Changing the Temperature: Narrative Strategy to Move the Base, with Anat Shenker-Osorio

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

[00:00:00] Sue Hyde: The pathway to governing power requires winning the battles of big ideas. We’re in a contest to help people make meaning about what’s wrong in our lives and country, who’s to blame, and how to fix it. Having a winning narrative strategy is just as important as power building and campaign strategies, and in fact, they all have to fit together in our overall strategy.

[00:00:27] We are joined today by Anant Shankar Osorio. Host of the Words to Win By podcast and principal of ASO Communications. She’ll help us examine why certain messages falter where others deliver. 

[00:00:44] Scot Nakagawa: Anat has led research for new messaging on issues ranging from workers rights I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to go ahead and Foundation, and [00:01:00] Lush International.

[00:01:00] For writing and researches profiled in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Boston Globe, The Guardian, and The New York Times. And grist among others you get it. She’s a rock star and she’s the author of don’t buy it the trouble with talking nonsense about the economy And now I want to say I mentioned the snark in order to get you to check out anna’s meme filled and information pack Podcast words to win by so thank you for joining us and bringing the snark to the anti authoritarian Podcast today or not.

[00:01:34] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Yeah Thank you for having me 

[00:01:36] Scot Nakagawa: So your narrative lessons are pithy and memorable. I think everyone can agree to that. Can you unpack these pithy and memorable things that you’ve said for us? The first is don’t take the temperature, change it. What does that mean? 

[00:01:54] Anay Shenker-Osorio: So oftentimes when you actually look at the way that political research is done, it’s done in a [00:02:00] decidedly different way among right wing pollsters and left wing pollsters.

[00:02:04] And when you’re doing something and we test things in many different ways, but I’ll just take for example, something that we call online dial testing. This is if you’ve ever watched the debates on CNN and you see the lines and they go across the screen. So we have You know, thousands of folks listening to a message and we instruct them to dial up when they feel warmly in an agreement and to dial down when they feel in disagreement, the average right wing pollster will look at one of those tests and they will say, Oh, that’s the winning message, the thing that’s happening at second eight or second 13.

[00:02:37] And the pattern that they’re attempting to discern is that the red line, meaning their base, right wing folks, are dialing up. The middle line, the persuadables, the folks who are conflicted and could go either way, are also dialing up. And their opposition, meaning progressive folks, are dialing down. So if you look at it, it looks like a sideways [00:03:00] V, two lines up, one line down.

[00:03:01] And the reason for that is, as I was once told by a very prominent right wing pollster, and I quote, I’m dialing for the red meat. In other words, what they’re looking for is a message that is going to engage their base to repetition, because they understand the most fundamental thing of about political messaging and really messaging in general, which is that if your words don’t spread, they don’t work.

[00:03:27] If the choir won’t sing the song, the congregation’s not going to hear the joyful noise, and there’s no way that message can penetrate. It feels pretty uncontroversial to say that a message that nobody hears cannot persuade them. That just feels like common sense. The standard kind of center right pollster, whether that be in the United States or among various labor parties in the UK, European, Australian context, what they’re looking for is the point in the message in which all three lines are more or less trending [00:04:00] upwards where everyone sorta likes the thing.

[00:04:03] They might not love it. The base might not be hot. Hot to trot on it, but it’s not offending anyone. In other words, they are looking for milquetoast. And so what they’re doing is they’re doing dial testing and they’re also doing survey testing where they ask people, what is your top political issue?

[00:04:23] If you ask people what their top political issue is, they will always say the exact same thing. It will be some permutation of money, economics, jobs, what’s in my wallet, inflation, costs, because we’ve monetized human existence. We don’t need to keep asking this polling question. It’s like asking, do people like breakfast pie?

[00:04:41] People like breakfast pie or something’s wrong with them. And so people tell us, oh, my top issue is the economy. The temperature taking approach is, guess we gotta talk to them about the economy. But the job of a good message isn’t to say what is popular, it is to make [00:05:00] popular what we need said. And so what we need to understand, and the right already does, is not where are people at, but where are we at.

[00:05:08] But where are they capable of going and how is it aided by our words, our images, our repetition? We could bring them from that awfully, oftentimes unhelpful place to where we need them to be. I’ll leave off this answer with an example. For decades, Democratic politicians in the U. S. were told you cannot run on abortion, you cannot run on abortion, you cannot run on abortion, it’s too divisive, it’s too polarizing, and in fact were even admonished and told to call it, it was the A word, people wouldn’t even use it, they would find these kind of language Jenga puzzle things to avoid saying the A word, and obviously with the Dobbs decision, That changed the saliency of the issue, but did it suddenly make people go from being rapidly [00:06:00] anti freedom to being pro freedom?

[00:06:02] No, people had those feelings all along, and so if Democrats had been pursuing a change the temperature rather than take the temperature, they would have brought abortion to the fore much earlier. Which is an issue on which they have much stronger standing. So that’s what that means. 

[00:06:20] Scot Nakagawa: Thank you. I appreciate your saying that we need to take people where they are capable of going, because I think that, we need to find the paths that people can actually walk.

[00:06:30] But here’s another one. You’ve said what you fight, you feed. What do you mean by that? 

[00:06:37] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, so we have a tendency to talk a lot about our opposition. And this is a nuanced thing that I want to say, because as we’ll probably come to later, I am a big believer that you need to name your villains and be very explicit about them.

[00:06:51] So I’m going to drop that there before I go into the what you fight, you feed. While it is the case that we need to name who the culprits [00:07:00] are behind the present circumstances. We also need to remember that the more we act in reaction to them, the more that our calls to action or our messages are a don’t and a stop and a can’t.

[00:07:13] Stop drilling, don’t have oil, get cops out, end this, end family separation. All of which, I hope it’s obvious, I agree with. What that actually does is it reinforces the bigness of the enemy in the, in a way that it makes people not want to stand up or join us. So here is a sort of quintessential example.

[00:07:41] I work a lot in Australia. If you ask the average Australian, this has been tested many times. Hey, if you had to guess what size is the. Fossil fuel sector in Australia, that’s mostly coal, what percentage of the workforce is in fossil fuels, people will routinely estimate the [00:08:00] mean estimate is around 9%.

[00:08:02] It’s actually, I don’t know the exact thing, but it’s like point 0000 something people are overestimating the size of the fossil fuel workforce by a massive degree. The same is true in the United States. And this, of course, Gets the consternation of the environmental community to no end. People think coal is such a big employer.

[00:08:21] They think it’s so huge. Same here in the US. And my answer to them is of course, people think that all you do all day long is talk about coal. All you do all day long is talk about fossil fuels instead of talking about clean energy. And I think that climate change is really climate change. Sort of the central place where we see the illustration of what you fight, you feed in having engaged for so long in an argument around, is it person made?

[00:08:50] Is climate change person made? Is it naturally occurring? They trapped us in having their debate rather than [00:09:00] having discourse that was simply the clean energy future is ours for the taking. We have energy from the wind and the sun that can never be moved and never be outsourced. Anyone who says differently is an Americant.

[00:09:12] We’re Americans. You think that this isn’t ours? That’s because you’re profiting off of trying to get us to keep poisoning ourselves. We could have been talking about clean energy all along, and instead we were talking about, it is person made, we will prove it to you, 1. 5 degrees this many, years, and so on.

[00:09:32] Scot Nakagawa: Terrific. That reminds me a lot of what’s happened with the immigration debate, where, you know, once upon a time we talked about the economy and about human rights, and the right now is saying to us that Immigrants coming over our southern border are rapists and murderers and, criminals in general forcing us into a conversation about whether or not that’s true when we, of course, know it’s not.

[00:09:55] And it’s very helpful to remind us not to move the goalpost so that we [00:10:00] can actually start to focus on the kinds of goals we have and communicate about them in a way that’s effective. So now there’s another one here. You say, engage the base, persuade the middle. What does that mean?

[00:10:12] Anay Shenker-Osorio: So that’s going back to something that I said earlier around when we’re doing message testing and we’re saying, this is the winning message, right? We tested five things and we say that message C is the winning message. The very real question we should be asking ourselves is based upon what criteria. So if the criteria, plural, are we want the message that gets the greatest number of people in the sample to at least dial up somewhat.

[00:10:42] We’re looking at the total number across all the respondents, then what you’re going to end up with by definition is milquetoast. You’re going to end up with either something that is blandly inoffensive I believe that children are the future, which is fine, but that’s not advancing a political argument.

[00:10:59] [00:11:00] Or you’re going to end up reinforcing a status quo belief that actually acts against the change that you want in the world. This is what happens when we see center left politicians say things like, We want comprehensive immigration reform that’s tough, fair, and practical. We need to be tough on those who cross our border without permission and practical.

[00:11:19] We can’t find and deport 12 million people. It’s where you genuflect at this altar of being in the moderate middle, because then people will see you as the reasonable person in the room or where you say, another example, of course, we should be concerned about the deficit. The way to handle the deficit is to raise revenue.

[00:11:36] You are like, I’m going to tell you the thing. I think you already think, and no, one’s going to be upset about the problem with doing that. Is that your base, your choir, your equivalent, and I’m sorry to, use this as an example, but the left wing equivalent of the red hatted, MAGA mob that is always and continuously engaged and enraged, they’re [00:12:00] not going to repeat that message because they don’t get out of bed in the morning saying to themselves, I’m going to check in on the GDP, I’m so excited to see whether it went up or down, and I’m definitely going to tell all my friends.

[00:12:11] You have to have a message that the base doesn’t just agree with and find inoffensive or palatable. You have to have a message that they would actually want to repeat. I think. The illustration of this that all of us experienced was around marriage equality and the shift away from practical arguments like hospital visitation rights and married filing jointly and we need to make sure that this is fair and people have the right to marry, as we called it then, toward a love is love and love makes a family.

[00:12:45] And if you have a problem with it, don’t come to the wedding. People will repeat love is love. People will repeat love makes a family. They may even talk to a stranger at a grocery store about it. They may even, back when people still used Facebook, change their [00:13:00] avatar to have a rainbow around it, thereby creating what we call social proof that this is what, quote unquote, most people think this is common sense.

[00:13:10] So it has to be a message that the base actually wants to carry. in order for the middle to even hear it in the first place, let alone be persuaded by it. Obviously, there’s not enough of the bass in any of the places that we work. And so it does need to convert the conflicted. But this question around converting the conflicted, and the idea again, that is that, the way that you convert the conflicted is by not even trying to convert them, right?

[00:13:36] You just repeat the kind of right wing light thing, because they must have some sort of attraction to that. All that does is actually reinforce your opposition’s argument. And so that’s what engage the base, persuade the middle means. It means that turnout is persuasion. 

[00:13:56] Scot Nakagawa: All right. Thank you. So here’s my favorite one.

[00:13:59] [00:14:00] Paint the beautiful tomorrow. What is that? What should we take from that? 

[00:14:05] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. So when we do testing and especially right now, I don’t think it’s going to be surprising to anyone listening that oftentimes what we find is that our opposition is not the opposition. People’s problem is not that they don’t think our ideas are right.

[00:14:21] It’s that they don’t think our ideas are possible. So why bother getting involved in the first place? If this is the Titanic, thank you very much. I’m not going to buy a ticket. I know how that ends, right? And I will often say to campaigners, the standard left wing message is this is the Titanic. As I said, boy, have I got a problem for you and we’re the losing team.

[00:14:43] We lose a lot. We lost recently. So you should join us for the average. a political person. So a person who is ideologically aligned with us but not participating, maybe not even voting and certainly not anything more than that, [00:15:00] they got a lot going on in their lives and boy have I got a problem for you is not that enticing and opening salvo.

[00:15:07] And so instead, If you want people to come to your cause, it’s pretty simple. You have to be attractive. You have to actually give them something for which they will hunger and feel like, Oh, that’s what I want, right? Again, because I used the example before, so it will be faster. It’s one thing to be in opposition to married filing jointly.

[00:15:33] It is another thing to be in opposition to love. If you have to maintain a position that you just don’t like love that’s a much harder thing for a right wing politician to do. And so that’s an example of that paint the beautiful tomorrow, create An idea that is so compelling that people will long for it.

[00:15:54] I, there’s a quotation from Tony Cade Bambara that I love, which is the role of the artist is [00:16:00] to make the revolution irresistible. And I would argue that the role of the activist is the very same. 

[00:16:06] Sue Hyde: Anat you work overtime to stop authoritarians from being elected. And you work to advance ideas and policies that will move forward an inclusive democracy and economy.

[00:16:22] What are the narrative strategies that are working, and how do you know when they’re working? 

[00:16:32] Anay Shenker-Osorio: I fortunately or unfortunately work increasingly and almost exclusively and certainly this year in the electoral realm. And the good and the terrible of working in the electoral realm is that we win or we lose.

[00:16:46] And it’s very straightforward and unambiguous. And that isn’t to say that you could run an absolutely extraordinarily brilliant campaign and still lose that does absolutely happen. Because sometimes the [00:17:00] headwinds are what they are, or you’re in a district in which, you’re in such a deficit in terms of who the voting populace is that even coming up, 20 points still doesn’t get you over the finish line, but working.

[00:17:15] Means or how do we know that they’re working? Like I said, if it’s an election, I think it’s pretty clear cut. I think that In other realms, it’s a question of we do a lot to measure baseline public opinion and measure movement on that public opinion. I can give concrete examples.

[00:17:33] And then, of course, there’s campaigns that we win or don’t win. That are not electoral, right? Policy victories, policy changes, sometimes there could be corporate campaigning, all sorts of things, but, this is you asking a campaigner, so that’s gonna, those are gonna be my answers, they’re gonna be pretty concrete and hard boiled.

[00:17:51] I think without that, we can fall into the messiness of we’re shifting people’s perspectives and the narratives. And [00:18:00] it’s what does that really mean until and unless you’re actually making meaningful differences in people’s lives. Do they have more freedom? Do they have less?

[00:18:10] Do they have more prosperity? Do they have less? Have we actually taken concrete steps to protect our planet and the things that inhabit it? Or have we not? I tend to traffic in pretty harsh, concrete measures. As far as what’s working, it’s complicated to boil it down. But I think The things that we see over and over again is that drawing a contrast is really working.

[00:18:37] Having an order to our message, the order that we tend to find most effective and therefore preach is values, villain, vision. What that means is that the message begins with an opening salvo, not of boy, have I got a problem for you as I pilloried earlier, but rather, The statement of something that the vast majority of the audience listening to [00:19:00] you is going to agree with.

[00:19:01] So for example, in a minimum wage fight, it would be something like no matter what we look like or where we come from, most of us believe that people who work for a living ought to earn a living. In an abortion debate, it might sound like Whether we’re black, white or brown, native or newcomer, across races, places and genders, most of us believe that we should have the freedom to decide for ourselves whether and when we have kids.

[00:19:26] So it’s a statement of broad belief that’s attached back to the issue that you’re going to be debating. So that’s the values statement. And the purpose of that statement is to, say this is a big we. Notice that the value statement is not a statement of outcome. It’s not a statement of we’re all suffering equally, or we’re all having an equally hard time, or we’re all equally privileged because those things are untrue.

[00:19:52] The value statement is most of us, roughly speaking, want to leave things better off for those to come. Most of us seek to treat others the way [00:20:00] we want to be treated. It’s that kind of a statement. And the reason we find that An effective opening salvo is because what I’m about to introduce in the second sentence, the villain, that the way that we call out the villain is very specific and we, and that specificity is that we don’t just talk about what they’re doing, but we ascribe motivation to it.

[00:20:23] We unpack the why. And that Y is ever and always, as any of us who have studied, and I know you two have right wing authoritarianism, they basically have one storyline. They’ve been peddling it over and over in all the places, in all the times. And that story is, hey, are you feeling shit? Are you feeling shit?

[00:20:48] The world is not going your way. Are you feeling like you’re not getting your due? Are you feeling strapped? Are you feeling stressed? Are you feeling the world is changing before your very eyes and, your way of life and [00:21:00] your culture are under attack? You know who to blame.

[00:21:03] It’s those people. And that cast of characters that will change, it will be based on religion, it will be based on gender, it will be based on race, it will be based on place of origin, but it’s always the same story. There’s nothing new under the sun. And so what we find is that the way to deal with that is to actually let folks know.

[00:21:26] That’s what they’re doing. So in the minimum wage example case, the second sentence would say, but today a handful of billionaires. And the politicians they pay for want us pointing our fingers in the wrong direction. They hope that by making us shame and blame new immigrants or people struggling to make ends meet or people who don’t look live and love like us will turn the other way while they hand kickbacks to their donors and hold down wages and [00:22:00] slash social security and medicare for all of us.

[00:22:02] You basically say to people, Hey friends, look, what they’re up to is getting you to hate someone else so that they can actually screw us all and that’s that middle bit and then the final bit returning to the positive because you’ll note that the message has twice as much positive as negative it’s positive negative positive you say by joining together to you know ensure a 15 an hour wage or by joining together to raise wages or whatever the call to action is it depends on your campaign we can make this a place where all of us have what we need to thrive So that structure, that architecture, we find works.

[00:22:42] We find that it works to move people away from candidates toward seeing elections as a crossroads between two different futures. I think we saw this very recently in Poland. They had an election in which they successfully got rid [00:23:00] of their right wing dictator. And what they said to folks in that context was vote for the Poland you want, not the person you want right now in our focus groups and our quantitative research, we’re seeing over and over again, that conversations about let’s just be explicit, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, they go nowhere and they go nowhere fast.

[00:23:20] We have a vast swath of people who are like, don’t like that guy. Don’t like that guy. Nope. And nope. If we. Paint the election as it’s about these two people. People are like I’ve already seen this show like the reality TV show producers were so lazy, they couldn’t even cast new characters. We already had this decision in 2020.

[00:23:42] But if instead we say we’re at a crossroads and we’re deciding which future we’ll have or we’re deciding which America we will be, you can get far more engagement. So that’s another thing that we really see working. 

[00:23:58] Sue Hyde: That’s fantastic. [00:24:00] Thank you. I wanna ask you a basic question, both for myself and probably for some of our listeners.

[00:24:06] What is the difference between a narrative and a communications message? 

[00:24:14] . Yeah. A little bit I would say. As it gets used in the world, it’s pretty messy. These are not like hard and fast definitions, so I think different people would give you different answers. Generally speaking, I think the way that language gets used is that a narrative is more foundational, it’s more underlying, it’s not necessarily explicitly articulated, so let me give you a super concrete example.

[00:24:42] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Once upon a time. Not so long ago, there was a narrative that women by virtue of whatever were too weak or too emotional or to this or to that to be able to vote, to be able to work outside the home, to be able to do [00:25:00] anything other than engage in child rearing and domestic endeavors.

[00:25:04] There are people who still think that and who are trying to repromote that as a prevailing idea. So that was a narrative. Sometimes it was explicit, and people would literally say, women are too weak, or women are too feeble. But, as long as that was the underlying common sense, and the quote unquote cultural story about women, then it made it so that a message grant women the vote, Or women should be in the workforce or here is Rosie the Riveter and she’s awesome.

[00:25:34] Those things are messages. Those are actual compact units of communication that go out in the world. The underlying narrative is what determines whether a specific message is going to land or it’s going to fall flat because you have to eat away at that core belief structure. So generally that’s the way those two things get used.

[00:25:52] The message is, Actually, the articulated slogan, tagline, concept, text [00:26:00] of the ad, and the narrative is the underlying story and set of assumptions that sort of exist and get passed along. Thank you. 

[00:26:10] Scot Nakagawa: Anant, can you share some of your best examples on how better narrative power strategies are helping communities advance?

[00:26:18] what, we believe in, which is a multiracial majority and a multiracial democracy. 

[00:26:25] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Sure. I think that one of my favorite examples, and I just want to underscore how obviously I must love this example, because as a person from Wisconsin, saying anything nice about Minnesota is obviously very challenging for me.

[00:26:39] So I must just really believe in this because I’m about to say very nice things about Minnesota. So in Minnesota, Minnesota is, You probably know a largely white state. It is nowhere near the coast for those who accuse, coastal elites who that thing could only work in California. It could only work in New York because of the [00:27:00] nature of the state.

[00:27:01] Minnesota is not that kind of a state. And in fact, Demographically is really not that dissimilar to its neighboring states of the Dakotas and Iowa and Wisconsin, and yet has enjoyed very different political fortunes. And so the question is why not only why does this largely white state have. Much better progressive policies and presently have a trifecta at the state governing level, but have pretty notably prominent politicians, the Attorney General Keith Ellison, a black Muslim man who was previously representative, a representative in the seat now held by Ilhan Omar, who is also a black woman, an immigrant, a Muslim So how did that come to be?

[00:27:44] How did it come to be that in one of the Twin Cities, largest metropolitan area in the state, there is an all woman city council, and many of those are women of color. How did that happen in Minnesota? Minnesota is an example of [00:28:00] Very smart, very deliberate power building over years and years, a state table where the organizations involved agreed early on, not just to share resources, but to act as a choir, to have unified messaging so that it wasn’t the Teachers Union, Education Minnesota, we have our message, and SEIU, we have our message, and Unidos, the Latino group, we have our message, and the Somali Workers Center, we have our message, but rather to recognize that unless everyone is actually pushing the same brand, the voters aren’t hearing anything.

[00:28:36] So first they built up trust and they built up connections and they built up collaboration and then this is the part of the story that I know better because all of this happened before, but in 2018 having been an integral part of the initial testing of something we call the race class narrative, which is what I was referencing when I was walking through the values villain vision [00:29:00] thing that is RCN in action in words.

[00:29:04] They decided that they were going to full scale implement this race class narrative, and in 2018, we launched a campaign that we called Greater Than Fear. That name was very deliberately chosen. In Minnesota, the rural parts of the state are referred to as Greater Minnesota. That’s their word for rural, a funny word.

[00:29:23] Minnesota only thing I don’t know any other state that says that and the fear mongering and the race baiting and the hatred peddled by the right wing was unsurprisingly very much concentrated in those rural parts of the state and it was part and parcel of their strategy because in 2016 they had come within the closest margin ever of actually winning the presidential I don’t remember the exact total so don’t quote me but you know around 10 15, 000 votes of Trump actually winning and the right sign that Oh boy, like maybe, we have a [00:30:00] chance here.

[00:30:00] And so they just unleashed the sort of full unrepentant race baiting dog whistling xenophobia, which was especially potent in Minnesota, because as some of you will know, there’s a important Somali American population there. And contained within that population, you have the perfect scapegoat because they’re black, they’re immigrants, and they’re Muslim, right?

[00:30:26] You can play on all of the fears in one population. And so we launched this campaign, Greater Than Fear, with a whole amalgam of groups, Faith in Minnesota among them, other groups that I mentioned already. And we developed a tagline, which was in Minnesota, we’re better off together. We made ads, we made billboards, we made radio ads, we made social media.

[00:30:46] We had a whole dogs against dog whistling. You could send us a picture of your dog. We would turn it into a cute little character. When someone said something terrible online, you could clap back with your little dog. We had, dog whistle, bingo. We had events, we had hot dish from around the [00:31:00] world.

[00:31:00] And when Trump came to Rochester, Minnesota. Instead of having an anti Trump rally, which was de rigueur at the time, they held a greater than fear rally. And basically the entire message was, hey listen, in Minnesota we know what’s what, and we know how to treat our neighbors, and we know that being Minnesotan means how you treat people and how you interact and what you want for generations to come.

[00:31:28] It doesn’t mean, a color of your skin or having a very long vowels when you talk. There are lots of ways to be Minnesotan and all of them are greater than fear. That was the closer of our main ad. And in that year we won all of the races in which we engaged in the campaign. So that was at the state executive level.

[00:31:47] We won both of the Senate seats. There were two Senate seats up because of Al Franken and we won at the local level as well in 2020, more of the same. They made more advances. And then in [00:32:00] 2022, more of the same. And they were able to finally flip. They had both houses with a one seat majority, one seat majority.

[00:32:10] And after that trifecta of a one seat majority, which for those of you listening from my home state right now of California or New York, let us be embarrassed. We should be embarrassed with our longstanding trifectas. They passed 21 pieces of. Progressive legislation in very short order. And when you ask lawmakers in the state why they were able to do things like universal driver’s licenses, including for undocumented folks and other things that are racially coded, they will tell you it’s because we didn’t run holding hiding the eight ball.

[00:32:45] We didn’t run saying, Oh yeah, you should vote for me because I’ll also be tough on crime. Or, Oh, you should vote for me because I will also bash immigrants. They said, This is who we are. This is what we believe. This is the world we want. And so when they got into [00:33:00] office, which is high, the purpose of winning campaigns is not to win the campaign.

[00:33:04] It’s how you govern. They were able to actually govern progressively. So I think that’s a really strong example. That example probably went on too long. So I won’t do others unless you ask me, 

[00:33:16] Sue Hyde: but that was a great one. It’s such an inspiring story, the Minnesota story. I’m really appreciative of you including that.

[00:33:26] It’s a big year, 2024. Really? Yeah, I think so. How would you advise us to speak about or describe MAGA and that movement as we engage with friends, neighbors, family? Yeah. 

[00:33:47] Anay Shenker-Osorio: So we’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of research on this. And so the first thing that I want to say is you’ve already captured some of it, which is the use of MAGA.

[00:33:58] The reason why, and a lot of people [00:34:00] bristle at this, and I respect and understand the bristling that we shouldn’t have a modifier before Republicans because truly it really is all of them. The reason for having a modifier, which is very deliberate, is that what we find is that provides what we call the permission architecture for people who used to be Republican, have Republicans in their family, love Republicans, to be able to feel like they can be part of this we, that they still get to claim some sort of attachment to an identity or an affiliation to family or to friends or to where they came from.

[00:34:37] And. They can still be with us. So that’s the reason for the macro Republicans. It’s not because we’ve lost our minds. And we think that there’s like some magical, non capitulating Republicans, in my estimation, they all have they’re all facilitators for this. And you know what, if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.

[00:34:58] And that’s how it is. [00:35:00] So it’s a deliberate sort of messaging tactic. There have been a lot of questions around, do we use the terminology of authoritarians, do we use the terminology of fascists, do we use the terminology of white Christian nationalists? We’ve experimented with all of this. My feeling is that it is fine to mix and match.

[00:35:20] It depends on the context, it depends on with whom you’re speaking, what, where are they? You want to do the thing that’s going to get the task done. By which I mean, what is your theory of change? Are you talking to somebody who is conflicted and you’re trying to bring them over? Are you trying to rally the base?

[00:35:40] What we find in testing, we’ve done some really interesting things is that while people start off more readily in agreement that authoritarian is a label that sort of applies to this crew less so than fascist. We find in split sample testing in large samples that folks who’ve been exposed to [00:36:00] the fascist fascism label there, they move more on vote choice.

[00:36:05] So this may be a case where, that’s not what people think initially, but that Is the thing that we need to repeat over and over in order to bring them to that place because that creates a more effective understanding. I think what’s more important than how we label them besides macro republicans are two things.

[00:36:23] Number one, not to call them extreme or extremist. I am a one woman diatribe against extreme extremists and the reason for that is that It’s because when you call them extreme or extremist, what you’re saying is that they still exist along a political spectrum, and they don’t. They have exited the realm of democratic norms.

[00:36:44] A political party tries to court your vote. They may do it well. They may do it badly. They may be neoliberal. Capitalists who are actually in point of fact impoverishing us. True. But they’re still interested in having you vote, right? So a political [00:37:00] party tries to court your vote in one way or the other.

[00:37:02] And an authoritarian faction tries to keep you from voting. They have jumped the shark and they are not operating within the realm of democratic norms. And so to call them ex extreme or extremist is too kind. And also what we find with extreme and extremist is that voters readily apply that label to Democrats.

[00:37:21] And in fact, in most surveys, we see people think Democrats are actually more extreme and extremist. And so we want to call them things that we cannot credibly be called. So in addition to the label question, I’ll round out by saying what’s more important is to describe what it is they’re up to and their agenda and the ways to encapsulate that we find to be most compelling, most resonant or most credible are they want to take away our freedoms.

[00:37:51] Freedom’s word big important word for a U. S. audience and they want to control us and decide our futures for us. [00:38:00] That’s really the way to package it that allows us to speak both about issues like abortion and also other economic issues. When we talk about they want to take away our freedom to retire in dignity, that’s a social security reference.

[00:38:14] They want to take away our freedom to join in union. They want to control us. And decide not just whether and when we have kids, but whether and when we can actually put food on the table. So we want to mix and match and make clear that the outcomes of their agenda are going to hurt you, the listener, the voter.

[00:38:35] Sue Hyde: That was excellent. 

[00:38:39] Scot Nakagawa: I have a quick question. We hear a lot about how we are losing the narrative battle on crime and immigration. Do you think that’s true? And if it is, why? 

[00:38:52] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Ah, this is just so sad. Um, immigration and crime are the [00:39:00] prime examples of where center left parties around the world have really taken the bait and have really agreed tacitly to have the opposition’s conversation over and over again and to try to present themselves as I said before, the B minus version.

[00:39:17] So it’s basically they’ve precapitulated by saying, okay, we agree that, this election is going to be who’s tougher on crime, that’s the electoral calculus and decision. And that should be What you have in mind. And so we’re going to promise to voters that we’re also going to crack down.

[00:39:32] We’re going to promise to voters that we’re also going to fund the police or in the immigration case, we’re also going to crack down on the border. We’re also going to find and deport people. And the problem with this, obviously the number one problem with this is what it actually does in the world.

[00:39:47] That is the actual number one problem that these are extraordinarily racist and regressive and punitive. And just They’re bad things to do. That’s actually what’s wrong with it. [00:40:00] Period. From a strategic perspective, from a winning elections perspective, from a because that’s the argument that gets made, and it’s an argument that gets made to me constantly, that I’m sacrificing and I’m jeopardizing, In the U.

[00:40:14] S. case, Democrats ability to win because I’m such a bleeding heart, social justice warrior that I can’t see the forest for the trees and I’m an idiot and I’m unstrategic and we just gotta swallow this pill and also present ourselves in these ways because that’s what voters want.

[00:40:30] That is a fundamental misapprehension of how people come to political judgments. Because what it says is that these conflicted voters that we’re fighting over all the time, they have this position. And that’s just simply not true. What the research shows is that they’re conflicted for a reason. If they had a fixed ideological position, they would be left or they would be right.

[00:40:54] They wouldn’t be toggling between these positions. And so the question is, How is it [00:41:00] that a Democrat running for office saying I promise to govern as a Republican is somehow going to move people away from Republicans? If you’re telling them, hey, here’s what you should hunger for, a Republican solution, then I have a newsflash for you.

[00:41:15] They’re gonna vote for a Republican because you just told them that they possess the better solutions. And we see that over and over again. We see it in the European context. And so I think we’re losing these things because Our purported leaders, not all of them, but a lot of them have taken this very bad advice over and over again and are actually feeding a right wing storyline and feeding an idea that the right is better, quote unquote, on these topics by parroting the right.

[00:41:49] They have at the same time pissed off the base who is largely not wanting to repeat and now not even wanting to turn out and vote. And what [00:42:00] we know is that elections in the U. S. are, at least presidentially, won or lost by a handful. This is the pathetic truth of our fundamentally undemocratic system.

[00:42:12] Elections are won and lost by, one percentage point in six states. And so the name of the game we see over and over again is turnout. It’s not actually moving these mythical swing voters. of whom at this point there’s basically like seven. I like to joke that they’re, there’s seven of them and they’re exhausted because they keep getting recruited for focus groups.

[00:42:32] Like they have to do every single focus group because there’s so few of them. Most people already have their mind made up. Between Trump and Biden, what they don’t have their mind made up about is third party, skip the top of the ticket and turn out to vote in the first place. And I would remind folks that in the United States, the largest swath of human beings is voter eligible non voters.

[00:42:57] That is larger than Republicans and it [00:43:00] is larger than Democrats. So the name of the game is really Are we going to get people to turn out? And how do we raise the saliency of the election? And what we find over and over again, It’s that in the U. S. when voters understand that what is on the line is will you have more freedom or will you have less, will you have the future you want for your kids or will everything be taken away from you, they turn out and they turn out and vote as they should.

[00:43:29] And so specifically now on crime, what we have found and I would really shout out and lift up the work of Vera Institute, is that When we pivot away from quote unquote tough on crime and having an argument around You’re tough on we’re tough on crime. We’re tougher. No, we’re tougher. No, we’re tougher and Instead talk about serious about solutions when we recognize that this crime focus Yes, it’s real people are worried about it.

[00:43:57] That is not that’s [00:44:00] not made up The reasons for their worry may be media fed and so on, but those are people’s genuine feelings, rightly or wrongly. But what they hunger for is safety. That’s the basic psychological need. And so if you can have messaging, and we did this in Minnesota, we did this in Wisconsin in 2020 and 2022, we did it to a certain extent in Pennsylvania, if you can meet people’s underlying Actual need, which is for safety by saying, for example, in a message.

[00:44:33] We know what keeps us safe. It’s having communities where we look out for our neighbors and people have what we need. It’s having the people who are sworn to serve and protect us act in our interest and treat us all as equals. But today, MAGA Republicans want us pointing our fingers in the wrong direction.

[00:44:50] They stoke fear while they slash budgets for everything our communities need, because they know that if [00:45:00] we’re fearing anyone who doesn’t look like us, we will keep doing it. We will not look, we can look the other way while they’re picking our pockets. That was a little bit of a messy articulation.

[00:45:10] But basically, you say, hey, here’s what you actually want. It’s safety. Here’s what we actually do to get it. We have solutions. We know how. Here’s why the other side is trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Here is why they are full of it. And here’s what we need to get done. The same is true on immigration, and on immigration, in particular, an appeal to freedom, which I referenced earlier, is really potent.

[00:45:34] We say, Most of us would do whatever it takes for our families. We work, we sacrifice, we would even pack up everything to move to a new place. And that takes courage. Immigrant Americans move here for the promise of freedom and opportunity in this country. And we think that moving is one of the best and hardest things a person can do.

[00:45:56] But MAGA Republicans, they feed off of chaos. [00:46:00] They grow off of hatred, and they live off of fear. They need us to point the finger at newcomers, while they keep blocking the solutions every family needs. We can create a fair immigration process that respects all families, ensure we have safety and order at our border, and have a country that we’re all proud to call home.

[00:46:22] That’s, roughly speaking, an immigration message. 

[00:46:26] Scot Nakagawa: Is this advice the same advice you give to people who are in those kind of tougher situations in red and purple places? 

[00:46:34] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Absolutely. 

[00:46:36] Scot Nakagawa: I hope people heard that. 

[00:46:40] Anay Shenker-Osorio: It’s how we’ve won in red and purple places. I don’t work in blue places. I just don’t.

[00:46:45] They don’t need me. 

[00:46:47] Scot Nakagawa: Yeah. Yeah. That’s really heartening because I think folks who live in those places are really struggling and this gives him courage. So thank you for that. 

[00:46:56] Sue Hyde: Our listeners love analysis [00:47:00] and they also love Advice about what they should do. So as we move into this more heated up environment around the elections, and I’m not just talking about the presidential, I’m also talking about state and local local elections.

[00:47:20] What would you advise folks in terms of, having useful but short conversations with friends, family? Neighbors. 

[00:47:32] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Yeah. So what I would say is that you want to follow the same values, villain, vision, order, and you want to personalize it to what you know, if it is friends and family, as opposed to strangers.

[00:47:45] If you know that your uncle really cares about fishing, like start there. If you know that your high school friend really cares about their kids, start there. So what that looks like in illustration, I’m going to have to make up a case [00:48:00] because, Each one of these will be idiosyncratic, and, it’s a friend, and she’s on the PTA with you, and she really cares about her kids, but, she thought the economy was great under Trump, or she just thinks they’re all bastards and why bother voting.

[00:48:13] Then you start off, ironically, yes, with where she is, in terms of her interests, not in terms of just capitulating to everything that she thinks, but you’re like, at drop off or whatever, and you’re like, and she’s saying whatever she’s saying. And you say, Yeah, I hear you. Things are really tough right now.

[00:48:32] And I don’t know about you, but we’ve had to make some changes in terms of what we pack at school lunch or what we buy in terms of groceries and just figure the budget out. I think we’re all there. But when I step back and I really think, who’s been making a fortune since the pandemic?

[00:48:49] Like who is going gangbusters right now? I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s the people who are always benefiting. It’s the billionaires. It’s the [00:49:00] corporations who have intentionally, they brag about it, jacked up our prices because they can. And what are we going to do? And so when I see that’s what’s going on, and I look at the choice before me, which, I’ll be honest, I don’t love, I don’t love this choice, but I know that this is a choice between a person who not only handed massive tax giveaways to people who already had everything, but has laid out plans to do more of the same.

[00:49:31] And a person who maybe inadequately, maybe not enough has slashed junk fees, has tried over and again to, tackle student loan debt, has delivered on the child tax credit would want to do more, but the Republicans blocked him. To me, it’s really a question of figuring out. Who’s behind making us struggle?

[00:49:57] And that’s how I come to my decision. [00:50:00] It’s having those kinds of conversations. 

[00:50:03] Sue Hyde: That’s great. Thank you. 

[00:50:06] Scot Nakagawa: Nat I want to talk about your podcast for a minute. Words to Win By takes listeners on a journey around the globe as you unpack real world narrative shifts that led to real world victories. So what does it mean for the U.

[00:50:19] S. pro democracy movement to win? figure out how to orient ourselves to international democracy movements that can advance our respective goals of building a more inclusive and pluralistic democracy globally. What insights can you share with us? 

[00:50:35] Anay Shenker-Osorio: Yeah, so the episodes, each episode is about a campaign we won somewhere in the world and how, so spoiler alert, they all end happy.

[00:50:44] There’s, in the newest season, it’s a little bit more complicated because the finales are about the economy and how to talk about the economy, so there’s some winning and then there’s some consternation, too, but for the most part, they’re about campaigns we won. And what I would say is that some [00:51:00] of them are domestic.

[00:51:00] For example, the Greater Than Fear episode from season one goes into the whole Minnesota thing. Obviously, it doesn’t take the story all the way into the present day because that was a few seasons ago, but it lays the foundation for how that was done, and there are other U. S. episodes. But what it does is it really takes you behind the scenes, for example, with Jacinda Ardern becoming Prime Minister of New Zealand.

[00:51:24] When I lived in Australia, I was fortunate enough to also work with the Labour Party in New Zealand. It really takes you into What are campaigns like? And what are people considering at the highest level? What are the kind of people in charge looking at narratively? How are they making their decisions?

[00:51:42] Why are there often a group of people that kind of are purveyors of milquetoast or status quo messaging? How do they overcome that? And I think that in terms of what lessons it has to teach a domestic audience, I would point, for example, to recent [00:52:00] episode about Brazil. Brazil had an election in 22.

[00:52:03] It was an election between two former presidents, both of them fairly old, both of them grossly unpopular among young people. I don’t know if any of that felt familiar to you, but in some ways, The exact correlate of our election this year, in some ways, the mirror opposite, because of course, the person in power was the right wing authoritarian.

[00:52:28] And the person who was trying to come back into power was the left wing candidate. And certainly a much more decidedly left wing and populist person, a socialist than Joe Biden, but, some parallels. And. What that episode details is how an extraordinarily effective campaign increased youth participation by 47%, not an audio typo, the actual figure.

[00:52:54] And what they did was, similar to what I referenced earlier, they got folks to vote. [00:53:00] Young people really engaged, they took their defiance, their desire to defy, and their exhaustion over why are these our two candidates, are you kidding me? We’ve already had these people as president, we don’t want either of them.

[00:53:12] To channel that into a message that they used, which was, if you don’t decide, they’ll decide for you. And basically, your participation here is really about you demonstrating that you are an electoral force. And yeah. Obviously, in their case, we need to elect Lula. And Once the votes are counted and the totals are done, and the inauguration happens, we have not yet begun to fight.

[00:53:45] That voting and elections, that’s merely a first step, a single tool in the arsenal that we have to deploy for the actual change that we want. And that’s an extraordinary lesson. There’s an extraordinary lesson from Costa Rica in [00:54:00] their ongoing battle with fossil fuel corporations.

[00:54:03] Beautiful lesson from Switzerland from season two around combating xenophobia using shared values. And I think we were talking earlier about immigration. There’s an episode early on about Australia and the work that we were able to do there, flipping the public Moving the public by 20 points in a single year on people seeking asylum and winning four sequential campaigns around the offshore detention prisons that the country was having, a third party operate for them and vacating the majority of those people and integrating them into Australian society.

[00:54:42] Scot Nakagawa: All right. Thank you so much. I, while you were talking, this voice in my head kept saying, authoritarians drive their agendas with fear, right? So the pro democracy movement needs to rely on hope. And when you think about what fear and hope, which feels better, right? So if it’s an invitation to [00:55:00] participate, to claim the future hope would do us a lot of good.

[00:55:04] And paint the beautiful tomorrow. 

[00:55:06] Sue Hyde: Let’s do that. All 

[00:55:09] Scot Nakagawa: right. Thanks again, Lanaat. 

[00:55:11] Sue Hyde: Thanks for having me. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much.