Democrats Need To Understand That Persuasion Is A Business—A Big One
Plus 16 thoughts on what a broader conception of persuasion would look like.
In a new essay for The Atlantic, the Pod Save America host (and my former colleague) Jon Favreau makes a straightforward case that Democrats have lost the art of human persuasion, and need to rediscover it if they intend to claw their way back to power.
Whatever happened in the past election might contain clues, but that’s a complex and contested story, still unfolding. It won’t change the elemental fact that winning the next election1 will require Democrats to persuade some as-yet unpersuaded voters that they’re worth voting for. Whatever policies Democrats think are popular, whatever affects they associate with normalness and affability, if they can’t do the delicate work of changing a mind, they can’t get anywhere.
Democrats are about to have as little power as they’ve had at any time in the past two decades for a simple reason: Most Americans weren’t convinced that they’d be better off under Democratic rule. That’s it. And there’s no shortcut back to power that avoids the difficult task of convincing people to change their minds.
I completely agree. As much as Democratic Party professionals have gotten wrong over the years, they are right about this. In an evenly divided country, pandering harder to likeminded (if frequently frustrated) ideologues can’t predictably build a margin of victory, and in any case, the higher turnout climbs in an election, the deeper into the electorate candidates must reach. Invariably, at that depth, they encounter citizens who are less and less political, less and less ideologically coherent.
Common touch (which is ultimately what Favreau describes in his piece) goes a long way toward persuading people who are torn, or laboring under bad information. Particularly in those intimate, small-scale encounters.
Where we differ (or rather, if we differ) it’s over the capaciousness of persuasion, which happens all different kinds of places, at all different kinds of scales, and in different ways.
Assertiveness, passion, and anger can all be highly persuasive affects, even if they’d be out of place in more delicate settings where empathy, compassion, and quiet confidence might work better. And the encounters where higher-wattage appeals reach voters have proliferated rapidly over the years, much faster than most professional and elected Democrats have been willing to change their approaches.
When Favreau writes “Democrats need to get back into the persuasion business” my only concern is that word “back.” They need to get into the persuasion business, yes, but it can’t be the very same persuasion business the party was in 16 years ago.
BLUE PERSUADE CUES
Think about common scenarios where persuasion happens.
Once every couple years, it happens stranger to stranger, on the front steps of homes in closely contested territory.
It happens on a rolling basis between citizens and the politicians who speak to them in ads, speeches, press conferences, town hall events, and so forth.
On a much more frequent basis it happens between familiars—siblings, spouses, friends, and coworkers—usually when one has stronger feelings about an issue than the other.
It happens near-constantly between influencer and influencee, thanks to a profusion of charismatic voices echoing across the country. Any one of these voices is now fairly likely to break the silence when a person feels under-stimulated and decides to check their phone, log on to their computer, or turn on their television.
Favreau uses an example taken from the first category to remind liberal and Democratic influencers that successful persuasion often requires open-mindedness and generosity of spirit.
Interactions with voters, frustrating as they often are, are always a good reminder of how different it feels to talk politics with a person you’re genuinely trying to persuade. You don’t speak in phrases from a candidate’s overly polished speech or carefully worded interview answers. You don’t talk like an ad that supposedly tests well but somehow sounds like every other Democratic ad you’ve ever heard. And the conversations certainly don’t sound at all like people talk and argue about politics online. Imagine if the woman we met in Las Vegas had posted her cop-killing-immigrants question on social media. Does anyone think the resulting discourse would’ve won her vote—or any votes? I can’t say I would’ve responded the same way I did in person.
I read that as a plea to anyone who will listen to rethink how they communicate in public. Particularly those inclined to vent frustration on social media, or berate well-meaning people for clout. Communicating in ways that reach large audiences is great, but not if its only persuasive force is to make strangers think you’re an asshole.
Agreed again. If we could sculpt left-of-center communication, this is one element of it I’d carve away, too. But optimizing left-of-center communication requires tacking on new forms as much as or more than it requires eliminating wasted or counterproductive ones.
The broad left needs more and better communicators, and, crucially, it needs the people who don’t understand their potential to influence conventional wisdom and public opinion to get with the times. Most persuasion doesn’t happen person to person, it is mediated. When it does happen person to person, it is most often between people who already know each other, and usually one of those people is regurgitating ideas they picked up from the zeitgeist. And the ripest targets are no longer classic swing voters who are happy to talk politics with strangers, even if their grasp of it seems bizarre to well-informed partisans.
What Democrats are missing more than anything is creative thinking about how to reach people who will never answer a telephone call from a number they don’t recognize, never answer the door for a canvasser, and never form lasting political beliefs by watching or reading professional news (because they rarely or never do).
Democrats thus need their leaders to adapt, or else they need new leaders.
PASSION OF THE ‘GEIST
With all that said, I cobbled together some thoughts on modern persuasion that I think would help Democrats broaden their conception of it beyond conveying empathy to strangers in the field or on the stump.