This is the first of a series of IdeaLogs that will amplify messaging advice from our brand-new 2026 Edition of Voicing Our Values. You can download the whole book from our website.
The first thing you need to know about politics is: you can’t persuade everyone. Most people have a series of political and policy beliefs they will not abandon, no matter the circumstances.
Political beliefs are strongly shaped and reinforced by two fundamental psychological forces: social identity and confirmation bias.
Social identity is the psychology of dividing the world into us-versus-them, the in-group and the out-group. In our nonpolitical lives, the us can be as simple as which sports team a person favors. It can be about an individual’s family, college, or country. Being part of a group makes people feel good. It enhances pride and self-esteem, and usually there’s nothing wrong with that.
But the far right weaponizes racial, ethnic, and religious social identity. They encourage people to see their in-group as superior while casting the so-called out-group as a threat. This dynamic can become emotionally rewarding; blaming, excluding, discriminating, or even taking satisfaction in the misfortunes of an out-group can feel good. Using fear, division, and misinformation to mobilize the masses is as old as human civilization. Unfortunately, it works.
Confirmation bias, one of the oldest-known and best-proven cognitive biases, is the tendency for people to seek out information that confirms what they already believe or want to believe, while simultaneously ignoring or rejecting information that challenges those assumptions. Through this selective use of evidence, people reinforce their own views and can end up misleading themselves.
Conservatives have always provided selective information to trigger people’s preexisting right-leaning beliefs. But in recent years, far-right and MAGA communicators—lawmakers and advisors, influencers and anonymous bots—have reinforced confirmation bias with a firehose of falsehoods. It’s deliberate disinformation that certain people want to believe. Like social identity, they are thrilled to accept lies that support preexisting beliefs. They get a shot of dopamine that literally makes them feel good. (Read more about social identity and confirmation bias in Chapter 22.)
If people hold onto false beliefs no matter the facts, then who is persuadable? The people who pay little attention to politics or have lightly held beliefs.
For years, nationwide polls have found that about 40 percent of Americans steadfastly support the MAGA movement, led by President Trump, and their policies. At least 40-45 percent steadfastly oppose MAGA.[1] So, in nationwide policy and electoral campaigns, only about 15-20 percent are persuadable. But in raw numbers, that’s as many as 50 million Americans.
Each state and locality has a different situation, of course. But wherever you are, create messages that appeal to persuadable people, while holding the progressive base.
As a practical matter, this means if you are talking to someone who is not persuadable, end the conversation and move on to someone else. If you are deciding how to reach voters, use all available data to target the persuadable ones. In any campaign, time and money are limited, so don’t waste them on people who aren’t persuadable.
Finally, understand that persuadable Americans cannot really be labeled as “moderates” or “independents.” They are not thinking in ideological terms. Rather, they are ordinary people who hold both progressive and conservative beliefs. They support both free markets and regulation, both freedom and strong personal restrictions, both strict and compassionate justice. They don’t engage in politics with the emotional intensity of partisans, so they can be persuaded by either set of ideas. Persuadable audiences have one overriding but vague political question in mind: “Who is on my side?” Craft your theme and messages so they appeal to them.
[1] A note about language: Throughout Voicing Our Values, when we refer to “MAGA,” we are describing a set of political attitudes and priorities—not a political party or all conservatives. This is how it is widely used in polling and political analysis, to describe a distinct subset of views within the broader conservative movement.