Think tanks are in the persuasion business. We think there are some good policies that lawmakers ought to adopt, and we know that elected officials are not going to pass them unless they’re popular. That requires us to persuade people that our ideas are good. We can tell whether it’s working through polls. Polls also help understand what approaches and what appeals people are more interested in. I speak about polling with Erin Norman, Lee Family fellow and senior director of communications strategies at the State Policy Network, for the Overton Window podcast.

Polling is a powerful tool to figure out what people think and what they are open to. “I think this is something that gets overlooked a lot,” Norman says.

“There are polling questions you can ask that get at why this is an important issue,” she says. “You have to make sure that you are explaining what the policy is and what it means for what voters care about.”

For instance, if people’s first concerns about immigration are safety and jobs, they’re not going to be persuaded by an appeal to cultural diversity. An attempt to persuade them has to address their concerns about safety and jobs.

“Polls can help you capture some of those feelings, which can help you build stronger messaging,” Norman says.

She mentions the points President Obama made about the Affordable Care Act. People were worried about the cost of insurance and access to care. His talking points were about cost and access.

Polling can be used by unscrupulous people to claim their proposal does the things people care about, even if it doesn’t. “The temptation is definitely there, if you have data that says that people want X, to spin it and say that this creates X,” Norman says.

Polls do more than figure out what people care about. They also help candidates, political figures and organizations decide on their strategy. “The majority of polling is kept internally and used for strategic goals,” Norman says.

That includes things like crisis communications, where an organization or a politician has a big problem and needs to allay concerns. “They’ll poll people to ask, ‘Have you heard about it? What do you think about it?’ And that informs communications teams.”

Polling can also identify appeals that are effective with select groups. “One of my favorite things that happens in polling are segmentation studies, where you take a universe of people—whether it’s registered votes or registered voters in a certain state—and then use their attitudes, behaviors and demographic characteristics that you can then create targeting and messaging for,” Norman says. “The most famous one of these are the soccer moms.”

People know why they believe an idea is good, but that is not enough. To convince others, you have to know why they might think an idea is good. “The real benefit of polling and other market research data is to identify trends and use that as a starting point for figuring out the right answer,” Norman says.

They are useful to the public policy debate in other ways, too. Polls help people understand the magnitude of major trends. “Two really good examples of this are attitudes about interracial marriage and gay marriage,” Norman says. “There are some cool charts that Gallup has put together where you can see just how quickly opinion changed on those issues.”

Major changes don’t happen because polls identified the magic message that persuaded everyone. “There really isn’t a silver bullet. It’s not that if we just get the right words, people will understand,” Norman says. “Using the right words is important — I want to make sure I’m clear on that — but you’re not going to get the perfect language that tests amazing and everyone gets it all of a sudden.

“It’s a slow-moving process and you have to measure your progress the whole way through.”

Check out our conversation at the Overton Window podcast.

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