Identify as a Voter: Anat Shenker-Osorio
February 1st, 2024
“The number one way to increase voting behavior is to talk about voting.”
Anat Shenker-Osorio is the host of the Words to Win By podcast and the Principal of ASO Communications. We discuss the winning messages for 2024 and the importance for pro-democracy voters to turn out on Election Day.
2024 is yet another do-or-die election for American democracy, and thus the first and most important message to Americans is to vote. We need to marshal a sense of defiance to participate because if we don’t decide for ourselves, someone else will decide for us. This election is a contest between freedom and fascism. What’s at stake is whether the US is going to continue to be a place where citizens have the freedom to cast their votes and have them counted.
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Anat Shenker-Osorio
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producer: Zack Travis
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Anat Shenker-Osorio Transcript, 2024
Mila Atmos: [00:00:00] Thanks to Shopify for supporting Future Hindsight. Shopify is a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere, giving entrepreneurs like us the resources once reserved for big business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com/hopeful. All lowercase.
Mila Atmos: [00:00:24] 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. It's 2024 and the future of America is in your hands. We're here to bring you an independent perspective about the election this year, and help you unlock your power to change the status quo.
We're having a conversation today, just after the Iowa caucus, where the MAGA leader has just won. And although 2020 seems like a long four years ago, it feels like we are in for a rematch of exactly that same race. Despite solid rejections of the MAGA agenda, for example, in codifying reproductive freedom after the Dobbs decision, in state after state where it was on the ballot, whether that's Kansas or Ohio, the disgraced former president continues to have a firm grip on his MAGA Republican base. So the central question that I have today is, how can pro-democracy voters and candidates talk about the stakes this year? And furthermore, how can we process the onslaught of information this election cycle?
To help us address these questions, we're joined by Anat Shenker-Osorio. Anat is the host of the Words to Win By podcast and principal of ASO Communications, where she examines why certain messages falter where others deliver. She was on the show back in 2022, and emphasized then that all political candidates should talk about what they're for. Anat, welcome back and thank you for joining us.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:02:07] Thank you so much for having me back. Happy New Year ish.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:11] Ish. Yes. So we're so excited to have you back and talk about election speak, mobilizing voters to actually turn out and vote. When we spoke last in 2022, you were emphatic that candidates need to talk about what they're for, instead of
rebutting the opposition and repeating those frames. So let's start with how 2024 is different from 2022. You've just completed a survey on economic messaging that moves and mobilizes. What are the winning messages this year?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:02:42] Ooh, trying to boil that down to a single thing. So we're in a complex spot. We're in the incumbency, regardless of reality and objective measures that say the economy is going pretty darn well. And the Biden administration has a lot to crow about, and they've been trying to crow about it. What we find is that it's not a winning strategy, either in romantic relationships or in voting relationships, to try to negate people's feelings. People feel what they feel, and you have to have some measure of acceptance of that and a way to move them forward. So people are feeling malaise. They are feeling despondent to some degree. They are feeling they have more month than check because even with inflation somewhat under control, you know, there's still things like housing prices which are out of control. There is extraordinary amounts of inequality and all of the realities that neoliberalism over decades has brought us. And so what we really find on the economic front, and I'll start there, but that's definitely not the entire story, is that when we have arguments about who is better for the economy, the brand advantage goes to Republicans. Again, it's not really about what's true in the world. It's about people's perceptions. When, in contrast, we ask voters who is better for your economic well-being? That prize gets handed to Democrats. That's true in public poll after public poll after public poll. It's true within our own research. The same goes if you ask voters who is good for, quote, growing the economy. They credit Republicans. If you ask them, who is better at protecting cherished programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc., Democrats. And so what does that mean? It means that we need to stop agreeing to have the opposition's conversation. They want to have a conversation about who is better, quote, for the economy, which, after all, isn't real. It's just an abstraction. You can't like go hang out with it. It's not going to take you out to dinner. You can try. But rather talk about who will ensure your family can have a better life. That better life approach, the personalizing, allows us not just to make an economic argument, but it allows us to talk about what it means to have the life that you want. And for us voters, what we see broadly is that what they want is to be able to decide whether and when they grow their families. They want to be able to send their kids off to school and not worry that they'll get shot in the process, or, less existentially, that they'll actually be able to read accurate books about American history that are true and inclusive. They want to know that when they go to
the doctor, they're not going to get sick worrying about the bill. All of those things that are part of having a better life are a brand advantage to Democrats. People associate Democrats with being better at that; they are the things people care about; so we need to move away from "hey friends, we grew the economy. Hey friends, we're gonna grow the economy some more." That's an argument that is less meaningful to people and it is less desirable terrain for us. So that's the economic piece.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:11] Thank you. That was very concise. Well done. So we just had a conversation actually, about the demise of unions in western Pennsylvania and how actually for unions, the better life argument has really failed, right? Because their lives are not better with Democratic control or any control. Actually, their life has become worse over many decades, of course. So that didn't happen overnight. But they are the quintessential MAGA voter in a way, because they want to return to a time when things were indeed better for them. But as we know now, the Iowa caucus results came out. And of course, I was disappointed, but not surprised. And, you know, for you to talk about better life messaging, I kind of felt like actually progressive messaging was really good in 2018 and 2020. Even in 2022, Democrats actually outperformed expectations, right? Like the fact that Biden won, that was huge. The fact that Democrats didn't give up the House in the way that it was projected in 2022 was very strong. And having said all that, I also was thinking that Republicans in all this time would reform itself and become more broadly appealing because it really didn't do well in '18 and '20 and in '22. And especially after January 6th, I really thought a new kind of leader would emerge. But alas, there is not. So thinking on these last three cycles, what do you think would have been even better pro-democracy and pro-freedom messaging? Because after Iowa it feels like people are not buying it or not getting it.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:07:53] Yeah. Wow, so many conversational threads. I would love to pick up the union one, but I'll let it go... to answer your question. So I think that what we saw in 2022, I'll just start there, was that we actually had two elections. We had what my colleague Mike Podhorzer has titled a "red wave, blue undertow." So in the 15 states, those states include Pennsylvania. They include Wisconsin. They include Michigan. But they also include other states that are not traditionally deemed to be presidential battlegrounds, but are places where neither Trump nor Biden won by more than 15 points. So they're purple-y. So the battlegrounds plus. In those 15 states, Democrats won. And turnout, despite it being a midterms, despite Democrats being in
the incumbency, where generally we would have the expectation that the voters would be sort of dissuaded and not that into it. That's what happens when you're the party in power. Your voter's not that energized, the out of power party is energized. That is the reason behind a red wave. In the 15 states where there was a marquee MAGA Republican running, they were running for governor, or they were running for Senate somewhere close to the top of the ticket. And the movement groups, and sometimes the candidates, made the election a contest of freedom versus fascism; made the election a contest about either "they're going to take away your freedoms, or you voter," -- not the Democrats going to come to save you. That doesn't work. "You, the voter," as the protagonist in the ad, in the speech, in the communication, "can decide to protect them." In those states, turnout was unprecedented. It matched 2018 levels, which was historic, historic, historic, and Democrats won. In the 35 states where Democrats ran much more traditional midterms campaigns, talked about the economy, tried to rebuff the crime arguments. I'm thinking, of course, of places like New York, iconically. California, to a certain extent, where I live, turnout was down as would have been predicted, and there was indeed a red wave. That is why we did not hang on to the House, as you know. So there were two elections that happened. And that's a very important thing to look at, because when you look under the hood, you challenge the conventional wisdom that, oh, turnout was down. Turnout was only down if you look in the aggregate. The places where Democrats won, turnout was up. The places where they lost, turnout was down. So you cannot look in the aggregate and say, oh, Democrats don't win by turnout. That's not true. You have to look where we won. So why am I making this point? I'm making this point in answer to your question. Because when voters understand that an election in modern day United States is a contest between freedom and fascism, they turn out and they turn out to vote Democratically when they do not understand that when it is muddled or unclear, it becomes about who loves the economy best, or it becomes about who is going to be harsher at cracking down on the border. That is where we dissuade the Democratic base from turning out. And we confuse the conflicted between choosing between A and A minus, right, between RoboCop and mall security. And that is really the essential thing that we need to understand about 2024. It's about marshaling in people the feeling of defiance. If you don't decide, they'll decide for you. The power, as you said so beautifully in the intro, is indeed in your hands. Again, not in Democrats' hands, not in picking a savior, but rather in recognizing that we are the ones who make our own future.
Mila Atmos: [00:11:55] Yeah, yeah. Thank you. So, speaking of us making our own future and messaging around getting people to be defiant to show up, I feel like what Republicans did really well is getting people defiant about wokeness and anti- wokeness, and that seems to be well enough understood that it's become a lightning rod, of course, to rally around. And I feel like in this moment, woke is a pejorative, really, of a person who cares about justice, about LGBTQ rights, wants to be anti-racist, but actually we should talk about these issues in a way that helps us make progress as a society. So how do you think about engaging in dialogue on issues that are deemed woke on the campaign trail?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:12:43] Yeah. Let me start by first giving credit where due, to MAGA. When they look at an issue and they first test it and people are like, don't care, don't know what that is. The classic case would be critical race theory. When we started off, doing focus groups ourselves to understand the dynamics of this, and we asked people critical race theory, they were as likely to believe that that phrase meant being critical of talking too much about race as what it actually is. Which, of course, is an academic theory about how the racialized legacy of our country impacts everything, especially legal cases and precedent and sort of how things operate in our systems today. It wasn't like death panels. It didn't convey to the average voter, I don't know what that is, but I know I'm not supposed to like it. So when they first saw people don't give a shit about this -- the same with political correctness, which is what wokeness used to be called -- you know, they just keep having the exact same strategy, and their exact same strategy is that they don't do polling to take the temperature, like Democrats all too often do. They do polling to figure out how could we change the temperature, how can we pick the issue that repeating it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and then some more again, we can make people care about this thing. On the Democratic side, they say, "oh, people only care about the economy. So we'll talk about the economy. People don't care about January 6th. So maybe we shouldn't do a January 6th hearing. People are sick of us talking about the Trump trial, so maybe we shouldn't do that." We need to understand that the job of the message is to make the conversation what we need it to be. So how do we handle this woke thing? Well, first of all, let us reassure ourselves, having now done 2 to 4 focus groups a week, you know, since 2020, so roughly 700,000 years is how it feels in pandemic time. Any and every time we ask folks and whether it is a swing voter group or a turnout voter group, "hey, what's the thing that really bugs you most about Democrats." If you ask
them that unprompted, none of the time do they say excessive wokeness. None of the time do they say they care too much about trans kids. None of the time do they say they're just handing out stuff to immigrants. To be clear, you can get them there. You can say, but does this upset you? But does that upset you? Unprompted, they never offer that. They always offer: "They don't fight. They don't get done what they say that they're for. They're always capitulating. They're always caving." That is people's chief beef with Democrats. And by the way, there is a strong correlation between the discourse around Biden being too old, which we can't change and we can't alter, and a perception underneath that, that that's actually a signaling mechanism for saying too weak, not resolute enough, which we could change. So here we have Republicans being like, you know what? We're going to make this an issue. And we have Democrats being like, "oh, people don't care about this, so we won't talk about it." How do we handle woke-ness? Well, first of all, we recognize that politics isn't solitaire. And it is not our choice to not talk about things, because when we do, it's like handing somebody some headphones, and one side gets this unrelenting vitriolic fear, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, constant sound, and the other is just silent. You can't counter hatred and fear with silence because you're just letting that messaging penetrate more deeply into the voter's consciousness. So what do we say? What we say we know through a series of endless experiments. At this point, we have been testing permutations of this about race, about gender, about gender identity, even about abortion, which Democrats used to deem, you know, they called it the a-word and were like, you can't campaign on that. It's too polarizing. Again, having preemptively decided that we need to just stick to things that everyone is going to be okay with, complete opposite of what actually works. So what we say is "no matter what we look like or where we live, most of us want our kids to go to a good school and feel excited to be there and come home, have the biggest worry on their minds be, where did I put my backpack? But today, MAGA Republicans want to turn us against each other while they take away the resources that our families need. They hope that if they can scare us about newcomers or if they can make us concerned about crime, or they can make us fearful about transgender folks, then we'll look the other way while they pick our pockets and take the wealth our work creates. We know better. We know that when we stand with and for each other, we can fight for the things that all of our families need and make this a place where every single one of our kids is comfortable and free to be who all that they dream to be." It's that kind of a message where you essentially reveal the magic trick that they're just engaged in yet another look over their right in order to
obfuscate what they're actually doing. What we've seen over and over again is that when you narrate the dog whistle, when you reveal the anti-trans siren song, as my colleague Jay Marsalis names it, people understand. They understand that there is a nefarious intent behind that make believe attack, which is actually just to control us. And I can't emphasize enough how much it is popping to describe their agenda both as taking away our freedoms and as wanting to control us and decide our futures. For us, that is very resonant to the voters. They understand it. It's short, they find it credible and they don't like it.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:08] Um hum. Well, in the words of Theda Skocpol, Americans are not fools. They get it. I mean, I think they understand the divide and conquer tactic if you unpack it, to your point.
Mila Atmos: [00:19:21] We are going to take a quick break to thank our sponsor, Shopify, and we'll continue with Anat in just a moment.
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And now let's return to my conversation with Anat Shenker-Osorio.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:27] So you made a quick allusion to January 6th. And personally, I feel like we should be talking about that a lot in the context of not re-electing the instigator to the White House. And also to your point, it feels like old hat. It's almost irrelevant. And in truth, so many things are happening right now in the world. It's overwhelming. But if we want to remind the voter about how bad that was and what a re-election would mean for us and for democracy writ large, what would your message be?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:21:59] Yeah. Super important. What we saw, just to reassure listeners, is that over the course of the January 6th hearings themselves, we were able to meaningfully move public opinion and not just in a generic national sample kind of way, but specifically among the target voters that we need, those swing and those turnout voters in battleground states. Basically, that's the name of the game. That's who we're looking at. That's who we're seeing when we say something is working, needs to be working with one or both of those groups. Otherwise it's kind of just irrelevant. We were able to move folks' opinions, not just that the January 6th hearings were important, were vital, were critical, but that actually they were about getting out the truth, ensuring justice, and on the incredibly important dependent variable measure of this is part and parcel of a broader MAGA agenda to take away our freedoms and control us. This is part and parcel of a broader agenda, to take away our votes, to overthrow the will of the people, getting people to understand that it wasn't just the foot soldiers, which was their initial understanding. We know from data that initially it was like, "yeah, it was that QAnon shaman guy." And it was, you know, the people who broke in, but not seeing kind of the generals that sent the marching orders. And that was a big part of the narrative push that we had to make to decenter the folks who were on TV all the time. Because, you know, there's a lot of footage, and that footage is very sexy from a TV news perspective to be like, "no, it's about the folks who planned, paid for, pardoned. Planned, paid for, pardoned. The members of Congress who planned, paid for, pardoned." You can hear my repetition. That's intentional. So we need to keep at that and remind folks. And the language that we have found most efficacious in this regard is talking about January 6th as a criminal conspiracy as opposed to an insurrection, an attempted coup, an attack. I mean, attack is also good language. When
we talk about it as an attack, it's really important to say that it was an attack on our country as opposed to an attack on our capital or an attack on our democracy. People need to have it made visceral for them that this was personal. This was sort of our generation's Pearl Harbor. This was the moment of no return. And when we talk about it as an attack on our country, a criminal conspiracy to overthrow your vote, to silence your choice, to decide for themselves that they would take power at any costs. People understand that we have in the upcoming Trump trials, another opportunity to expand that narration and what we see in polling in the same sort of anxiety inducing polls that all the folks are looking at and saying, oh, the horse race is bad, the horse race is bad. And there's plenty to say about why those polls ought to be put into the garbage bin. In all of those polls, usually somewhere question, you know, 12 or 20 or however long down the line, they will ask something around: "But what if Trump is convicted?" Or "how would a Trump conviction impact your vote?" Or "how do you feel about a convicted person if he's convicted of a crime?" Like "should he still be president?" In all of those polls, that question flips enough voters, usually by taking them out of the "don't know, not sure, undecided" -- not by taking them out of the Trump voter category, to flip the election by meaningful digits. And so we need to understand that that story that you just lifted up, that what's at stake here is, "are we going to be a place where we continue to have the freedom to cast our votes and have it counted? Are we going to be a place where you have the freedom to decide what happens in your own future? Or will we allow this fascist movement to rule over and not represent us" -- that that's what's going on in this election.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:20] I guess I'm surprised, the way that you're saying that it is, you know, an assault on our country, that people have not messaged it as being anti- American in a way that people all over this country describe communism as anti- American, right? Like this was anti-American. But, you know, speaking of the polls that you said that if Trump is convicted, people change their mind and in the polling would not vote for him. And I have to tell you that just a few days ago, my 16 year old asked me, how is it that he's even on the ballot, given that he was convicted of raping a woman, of lying about the financial condition of his company, and now being barred from conducting business in the state of New York, and is, of course, embroiled in these lawsuits, you know, in the federal election interference case in D.C., the conspiracy to overthrow the election. And if you believe Chris Christie, he will be convicted. So, of course, there are some states who are barring Trump from being on the ballot. But so
when you are specifically talking about the criminality and the potential conviction, what do you say?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:27:30] What do I say to the question that your child very, very wisely asked, like, how is this our reality?
Mila Atmos: [00:27:36] How is this even possible? Yeah. How is this our reality?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:27:38] You know, I asked myself that on a multiple times an hour basis. It's hilarious being friends with people who live in other countries and trying to explain because they're like, just explain again. Like, explain again how this is what's going on and this is what you're doing, friends. Mostly on that question, but also on the question of how is it that you're having the exact same election again? Like, didn't you do this? Wasn't that 2020? What's going on? You know, and my joke is that the reality TV show producers have become very lazy. And instead of casting archetypes, they've just, like gone back to the exact same characters. And a lot of the malaise that we see out of voters, my pet hypothesis, is just people are bored. Americans like new things. This is not new. We had this matchup before. Why should I be plugged into it? This is boring. But back to your question. The frogs in boiling water analogy to me is really the most apt, and I think that the media is kind of the sine qua non of the frogs in boiling water, by which I mean everything is normalized. Everything as if this were just kind of permutations of normal and, you know, whether or not we're actually going to allow people the legal right to vote. That's just a policy disagreement in the way that, like, I think the highway should go over here and you think the highway should go over there, or I think that we should do this kind of financing for Medicare. And you think we should do that kind is a policy disagreement. We have had since 2016 -- and actually, let's go on before that to the Tea Party. The Tea Party, a movement born of questioning Barack Obama's place of birth, place of origin, whether he was actually even fit to run, a movement born of questioning whether people of color should even have rights, a movement born of the exact same impetus and roots as Jim Crow. Right. The movement to destroy reconstruction. I think that it is very telling that in Germany after World War Two, there were very concrete steps taken and written into law that ensured that a Nazi party could not rise again, could not run again, could not be made to represent people, because I think that they understood that, you know, it's like weeds, right? You think you got all the weeds, but you just got to keep weeding unless you truly
pull them out by the root. I promise you, they're sitting there in the soil and those weeds of white supremacy, of domination that are part of the soil of this country. And I think that we're kidding ourselves if we say anything differently. We never pulled those out by the roots. We never actually barred people who had been involved in attacking the country. In fact, we say that there was a war of North versus South. That's ridiculous. The North wasn't a separate force. It was a war of the South versus the United States of America. The South attacked the United States of America. The North is not a country. And so when they did that, operating from concentration camps, which we've been conditioned to call plantations, doesn't that sound nicer? We did not nip that in the bud. We did not put in place laws. The closest we got to it, ironically, was the 14th amendment, Part Three (3), which barred insurrectionists from running for office, which is the part of the Constitution right now at issue in Colorado and Maine, as you brought up, barring Trump from being on the ballot. And so I think the way that we have gotten to here is by pretending along the way that everything is within some kind of realm of normal and everything that this man has done, everything that this movement has done, everything that the Tea Party did in sort of preparation for becoming MAGA was just kind of a policy disagreement. What folks need to understand is that a political party tries to court your vote, and an authoritarian faction tries to keep you from voting. The Republican Party is no longer operating as a political party, and that is a choice that they have made. I did not make it for them. I wish that they would make another choice, and so they need not be treated and spoken of as a party, but rather as an attempt at usurping force. That's what people need to understand.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:33] Well, I was going to ask you a question about how you're thinking about the American voter today and the way that it used to be even ten years ago, but you've just laid out the context that really white supremacy never died, that has been with this country for a long, long time. And you made a reference to the Tea Party, which in my mind was sort of like the resurrection of this, you know, the beginning of where we are today. I mean, it would be inaccurate to say it's the beginning, but sort of the kindling fire maybe is a better way. But the reality is that politics is not the way it used to be. Even like in the 80s or the 90s. Politics has changed. And and one of the things that I'm worried about is that someone like Biden has lived and worked all his life in that other system that is no more. And he continues... He's talking and running like that old politician that really nobody is interested in anymore. So in your mind, how has the electorate evolved, having said all this, contextualizing all this?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:33:31] Yeah. And I want to really just draw a bright line between the things that I say that are kind of my attempt to understand what's going on and the things that I say that are messaging advice, and they are different things. So that analysis is not actually a message that is not a sort of front facing message to a voter. And I would not encourage that to most people. First of all, most people can't listen that long and have already tapped out. So I just want to draw that distinction. I think when I'm looking at the US voter, what I'm principally concerned about, as I said before, is the disaffected. What I am principally concerned about is how we reassemble the Avengers. The Avengers got to come back for yet another movie here. It's a rerun, and the anti MAGA coalition that came out in full force to deliver us a blue wave in 2018 that came out in 2020 to eke it out, that came out in the states that I mentioned in 2022, in the off year elections that you lifted up, rightly so at the beginning, to defy pundits, precedent, expectations, etc. that's the coalition that we have to reassemble. And so the questions that we have to ask ourselves are what makes those folks go out and do the thing? And a lot of what we know is that voting is a habituated behavior. And this is maybe the most challenging thing for folks like me. I'm going to say, you, anybody who is deeply engaged in politics to understand, we traditionally think of the distinction between voters being ideological. Oh, there's, you know, these two factions, there's progressive people and there's right wing people, and they're very, very different in many ways. The more important distinction is between engaged voters, which is a teeny tiny little group of people, and most Americans. The largest political bloc in the United States is not Democrats and is not Republicans. It is voter eligible non-voters that is the largest group that is larger than the Democrats' group, larger than the Republicans' group. And they are the name of the game for us. Un-habituated voters, first time voters, depends on which election you're measuring against, but they are around 12 to 20 points more progressive than the general electorate. So if you turn them out, you're going to get more Democratic, big D and little D outcomes because more people taking part in our decision making is more democratic, small D. So what turns them out? We like to believe it's issues. We like to believe it's a magical incantation. We like to believe it's a candidate that, you know, really, really excites them. In reality, what the behavioral science shows is that it's not that different than adhering to a diet, adhering to an exercise routine. Voting is a matter of habituation. People who always vote always vote, and people who never vote, never vote. So how do you tip them from, "Oh, I'm just not a person who exercises, like I don't exercise" to, "I don't just exercise, but I'm going to
stick with it. It's not just going to be like a January 1st kind of situation. I'm going to go past January 2nd, I'm going to go into February. And in fact, I'm going to need you to go to November, friend." So what most alters voting behavior -- and I know this isn't sexy. It isn't like soaring anthems and issues and ideology is social proof, i.e. the middle school theory of messaging. People do the thing they think people like them do. So if your milieu, if your sort of identity group, whatever that is, could be religious, could be racial, could be job-related. However you kind of identify if that group of people has voting as part of its habituated behavior, you're much more likely to do it. It's not that different to the phenomenon of like, "well, that must be the good place to eat because there's a line there. I don't know anything about that place, but that line is telling me something." So in 2018, in 2020, through the Trump resistance, being political, being engaged, consuming political news, having political posters in front of your house, wearing political clothing, all of that surged. There was just a lot more of it going on, and it became a part of way more people's identity. People who maybe previously never paid attention to political things, or maybe they voted, didn't do much more. Maybe only in presidential. We have to get back into a place where being tuned in and tapped into politics is part of identity, and that is really what this year is about. It's much less immediately, though eventually we have to seal the deal about selling Biden, about selling Harris, about selling Democrats. We first have to sell the very idea of participating itself. So the number one way to increase voting behavior is to talk about voting, not about issues, not about candidates, about voting. The other way is social pressure. Social pressure is that creepy postcard that comes to your house that says who you vote for is private. Whether or not you vote is a matter of public record or this is your record on voting, you vote x percent less than your neighbors or X percent more than your neighbors. It's basically saying people can tell whether or not you voted, and those are the levers, basically making it the socially sanctioned thing to do that have the most movement on changing behavior.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:44] Um hum. Yeah. Well, I will say that works, of course. I... in 2022 had a texting tree and I texted all of my friends to say, "when you vote, please bring two more friends to the voting booth." And not everybody responded, but some did. You know, I'm not sure that they necessarily invited people, but I think they tried. But to pivot here, I want to talk about some other races that you are watching on the state level or municipal level. Aside from the presidential, what should we be on the lookout for?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:40:18] Yeah. So as a note of hope, I just want to say look at what just happened in November of 2023 at the school board level. Right? We have this group. We're quaking in our boots. They're supposedly so powerful: Moms for Liberty. And this is again where MAGA just excels. I mean, they are the fake-it-till-you-make-it kings, queens, royalty of the universe. They take, let's say, Iowa, 2.7% of eligible voters. That's who turned out in Iowa. Did you know that was less than 3%? Iowa is a state with 1% of the US population. 2.7% of eligible human beings were voting in that election. So we're talking, what, like 20 people? I'm kidding. I'm exaggerating. But, you know, it's not a lot of people. And Trump is declaring that he was chosen to be king of the universe. They take whatever little teeny tiny crumb is going on, and they say, "this means that everybody loves us." We take winning in race after race after race and say "we're the losing team. We're very, very concerned. We're probably going to lose." So this is another example of social proof school board races. You thought I had lost the thread, but here it is: in the election that we just had in 2023, when, of course, Andy Beshear, you know, remained governor of Kentucky. We saw the Virginia State House flip. God bless Virginia. We saw great outcomes in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court races. We saw Ohio deliver another ballot win on the heels of the previous one. And we saw school board races in place after place after place that Moms for Liberty had put their eggs in the hatred, xenophobia, anti-trans basket. That is where they love their eggs. They keep their eggs very warm in the hatred basket. And we won a lot of those races. So I'm looking again at school boards. This is an absolutely winnable issue when you bring things down to the local level and people really understand, oh, you're going to get in the way of my kids actually being able to have an education that they want and deserve. Oh no, no, no friend. Right. It becomes very clear and unambiguous to people who are politically engaged that requires, you know, some measure of being a high information voter that you're paying attention. So I think school board races are extraordinarily important. I think there are Senate seats. For example, Missouri, wouldn't it be delicious and wonderful to have Josh Hawley run his way to whatever slime bath he actually belongs in? I think that Missouri is a great pickup opportunity. I think that there is a pathway to hold on to the Senate. I mean, I am a pathological optimist, so I believe that there is a pathway to have a trifecta again, if and when we mobilize this defiance and we make this act of voting being the thing to do and what people like you, however you define that, do.
Mila Atmos: [00:43:32] Well, not to throw a wrench in here, but I know that there are some engaged voters, progressives who are currently divided over what's happening in Gaza and who have told me personally, "yeah, I am not going to vote for Biden because I'm so upset." And it's not that they're going to vote for the opposition, but they'll just not vote. So it's the kind of thing where I feel like, well, I understand where you're coming from, but the stakes are high and I kind of feel like, how do you persuade them to come out, or is there just a lot of time between now and November? But, you know, I mean, that sounds lazy, but you know what I'm saying?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:44:03] No, no, not at all. It doesn't sound that way at all. So that's real. And I think that anyone who thinks it's not real is kidding themselves. We can see it in qualitative. We can see it in quantitative. We can see it really, really acutely. In a state like Michigan, where there is a high concentration of Arab-American voters who not only are a core part of the base, they are very politically engaged. Right? There are a lot of our GOTV volunteers. They door knock. So we need to remember it's not just an impact on voters. In some places, it's an impact on the machine that we rely upon to animate other voters. Right. These people are often, let's take the band analogy, the first trumpet. And if you can't get the first trumpet to be playing real loud, like, how could you possibly get the rest of the orchestra to be on it? So what you're talking about is very real. And I think what's especially visceral about it is that these conversations that you're describing, what we are getting from voters, is not, I'm just going to stay at home. It's I'm going to skip the top of the ticket. I will vote down ballot. That's a very sophisticated person. That is a different kind of a voter than one who's like, "look it, I just won't do anything." Or the kind of a person who has never voted before. And they're just like, they don't even really know what's going on. They're barely aware. The election's not on their radar. So the first thing, you know, I will give the annoying researcher answer and say it's an empirical question. We are right now in deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, trying to disaggregate who are these different subgroups of potentially disaffected voters, because I just named three categories, and those are different kinds of people, and they require a different rhetorical response. So the best answer that I can give at this point is you've already intuited, I think, because you're very smart and because you're obviously an incredibly empathetic person, what doesn't work is yelling at people, shaming people, berating people. I personally have never had the experience of telling someone, wow, what you're thinking of doing is the worst idea ever, and you're obviously an idiot. And having them turn around and say, please tell me more about
that. I'm so excited to hear your opinions. So all of that kind of like, "do you have any idea what you're doing? You are doing the worst thing! You are the person who's going to put Trump in office!" Like all of that, that does not work. So if you need to scream that into a pillow, if that's your natural inclination, like go get a pillow, don't say it to other people. What to say to other people? I have tried various things and again, we're talking about high information people. At least the kind of conversation that you've described is either "I hear you, it's an extraordinarily awful situation, and I personally disagree with the policy as well. And I feel sad." I mean, it's beyond sad, right? Sad is not enough of a word. And here's what I know. What I know is that if you don't decide, they'll decide for you. If you don't cast a vote for the continuation of the freedoms, limited as they are, insufficient as they are, inadequate as they are, in this country. If you don't cast a vote to protect what we've got, then what comes next will be: we no longer even possess the means to keep fighting. We no longer even possess the means to contest this. So that's one way of doing it. The other way, which is related, again, if it's a high info person, is to say, yeah, this shit's real broken. It's extraordinary in the worst possible way that this is our choice to make, that these are the candidates in a country this large, with this many extraordinary human beings contained within it, that we're making a choice in 2024 that is the same choice we had in 2020. The US electoral system is like a broken down toaster that has two and only two slots. You are never going to get a nutritious breakfast out of a toaster. You can't get protein, you can't get vitamins, you can't get anything really delicious. And in that toaster, we get to select between a crusty, dry piece of bread that is not that appetizing but will give us some calories, will fuel the calories we require so we can get through the rest of our day, and a carcinogenic, arsenic-laced piece of poison. What we need to do is we need to not have a country where what we pretend is democracy is run by a toaster. We need to have a full kitchen of appliances, and that is why we march. That is why we do labor actions. That is why we have to have other means of civic engagement. But unless and until we make that choice to pick the bread so that we can have some calories, we're not going to be able to keep engaging in these other fights and we won't be able to go on.
Mila Atmos: [00:49:43] Well said. Well, as we are rounding out our conversation here, last question. Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful?
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:49:51] You have teen kids. I have teen kids. Obviously. That's an enormous source of hope. I would say that beyond that, what gives me hope
is that I would rather win elections than polls. And despite the fact that, yes, we have lost ground. You know, I'm not going to lie to you, I'm not going to make up a story. Down ballot in state houses, in local places where a generation ago, let's say there was much more Democratic dominance. And that's a tale for another time. All of the ways that that happened, short form. TLDR. It's the neoliberalism, stupid. That was a big mistake on Democrats' part was just being a B-minus version of Republicans. But in this period that you have named sort of the 2016 on, Democrats just keep defying the odds. And that is because of this ragtag, imperfect coalition of folks who simply understand that when freedom is on the line, they're going to show up to defend it. And that is what gives me hope.
Mila Atmos: [00:50:57] Oh, terrific. And me too. Now that you've said it in this way, it's really heartening to remember that, in fact, people do show up and they do take the vote seriously, as we've seen over all these cycles. And they make a choice for all Americans. Thank you so much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you back on the show.
Anat Shenker-Osorio: [00:51:18] It was a joy to be with you.
Mila Atmos: [00:51:20] Anat Shenker-Osorio is the host of the Words to Win By
Podcast and Principle of ASO Communications.
Next week on Future Hindsight, we're joined by Cynthia Ritchie Terrell. She's the founder and executive director of Represent Women, the writer of a weekly column on women's representation for Ms. Magazine, and an expert on electoral reform and system strategies to advance women's representation and leadership.
Cynthia Richie Terrell: [00:51:53] Incumbency is the biggest barrier in Congress. For example, 95% of people get re-elected, whether that's a male or a female. And so when there's that little competition, it's super hard for challengers to run and to win. We saw in the 2022 midterm elections, even though there were many challenger candidates who registered and filed to run in elections, and we spent somewhere between $8 and $9 billion on congressional races in the midterms, we went from 123 women in the US House to 124 women in the US House, and one challenger won.
Mila Atmos: [00:52:33] That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show. If you're still here, we have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:53:17] This podcast is part of the democracy Group.