Vote for Equality gets the message

While we’ve had some lovely judicial and legislative victories lately, you may have noticed that the LGBT community doesn’t necessarily do well when it comes to ballot measures. In fact, according to Vote for Equality educators David Fleischer and Regina Clemente, we’ve lost 33 of the last 34 ballot initiatives relating to same-sex marriage.

Vote for Equality is working to change that with a bold, smart social science experiment. So many people wailed, “What were they thinking?” after the Prop 8 results that Vote for Equality decided to find out.

Vote for Equality is the organizing arm of the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, and with the help of dozens of volunteers, they are organizing a “1,000-hour conversation” – one-on-one conversations with California residents to find out what people really think about gay marriage through door-to-door canvassing and phone banking.

By studying the conversations we have, we can gain insight about what really moves people and learn how to make future campaigns more effective.

The canvassing is combined with a fascinating look at ad campaigns from past ballot initiatives. Taking a hard, honest look at what has and hasn’t worked in the past will help us make more persuasive campaigns in the future.

One of the most important focuses of the messaging trainings is on understanding the point of view of the opposition or the undecided voter. Ads that move us won’t necessarily reach someone outside the community.

A voter who is strongly opposed to gay marriage won’t respond to an ad that just tells her she’s wrong – she’ll probably just dig her heels in even harder. And a voter who isn’t tuned in to the gay marriage debate won’t necessarily be moved by things that are meaningful to those of us who are.

Reaching that tuned-out or undecided voter is tricky. It’s important to have a clear message – and to repeat it. A voter who half-sees a commercial while he’s making dinner and talking on the phone needs to see it five to ten times before the message really sinks in.

And about those messages…

Fleischer and Clemente’s first session focused on contrasting the ads the GLBT community tends to use with the ads of anti–gay marriage activists. Ads for our team tend to be focused on fairness and rationality, because duh: If you really think it out, same-sex marriage bans make no sense.

Unfortunately, the other side bypasses the brain and goes straight for the gut and the adrenal glands. Our commercials sit the voter down for a nice chat over a cup of herbal tea. The other side grabs him by the lapels and starts screaming about how the gays are going legally force him to turn his church into a venue for naked gay circuit parties and there is NOTHING HE’LL BE ABLE TO DO ABOUT IT.

And with a lot of voters, that wins. You can’t think rationally when you’re panicking. It’s like asking someone to finish up her taxes before dealing with the zombie attack.

Ads from anti–gay marriage forces tend to focus on loss of control (“It will be illegal for your church to voice its views on homosexuality”) and wide-eyed children being turned gay by storybooks. In other words, they jab at the voter’s instincts to defend his rights and protect the innocent.

Both of those themes come up over and over, so we need to stop being surprised by them and deliver quick responses. And since the other side is already working of the voter’s emotions, it might be time to be less afraid of using emotional messages ourselves.

We don’t have to whip up the hysteria any further, but getting people in touch with a different set of feelings can’t hurt. In training for door-to-door canvassing, we learned to talk about personal experiences rather than falling back on detached logical arguments. It’s scarier, yes, but it does get the conversation going.

Perhaps the hardest – and most interesting – challenge is learning to empathize the voters who are against gay marriage. As hurtful as they’ve been to the LGBT community, most of them don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “Myoohoohahaha! Can’t wait to get started on the oppressing!” And most would be offended at the suggestion that they’re bigots.

Starting a debate by jabbing a finger in someone’s face and telling that he’s wrong and an awful person will cause him to shut down. It certainly won’t help him change his mind.

As hard as it is sometimes, we need to assume the best and give people credit for being the good people they are sincerely trying to be. That’s when we can get a real dialogue going instead of just a slogan-shouting competition.

There are a lot of questions to be answered – and hours and hours of conversations to go – but Vote for Equality is making some exciting progress toward creating clear, direct, honest messages that can help change minds.