Erin Norman is the Lee Family Fellow and Senior Director of Communications Strategies at State Policy Network.
Do you and your audience speak the same language? Public policy impacts everyone and often dominates the news cycle so experts in the field often make the mistake of assuming people are well-versed and understand the issues of the day. But the average person does not spend a significant amount of time thinking about what happens in Washington or even in their statehouse. And given that a Pew Research Center poll shows that two-thirds of Americans feel exhausted when they think about politics and just four percent feel excited, we shouldn’t expect people to pay more attention in the near future.
For example, a recent poll by State Policy Network shows that just 19 percent of voters can pick the correct definition of an Education Savings Account (ESA) from a list. Forty percent of voters didn’t even guess, instead opting for a “not sure” response.
This extends beyond the names of legislation or policy. To get a better understanding of how messaging is perceived, SPN’s poll also tested the associations with key words and phrases our Network uses in messaging policy. Except for “Electoral College,” which gets ample news coverage at least every four years, a majority of voters have either a neutral opinion or are unsure how they feel about the terms. When messaging rallies against the “Administrative State” or highlights how a policy will strengthen “federalism,” the truth is, that doesn’t mean much to the average American.
This recent research is a great reminder that our audiences are not necessarily like us. SPN’s Lura Forcum has written about this and why our brains project our own thoughts onto the people around us. Nate Silver has a recent substack reminding us that American life is “increasingly self-sorted along political lines,” and that we are much better off trusting research, even in its imperfection, than our social circles for a good read of what Americans think about politics and policy.
To maximize effectiveness, messaging aimed at voters should:
