Say What You Mean

After getting the same Vera Institute of Justice messaging presentation twice on Friday, I’ve been thinking about what messaging consultants are actually trying to do.

The average messaging summit is a triangulation between three things:

* What the consultants’ funders want
* What their pollsters tell them voters like
* What the audience of candidates, staffers, and pundits needs to hear

That’s the strategic task: here are some folks who don’t talk to each other or can’t hear what each other is saying. How should they communicate?

But that’s also the whole problem.

We start with a naive paradigm: citizens talk honestly to each other and their elected officials. Politicians listen, then speak. Citizens vote. But it’s more complicated than that! Politics is a constant battle by which different politicians can win, different laws can pass, different programs can get implemented.

People with expertise or money want to convince their fellow citizens that the naive conclusions of dialogue are wrong. So we ask: What should candidates say and do to win? What should pundits say to help them? What about party members and primary voters? Advocacy directors? Activists?

I’m on that list. So are you.

Here’s how it plays out in my work: citizens are worried about crime and demand their elected officials do something. Politicians hear that crime is salient, so they give cops massive raises, exempt police from accountability, increase sentences, send in the National Guard. “Something must be done. This is something. We must do this.”

Meanwhile, experts look at incarceration numbers, racial disparities, crime rates, and how other countries handle these problems—and conclude we have a prison problem. We suggest lower sentences, point to the cruelty of these institutions, identify root causes. Then pollsters tell us our messages aren’t landing.

Back in 2014, I published David Green’s “Penal populism and the folly of ‘doing good by stealth‘” in The Good Society. He describes how Tony Blair pursued effective criminal justice reforms quietly while making loud, punitive pronouncements—what he calls “loud low-roading” paired with “quiet high-roading.” The logic: good policy can only survive if wrapped in tough rhetoric or hidden entirely.

But Green argues this approach corrodes democratic legitimacy and public trust. When citizens are treated as audiences to manipulate rather than as participants in deliberation, the legitimacy crisis that drives penal populism gets worse. The solution to public punitiveness isn’t better spin—it’s actual engagement that treats people as capable of weighing complex trade-offs when given real information.

The US locks up too many people, especially too many Black and brown people. Voters currently reward politicians who do that. Maybe that changes when we stop gaming the message and start being honest about what we know.