Resource Library

Decades of political communication research has pointed to political persuasion (or changing someone’s mind) being one of the most difficult things to achieve, with campaigns having small effects on average. This would suggest that attempts at political persuasion, such as political ads in an electoral campaign, mostly do not move the needle much (if at all) with audiences. However, one response has been that these small average effects may be masking larger individual effects from sources of heterogeneity, or contextual pieces of a political ad such as message (content, tone, sponsor), audience (partisanship), and setting (battleground status, primary vs. general election, timing). 
Using an astonishing real-time design consisting of real ads from US presidential candidates, 59 unique experiments and 34,000 respondents over the course of the 2016 presidential election, the authors of this study find little evidence that any of the above conditions matter much when it comes to the persuasive effect of political ads on candidate favorability and vote choice. Indeed, owing to the large number of respondents (which makes finding even tiny effects more likely), the authors found a small but significant effect that ads can influence candidate favorability but no significant effect on ads actually influencing vote choice. In other words, the effectiveness of presidential campaign ads – even targeted ones – on persuading people to vote for one candidate or another may be greatly overstated.

Successful movements must be able to analyze the political conditions and determine a course of action—all while balancing the pull of “inside game” electoral politics with “outside game” movement building. Organizers often jump into this in moments of crisis and are given few tools to understand what they are doing and how to best do it. This is why Momentum asked the organizing veteran Alexandra Flores-Quilty—former president of the U.S. Student Association and cofounder of By the People—to craft this report packed with tools and concrete advice to address all of these complexities. In the early stages of a movement, where the public and base need to align on the problem and popular demand. As the movement progresses into the stages of institutionalizing wins and consolidating political hegemony, then there will be more need for the other parts of the ecology to be built out including in particular inside game, organizing within political parties, and even structure-based organizing. These and other lessons are broken down in this 50-page report. This report quotes other experienced organizers.

An overwhelming majority of Maine voters are concerned about the impacts of climate change, with degree of concern largely breaking down along party lines. 77% of respondents said they were concerned about the impacts of the changing climate, with 47% saying they were “very concerned.” 

82% of respondents said that the US government should do at least a moderate amount about global warming—an all-time high for public opinion on the issue. 70% of respondents (across all categories) believe that the US government, governments in other countries, businesses, or average people should do more to deal with climate change. 75% of respondents said they had personally observed effects of global warming. 64% of respondents said that world temperatures had been higher during the past three years than before—an all-time high and a 10 percentage point increase from 2018. 43% of respondents said that weather patterns in the county where they lived were more unstable during the last three years than before that.