We're expecting too much. Let's get back to persuading.

There was a fatal flaw to President Biden’s message about democracy being on the line in the 2024 election: He expected that Americans would care.

Oops.

President Biden did a poor job of explaining why they should care and — surprise — they didn’t.

Expectation has become a widespread and insufficient substitute for persuasion in our politics, and it’s undermining Democratic campaigns and left-leaning causes.

We expect that voters want the equal treatment of all Americans.

We expect that voters want the government to protect the rights of workers.

We expect that voters care that Republicans are more interested in protecting guns than children.

We expect that voters will be upset that Republicans will give away their tax dollars to millionaires and billionaires.

The epidemic of expectations is a cancer in Americans’ communications culture and it seems to undermine Democrats more… I suspect because of our disposition for respecting expertise and stability. When we communicate, we tend to assume everyone else respects them, too.

“I don’t know how to explain to you why you should care about other people,” an exasperated Lauren Morrill posted in a viral tweet during a 2017 fight over the Affordable Care Act (interestingly: the zeitgeist incorrectly attributes the quote to Anthony Fauci).

I certainly remember sharing the sentiment... that feeling of intellectual frustration and moral superiority, mixed with hope that shame might convince those Republican lawmakers to care enough to stop trying to deny people affordable health coverage.

It’s so easy to see now that the sentiment was lazy and condescending, and how that attitude contributed to the visceral pushback against Democrats in the last election. I heard it from voters myself directly and repeatedly — including from lifelong Democrats — while campaigning in deeply purple Salt Lake County last year.

But self-flagellation is hardly the point.

We need to stop expecting a consistency of norms and instead, do a better job persuading Americans that those norms are in their interest.

Thinking we shouldn’t have to persuade people to care is one of our foundational problems.

Persuasion is a declining (if not lost) art form and as we build forward, we should make a conscious effort to expect less and persuade more.

How often do we hear candidates and elected officials say what they think on an issue but skip why they think it? When they skip the “why,” they essentially surrender the opportunity to persuade anyone who doesn’t already have a strong opinion on the issue.

That also means surrendering an opportunity to connect with the audience on an emotional level.

We like to think people are making an intellectual choice when voting but most — especially low-information voters — actually make an emotional choice about how they feel about a candidate or their party or people in power.

Democrats spent a year telling voters about how good the economy was — and on a macro scale, it truly was remarkable — but many voters didn’t feel it was good for them.

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Trump's spending power-grab last week illustrated our challenge.

Democratic reaction to the Trump Administration's illegal executive order on federal spending?last week generally fell into one of three buckets:

This is illegal.

This is an attack on Congress' authority.

This is bad because it's going to hurt 80 million Medicaid recipients, millions of families with kids in day care, and families who rely on food stamps to survive.

The first message expects voters to care about legality and the second expects that voters will care about Congress' authority. Recent history has shown neither is true.

Frankly, expecting Americans would understand why a particular Trump action is bad gives Americans too much credit. They're more focused on their own lives and solving their own problems to invest the mental energy it takes to keep pace with everything that's going on.?

Remember: when asked by YouGov in 2022, Americans said they believed 27 percent of the country was Muslim, 30 percent was Jewish, 33 percent was atheist, and 70 percent was Christian. They believed 21 percent of Americans were transgender, 30 percent were gay or lesbian, and 29 percent were bisexual. They believed 27 percent were Native American, 29 percent were Asian, 39 percent were Hispanic,?41 percent were Black, and 49 percent were white.

When we fail to provide context in our political communications, we run the risk of allowing assumptions and misinformation to furnish the context instead.

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Even in local politics, real persuasion is often a casualty of expediency.

Faced with rising costs and shrinking attention spans, local candidates seem to be increasingly sacrificing real persuasion for an assumption of agreement — or at least an assumption of understanding. It’s cheaper and more efficient to skip the complexity of a persuasive argument about a policy matter in favor of a confident values-based declarative.

When you have only 60 seconds in a debate to answer a question about homelessness or housing or infrastructure prioritization, what choice does a candidate really have?

The short-term benefit of this messaging approach is undeniable, but so is the long-term detriment. Like children on a sugar high, we are conditioning voters to expect easy answers to extremely complex problems. And when the intractable problem isn’t solved in the first week, first month, first term, the crash just adds to a long-term disaffection of voters.

Taking the time to genuinely persuade voters is a bigger lift, but I believe it’s necessary for our long-term expansion of support.

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Our tone matters, too.

Modern persuasion is more about values and feelings than facts and figures. It’s also about the tone with which we try to persuade.

When I worked at the non-profit ONE Campaign, I would occasionally make derisive jokes about having to give people hugs before I offered a direct opinion. It wasn’t until I was in my late 30s that I discovered that adapting my communication style to the preference of my audience didn’t mean I was giving something away, but rather that I was increasing the likelihood of getting what I wanted.

There’s no shame in adapting your messaging approach to fit your audience; in fact there’s honor in it. It’s savvy and respectful of our audience’s attention.

If we don’t listen to what our audience wants, how can we frame our arguments in terms seen as favorable by that audience?

We need to have the humility to accept that not everyone has had the same experience as us, or consume the same news/content as us, so they don’t have the same perspective as us and maybe not the same values as us. Which leaves us with two choices: Persuade them or abandon them.

Do we want to be right, or do we want to win so we can do what’s right?

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My favorite bit of communications advice I give clients and students is that there is no such thing as a solution without a problem.

It’s a matter of framing — a practical reminder that anytime you introduce a policy idea, you need to explain the problem you’re trying to solve and why you’re trying to solve it. Expecting that people will see the “problem” through the same lens as you — or even see it as a problem at all — is both risky and missing an opportunity for persuasion that will benefit you in the long run.

We need to tell people that a problem exists, why it’s a problem (and maybe whose fault it is), and how our idea to solve it will help them. We’re creating an emotional loop that closes with a satisfying subconscious shot of serotonin.

Consider the differences between these three statements:

We should build more houses. (Solution)

There aren’t enough homes in our community so we should build more houses. (Problem and solution)

There aren’t enough homes in our community and I want our kids and your kids to be able to make their lives here when they grow up, so we should build more houses. (Problem, motivation, and solution)

Which of the three is most likely to earn the support of someone who hasn’t really thought about the issue yet?

Most voters try to think about politics and government as little as possible. In fact they avoid it, and the opinions we offer compete not only with the opposing viewpoint on the matter, but they compete with every other thing going on in people’s lives at that moment.

So we have to persuade them why they should also care about those issues instead of merely expecting they should and demeaning them when they don’t. Persuasion is how we can bridge our current bleak reality with the future we’re trying to build.

There is a strong argument to be made on the value of brevity and repetition to our modern communications. I make that argument frequently and stand by it. But the most powerful of our messages will be those that are concise, repeated frequently, and are persuasive.?

We will never win power back if we do not persuade those who can give us that power that our leaders are the right ones.

Today Democrats control no branch of the federal government and just 40 percent of state legislative chambers. While turning out Democrats in otherwise-low-turnout mid-term elections will help us improve our standing in 2026, in an awful lot of districts, we’re actually going to need to win some center-right voters, too.

In both cases, we’ll need persuasion to do it, not merely expectations.