The American Message
Foundation
Three Principles of Effective Messaging
The words and phrases, metaphors, and examples we use activate unconscious networks of thoughts and memories, images, and emotions. Using one word versus another, or placing two clauses in different orders, can generate entirely different responses.
For example, never use the term, “entitlement programs.” Entitlement unconsciously activates associations to unearned benefits to which people feel “entitled.” FDR deliberately built Social Security taxes into people’s paychecks - as a separate deduction - so no politician could ever take it away. Those taxes provide insurance for our dignity in old age or disability. Feeling entitled to benefits vs. purchasing insurance for those benefits are on opposite ends of the spectrum of responsibility, a term appropriated by the right but that appeals to people across party lines.
We should similarly wipe “Medicaid expansion” from our lexicon. Expansion activates the Reagan “big government” network. What we're really trying to is extend Medicaid to all working Americans, a message that also emphasizes that these are largely hard-working people and thus deactivates associations to “welfare recipients” and their racial overtones.
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1
Know what neural networks you are activating
2
Speak to voters' emotions and values
Emotions evolved to alert us to attend to what is important and to guide us toward or away from what is good or bad for ourselves, our families, and our communities. If a word, phrase, or message is emotionally inert, it is politically inert.
Consider “bodily autonomy.” Most voters could not use it in a sentence. It may mean something to us, but it does not mean the same thing to ordinary Americans.
What made people so angry about Dobbs? It took away our freedom to decide whether and when to have a child. That is the “language of the kitchen table” on abortion, replete with the appropriate feeling. So is this juxtaposition that can be used in debates, ads, or conversations with constituents: "I believe every woman has the right to choose the father of her child. My opponent believes every rapist has the right to choose the mother of his."
Emotions are also central components of values. In the 1980s, the right labeled people with fundamentalist Christian values that were far outside the mainstream as "values voters," as if the rest of us were morally inferior. Reagan and the right successfully appropriated a wide array of core American values - freedom, national security, patriotism, family, and fiscal responsibility - and they even captured the American flag. Now is the time to take those values back.
We are all “values voters." One of the major differences between the far right and the rest of us is, in fact, our values. The problem with our messaging is that we too often start with an “issue” and never get to the underlying values. Effective messages virtually always start with values and then move to issues.
For example, leaders and advocates often call for a $15 minimum wage. But why $15? Why not $10? or $12? or $20? Should teenagers get that for flipping burgers at MacDonald's? Policies only resonate when we provide the values scaffolding that makes them seem obvious.
For example, “No one should have to work two or three jobs to put food on the table for their family. That’s why I support a $15 minimum wage. Think about it: $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. That comes to $30,000. Try raising a family, or even supporting yourself, on that.”
3
Tell coherent, memorable stories
Humans evolved over the last 300,000 years, but literacy only emerged in the last 5,000. How did our ancestors transmit knowledge and values throughout most of our history?
Through stories. The holy books of the great monotheistic religions were all written in parables for a reason: Our brains evolved to “expect” a kind of story structure that renders facts and values memorable.
For example, in a project for a coalition of organizations working toward campaign finance reform about 15 years ago, the first thing we learned was to stop calling it "campaign finance reform," which did not activate the right neural networks (Principal 1). The term is abstract and does not make most people think of their own lives or values, leading large samples of voters to to find it uncompelling. The term that captured the issue most accurately - and still does today, because it is inclusive of many election-related problems - directly references a core value shared not only by humans but by other primate species (Principle 2) and moved voters the most: fair elections.
Here is an example of a brief, updated narrative taken from that research:
"It's time we return to government of, by, and for the people, not government of, bought, and for big corporations and billionaires. CEOs shouldn't have the cell phone numbers of their senators unless the rest of us do, because that gives them access we don't have. We used to have meaningful limits that prevented rich people or corporations from buying elected officials, but not anymore. Why doesn't every American have healthcare? Ask the insurance lobby. Why are medications so expensive that most of us have to decide whether to buy what our doctors ordered, when people in every other country pay a fraction of the cost for the same drugs - which Americans invented, with the help of taxpayer dollars? Ask Big Pharma. And why has the American Lung Association warned that half of our children have lung damage from pollution, and scientists have discovered that all our kids have microplastics in the cells of their bodies, including their brains, that aren't going away? Ask Big Oil, because plastic is a petroleum product. We're the world's oldest democracy. If every other advanced democracy can figure out how to keep money out of politics, we certainly can. It's time to end this form of legalized bribery, so our government pays attention to our problems again, not just the problems and profits of big donors."
Our goal in that study was to identify messages that could take an abstract issue - about money in politics - and turn it into something people feel and to which they could directly relate. We knew people do not respond with either concern or enthusiasm to issues defined by "process" or procedures unless directly connected to outcomes. In the narrative above, we learned how to do it, alternating sentences in the middle of the message directly related to outcomes that matter to people with sentences about process. We used a liturgical style familiar to msot Americans, who attend or attended religious services as a child, with the "call and response" structure between clergy and congregation ("What do you think is poisoning your kids?" "Ask Big Oil"). That structure creates an unconsciously felt back-and-forth between a trusted authority and orindary people and betwen the sacred and the profane.
As we learned in both 2022 and 2024, turning even a concept at the core of who we are as Americans - democracy - into an experience-near, emotionally resonant experience that gives you a chill or puts a tear in your eye, especially to imagine losing it, isn't easy.
By early 2016, we will crack that code.