Daily Kos: Top Five Rules of Political Persuasion

Daily Kos: Top Five Rules of Political Persuasion:

Rule #1—Understand Your Audience

Most Americans are partisan Democrats or Republicans who really cannot be persuaded. In 2012, only about 10-20 percent could possibly have swung between Obama and Romney. The rest, 80-90 percent, were set in stone. So the target group of persuadable voters is often small.

Those persuadable voters aren’t like us. They don’t pay much attention to public policy. They are neither staunch conservatives nor avowed liberals. They don’t often read political news or watch it on TV. In general, they’re the citizens who are least interested in politics. After all, if they understood the stark differences between the parties, they would already have taken a side.

We cannot persuade them by assuming they know what we know or by using the statistics, ideological language, and insider catchphrases that progressives use when talking to each other. Persuadables don’t speak our language.

The solution is to take persuadable voters as they are, not as we wish they were. Accept that they have biases and beliefs that are different from ours, understand them, and speak their language instead of ours. (For poll-tested advice about language that works, issue-by-issue, see www.progressivemajorityaction.org.)