John Ray joined me on today’s episode of Rural Weekly Live (Joe’s out on the road) and we got into something I’ve been chewing on for years: the difference between a message that’s popular and a message that’s persuasive.
If you’ve ever knocked a door, you already know the difference in your gut. You walk up, say “hey, I’m Matt, I’m with the campaign, and I think this economy sucks,” and the person nods along. Yeah, the economy’s complete shit. That’s a popular message. Everybody agrees. But watch what happens next. One person says the economy sucks and Trump’s doing everything he can to fix it. The next says it sucks and Trump’s to blame for all of it. The next says it sucks because corporations are squeezing everybody they can. Same opening line, three completely different places the conversation goes. Popular got you in the door. It didn’t move anybody.
That gap, between what plays well on paper and what actually changes a vote, is what John and I built a poll around.
If you’ve worked for any campaign over the last several cycles then you can probably relate to this. Someone emails you polling and essentially says “if you just say these magic words, voters will come around.” We say the words. Twenty years go by. We look up and ask why the needle hasn’t moved.
Well, the truth is that the poll was never going to move it, because persuasion on a single issue is not how most people decide how to vote.
Some people treat politics like debate class in high school. It isn’t debate club. It’s homecoming. It’s a popularity contest.
People vote on identity, not just ideology. I hear it on the doors all the time. Not an argument, but “my grandpa was a Democrat, that’s why I’m a Democrat.” “My family’s always voted Republican.” Some people seem to treat politics like debate class in high school. It isn’t debate club. It’s homecoming. It’s a popularity contest. You can have every argument right and still lose if nobody wants to hang out with your club.
Which is why I keep coming back to the stuff that doesn’t make the New York Times. CNN and Fox want the scoreboard, who’s up, who’s down. That’s not actionable for somebody running a county party in a small town. “Fifteen people came to our local event” isn’t a national story, but going from 5 people to 10 to 20 in your county is exactly what moves things at the level where it’s possible to move them. The media has no way of seeing that, so it doesn’t count it.
We all know by now that Republicans aren’t happy with their own party. A lot of them are a little embarrassed. They’re no longer putting up signs or getting involved at the local level. They feel like the party’s driving off a cliff. They are never going to vote for Democrats, but they’ve got no momentum and not much reason to turn out.
Meanwhile every Democrat I know is going to vote in every single election between now and 2028. They’re not in love with the Democratic Party. They’re voting against Trump, and they’ll do it regardless of who’s on the ballot. Stack the three to five points of genuinely movable rural voters on top of that, and all of the sudden districts that have long been forgotten by the Democratic Party are in play. If we get rural Democratic vote share from 33 up to 39 percent, that reshapes American politics. That’s starting to happen.
John’s caution is the right one, though. Republicans are taking their bad numbers seriously and they’re in the lab too. The short-term picture is good for us and we should be honest about that. The long-term picture means we’d better be building something real, not just waiting for the other side to keep handing us gifts.
And now it’s on all of us to capitalize on this movement in our own local communities. Yes, popular messages get us in the door. But persuasion is the slow, unglamorous, neighbor-to-neighbor work of building something people actually want to be part of.
