative messaging again, not to inspire fear, but rather defiance.
Mila Atmos: [00:30:04] Yeah. Well, so I have a question that's from the other side, which is that so many popular things seem to go by the wayside when people have already been elected. How can those popular issues become more generative, or how can we hold our elected officials more accountable? Like what can we say to them so they can hear us?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:30:24] There is nothing -- and I am the messaging lady saying this against my own interests, so this how strongly I believe it -- there's nothing that we can say that is as powerful as things that we do. So let's take a concrete for instance. Many people forget that the wave of teachers' strikes that overtook this nation in 2018 and led to the greatest organized labor movement that we have had in this country in I don't know how many years since, like the era of creating OSHA and creating Social Security and creating labor protections. We had those educators' strikes because it wasn't just teachers, it was also paraprofessionals. Those educators' strikes. Where did that begin? It began in West Virginia. Yeah, that West Virginia. The Joe Manchin, West Virginia, that that's the state. I mean, not another one. That is where that movement began. It then went next to where? Oklahoma. And then after that, Arizona. And so what was happening there? What was happening there was that a group, a powerful force of educators, were not just saying enough is enough. They were demonstrating it. Right. The same principle holds with the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd and the re-emergence of the Black Lives Matter protests. And you know, it gives me incredible sadness to talk about it because it was such an incredible moment. And when we look at the present backlash against it right now,
sitting where we are in 2022, it's heartbreaking. But when you look at public opinion around that time about BLM, about policing, about protest, about racial justice, we saw this sudden and measurably large surge in support for progressive ideas in support of racial justice.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:32:19] You know, Ibram Kendi's book, best seller. People were going to book groups. America was quote unquote in this racial reckoning. I'm talking about it like this was one hundred years ago, right? It sounds like I'm talking about, you know, Little House on the Prairie or something. That was because social proof is real. When you turn on the local news and you see people of different ages, different races, different backgrounds in the street saying, "this isn't right, this isn't OK, this is what I believe. This is what I stand for. We need to make this a place where everyone can make it home safe. We need to make this a place where everyone can breathe." Then you, middle-American, for example, are like, "huh, I guess this is what people like me think. I guess this is what is right, and I guess this is what is true." And that's what the right wing understands so completely well. That is why they keep their base engaged and enraged so that they are going to the school board meeting, so that they are wearing the red hats, so that they are yelling and screaming. And so how do we hold our lawmakers to account? How do we make them pass our priorities? Well, first and foremost, and this is infuriating. I can go on all day about the Democrats in our caucus who not only betray their party but betray our entire nation and our voters by being complicit in taking away people's freedom to vote and being complicit in allowing the GOP to sabotage our elections, basically to decide for themselves which voters they will heed and which they will silence.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:34:01] There isn't a theory of change. If there were, I'd be so down with it. We're in "We win by talking shit about Democrats." If that were true, I'd be a happy lady. It's not. And so we need to keep attention and ire where it rightly belongs on this authoritarian faction, which is in point of fact, how they're behaving. So what we should be doing is not because I think it will work, not because I think it will flip them. It's all about media. It's all about narrative. We should be asking Republicans. We should be showing up in front of their offices. We should be calling them. We should be mailing them. We should be creating media moments, because the media refuses to do it, in which we are saying to Republican lawmakers, "why is it that you are taking away our freedoms? Why is it that you are trampling our rights? Why is it that you believe you get
to pick and choose your voters? Because hey buddy, in America, we believe that voters pick our leaders. Leaders do not pick their voters, and we also believe that for democracy to work for all of us, it must include us all." We need to be doing those targeted things in order to demonstrate a larger narrative that actually this is what Americans want. This is what Americans believe. This is what Americans desire. This is where we stand.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:24] Mm hmm. Well, I guess we better go show up at those congressional offices standing in the hallways. Those have been very effective, for example, when they stood up for health care and wanted to make sure that they voted to keep health care accessible. The Affordable Care Act. So towards the end of the interview, always ask these two questions. So I'm going to ask you those two questions, and then I'm going to ask you a question about the questions, a little bit meta. So the first question is what are two things everyday people can do to basically be on point with their messaging.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:35:59] Yeah. Personally, at my shop, which is findable at ASOCommunications.com, every project that we work on, everything that we do with rare exceptions, we make public. We believe, again that if your words don't spread, they don't work. And so there are messaging guides there. There's an overall messaging guide that we created. We frequently partner with an organization called We Make the Future. You can also find incredible resources there. wemakethefuture.us. So you can look at those messaging guides. We have them on everything from the freedom to learn, which is how we make a full throated case for equitable public education and confront these attacks on critical race theory. We have messaging guides on how to talk about revenue, how to talk about everything under the sun. We also have ads, which you are welcome to take and post. We have memes. We have gifts. We have social media toolkits. So grab it, take it, use it. On the messaging side, I would also at the risk of sounding kind of self-serving, that's kind of why I made my podcast, so that's what Words to Win By is supposed to function as. It's supposed to be functioning as a set of lessons on campaigns that we've won around the world and how we did it. There's also resources on the website for the podcast messaging guides, ads that we ran. So you can also get stuff there.
Mila Atmos: [00:37:24] Excellent. And so the other question I always ask is looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:37:31] A few things. Honduras, where my husband is from, you know, giant set of in-law family, their place that I care a whole lot about and lived. They just elected their first woman president ever, and she ran on an unabashedly democratic socialist legalize abortion in a country where abortion is a criminal offense, pro-social, progressive agenda. Incredible. Chile. Same thing. Victories against right- wing authoritarianism. Never complete. Never enough. Looking at Brazil, for example, and their hopes and their aims to defeat their own Trumpian figure, Bolsonaro. Their election is in October. I see forces in the world and I do believe that these are global forces. The rise of Trump, the rise of Brexit, the rise of Boris Johnson, Orban, Duterte, Bolsonaro, the right-wing in Australia, which has had a firm hold through again the same playbook as everywhere, right? Divide in order to conquer, oldest trick in the book. I do see the left globally -- again, these are never complete, never enough, never fast enough, all the caveats -- but getting better, getting smarter at confronting these tactics and being able to speak full throatedly to our values, to what we believe. So that gives me hope. And the other thing honestly, that gives me hope is that we had record turnout in '18 and '20. And so what we need to do in '22 is incredibly hard. Don't mistake me. The incumbent party usually takes a shellacking in the midterms. That is the historical pattern, and we're kidding ourselves if we're not real about that. But in contrast to previous midterms, this is the first time that we're going into a midterm having had this giant turnout. And what that means is that our task now is to re-turn out. It's to get those folks who've done it once or who've done it twice to do it again, which is hard, but not as hard as turning never before voters into first timers.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:44] Mm hmm. That's incredibly difficult. There are millions of people who have never voted and probably never will. So the meta question I wanted to ask you is that most people answer the questions with young people, you know. Speaking about re-turning people out this year in '22. How do we get young people, specifically, to feel engaged enough to turn out this year?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:40:07] So one really critical thing is that I said it before, social proof is real. And so what do I mean by that in this situation? I mean that understandably, we have a tendency to say things like, Oh, young people really don't
turn out. X y z identity group are low propensity. This kind of category doesn't really vote in midterm elections, so we narrate our own problems. My frequent colleague from Frameshift, Maya Bordeau, likes to remind people that the number one rule or a top rule in marketing is: you don't tell people what keeps you up at night. You talk about your solutions to what keeps them up at night. So what keeps people in my position up at night? Young people aren't going to turn out. That keeps me up at night. That isn't a thing you say to young people. That is not your message because social proof is real. And so if you say, "oh, young people are non-habitual voters. Young people really don't vote. They vote in lower numbers." That actually measurably decreases participation because what you've said to them is, "Oh, well, I'm a young person and that's what a person like me does. Ok." It it grants social permission to not.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:41:21] So what do you say instead? You say, "young people are turning out in record numbers" because that is actually true because when we increase turnout, we increase turnout across the board. That is a fact. There's a factual statement. I never make non factual statements. I want to be very, very clear. "Young people are turning out in record numbers and you are the ones, you are the vital voters," which is a term I like to call the surge voters from '18 and '20. "You are the vital voters that beat back an authoritarian faction that was trying to divide us. And in '22, you're going to do it again. You're going to take to the polls. You're going to take to the streets and you're going to take to the halls of Congress to stand up with and for each other to make this a place where liberty and justice is for all." So you say to them, you did this thing and you message from inevitability. You don't say, if you do this, it'll be a lot better. If you participate in this way, we could have this. You fake it till you make it. You say, here's what you are going to do.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:29] Perfect. If there is maybe one takeaway you want us to have. What would it be?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:42:36] Say what you're for. Say what you're for. Say what you're for. What you fight, you feed.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:40] Great. Thank you very much for joining us. It was really a pleasure. Anat Shenker-Osorio is the host of Words to Win By. Thank you.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:42:49] Thank you.
Mila Atmos: [00:42:56] Next time on Future Hindsight, I'm going to be joined by Neil Roberts. He's working on a book entitled How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism, and he's going to help us think about what freedom really means in America as we struggle with the past and present, founded and built for white supremacy.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:14] This episode was produced by Zack Travis and Sara Burningham. Until next time, stay engaged.
The Democracy Group: [00:43:29] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.