Six years of professional messaging training. A first-time volunteer with zero formal background just outperformed every talking point I would have reached for.
Watched one of our newest volunteers, someone with genuinely zero prior political organizing experience who only signed up to help out three weeks ago, successfully persuade a clearly, genuinely undecided voter at the door today using an argument I would never have thought to make myself, despite six years of professional campaign messaging training and considerably more formal preparation than this particular volunteer has had access to across her entire brief time with our campaign.
The voter in question had expressed, fairly early in the conversation, a specific, genuine skepticism about whether either candidate in our race actually understood what daily life is like for an ordinary working family in this district, a common enough concern I have heard voiced many times across this cycle, one our campaign has an entire, carefully workshopped set of talking points specifically designed to address, emphasizing our candidate’s own working-class background and specific policy positions aimed at exactly this kind of economic anxiety.
Our new volunteer did not reach for any of that carefully prepared messaging. Instead, she simply, genuinely shared her own direct, personal experience navigating a specific, similar economic hardship in her own recent life, and how she had personally come to trust our candidate’s specific position on this issue, a genuinely unscripted, entirely personal appeal that connected with the voter in a way I watched happen in real time, considerably more effectively than any of our own carefully developed talking points typically manage.
I think there is something genuinely important, and genuinely humbling to admit after six years of professional training in exactly this kind of persuasive messaging, about how much more powerful an authentic, unscripted personal story can land compared to even the most carefully, professionally workshopped talking point. Our own messaging, however genuinely well researched and well tested, inevitably carries a certain professional polish that a voter can often detect and, at least partially, discount specifically because it reads as professionally constructed rather than as one genuine person simply, directly sharing her own actual experience with another.
I spoke with this volunteer afterward, genuinely curious about her own thinking, and she seemed almost surprised that what she had said carried any particular strategic weight at all, describing it simply as the honest thing that came to mind once the voter raised his specific concern, with no awareness that she had, in that unscripted moment, actually outperformed six years of my own professional training at achieving exactly the persuasive effect our campaign spends considerable resources trying to engineer more deliberately.
I think this experience is genuinely reshaping how I want to approach volunteer training going forward, less emphasis on getting every volunteer to reliably recite our carefully developed talking points, and considerably more emphasis on actually helping volunteers identify and confidently share their own genuine, personal connection to whatever specific concern a given voter happens to raise, an approach that trades some of the message discipline professional campaigns generally prize for something considerably harder to fully control but that, based on today’s direct evidence, may actually land with considerably more genuine persuasive force.
I do not think this means abandoning our more structured messaging entirely, since a campaign this size genuinely does need some baseline consistency across dozens of volunteers having hundreds of separate conversations. But I am going to bring today’s specific example to our next volunteer training session, not as an isolated anecdote, but as a genuine, concrete demonstration of exactly the kind of authentic, personal persuasion I want our entire volunteer team to feel genuinely empowered to reach for, even when it means occasionally setting aside the more polished script I have spent considerable professional effort carefully developing.
I think what today ultimately taught me, more than any single tactical lesson about messaging or training, is a genuine humility about the actual limits of professional political expertise relative to the specific, irreplaceable power of one ordinary person speaking honestly to another about something they have both genuinely lived through. Six years of training taught me how to build a message. It apparently did not fully teach me what today’s volunteer already understood instinctively, that the most persuasive message is often simply the truest one, delivered by someone with no professional stake in delivering it well.
I am going to make a point of actually thanking her properly tomorrow, beyond the brief conversation we had today at the door, and I suspect she is going to be genuinely surprised to learn just how much of an impression her unscripted, entirely honest moment actually made on someone with considerably more formal training than she currently has, and considerably less natural instinct, apparently, for the exact thing that actually worked today.
I think I am also going to start actually asking every new volunteer, right at the start of their very first shift, to spend a few minutes simply thinking through their own genuine, personal connection to whatever issues our campaign is running on, before I hand them any of our more formal training materials at all. I suspect that ordering matters more than it sounds, letting a volunteer’s own authentic voice properly settle first, before our own carefully constructed talking points have the chance to quietly crowd it out.
More from this author at Tinsel Vandergraph, prat.uk.