Robert Danisch, University of Waterloo
February 18, 2025
Ontario residents will soon elect a new government, and Canadians should expect a federal election this spring.
Elections matter. They are opportunities for democracies to enact the bedrock principle that leaders are accountable to the citizenry — and for citizens to examine how communication practices inhibit or enhance democratic life.
For politicians, elections pose a specific, clear communication challenge: How does a politician persuade a voter?
Persuade voters
Success in an election requires persuasion. Too often, though, politicians misunderstand the process of persuasion. The most common mistake is to believe that explaining a specific policy proposal will influence voters.
Ontario Liberal Leader Bonnie Crombie began her campaign, for example, touting platform doors for Toronto subway stops. This is a sure sign Crombie will fail to persuade a plurality of voters.
Why? Because Crombie is mistakenly thinking about communication as a process of transmitting information — transmit the right information or policy idea and the public will nod in agreement. That’s not how communication works.
Science communicators call this the “deficit model” of communication (the public lacks information; once they get it, they change their behaviour).
Motivate voters; control the narrative
There’s little evidence that information sharing is persuasive, and popular policy positions routinely fail to persuade voters (a casual look at the last presidential election in the United States demonstrates this). Politicians, of course, want to talk about policy, but policy is how one governs — not how one persuades.
Politicians need to motivate voters, not inform them. Ancient orators like Demosthenes and Cicero knew this, as did former U.S. president Barack Obama and even authoritarian leaders like Hugo Chavez.
Explaining policy positions is not how to win an election.
Crombie’s proposal for platform edge doors reveals a deeper communication problem. A policy like this implies a frame, or a map, through which people are invited to see the world.
Crombie’s policy proposal suggests that the world is a dangerous place. If we accept that frame, then we are likely to feel fear for our safety and imagine the government as our protector — this is the likely effect of her policy talk.
This is exactly the frame that conservative politicians often promote. In elections, the party that controls the frame wins.
The frame implied by any policy matters more than the content of the policy in an election. Another way to understand the power of language is to think of a simple phrase like “tax relief.” For years, left-leaning political parties have advocated for middle class “tax relief.”
But this frame assumes that taxes are a burdensome infringement (the word “relief” signifies some burden that we need relief from). That is the assumption of right-leaning political parties.
The more politicians on the left continue to portray taxes this way, the more persuasive the parties on the right become.
Whose values?
The important lesson here is that politicians need to have the conversation they want, not the conversation their opponents want. Donald Trump’s most powerful communication skill is forcing the media and his opponents onto his conversational terrain.
Trump’s oppenent, Kamala Harris, tried to talk values. But her messaging was often too confusing, too complex and too varied to be persuasive, especially compared to Trump’s repetitive drumbeat of value-based accusations.
Consider the broader frame that government’s job is to help the economy. Some have argued “the economy” is a fiction, a rhetorical construction that suits right-leaning political parties. Whenever the left advocates for a policy that intends to help “the economy” (a higher minimum wage, for example), they recirculate and reaffirm a conservative frame.
At the core of these frames are often a set of values: freedom is good, government can’t be trusted, the economy matters most. Messaging that focuses on why is much more effective than messaging that focuses on what and how.
When politicians talk about values more than they provide information, they are more likely to get attention and cause reactions. Values talk — about what’s good or bad, right or wrong — tends to target the more primal, limbic part of our brain, which can cause people to feel motivated to act.
Crombie, therefore, needs to explicitly articulate her values, why she is running for office, and make sure to implicitly frame any policy suggestion through attention to those values. Right now, she is implying conservative values through liberal policies — that won’t work.
Stories reinforce the frame
Values tend to come wrapped in the stories we tell about ourselves and our moment. Marshall Ganz, Harvard sociologist and community organizer, trained Barack Obama’s campaign volunteers in a form of storytelling, based on values, that was intended to motivate people.
Good stories have villains and heroes, along with challenges or choices. Most importantly, good stories create a feeling of identification — a “we” that navigates a set of challenges or choices.
Stories that make people feel hope, confidence, solidarity, anger and urgency are particularly adept at motivation. And these stories are also able to reinforce the frame through which we view the world, causing a story to “feel true” for voters even if it contains factual inaccuracies.
The story that resonates most powerfully creates a sense of identification and makes a specific frame seem true drives electoral outcomes.
Vision of the future
The very best stories have a clear vision of the future. Too often politicians fixate on, and lament, problems. All of that problem talk can inhibit motivation. A clear picture of an ideal future shows the citizenry how a story ends.
These imagined futures can be inspiring in ways that drive action. Painting a compelling tomorrow is a central part of political persuasion.
These aspects of persuasion have been true for centuries. Our moment, however, adds a complicating element — our social media systems.
Scholars of rhetoric have long known that repetition is persuasive. Social media amplifies the power of persuasion. This might not improve democratic decision-making, but politicians must still recognize how slogans, memes and sound bites all become the resources for repetition and the grounds in which specific frames or stories begin to dominate conversations.
Controlling what gets repeated and using figures that are repeatable are necessary contemporary considerations.
To be clear, if you want to win an election: control the frame, talk about values more than policy, tell a compelling story, paint a bright future, and find ways to repeat, repeat, repeat.
Robert Danisch, Professor, Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo
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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.