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Why Republicans should watch their language

By Frank Luntz,January 11, 2013

This coming week, House Republicans will gather in Williamsburg, Va., to discuss what went wrong in 2012. I’ve attended more than a dozen such congressional retreats since 1993, and I can already imagine how the conversations will go. Someone will undoubtedly come to the microphone to declare that what the GOP needs is a better brand, missing the essential point that candidates and political parties are about reputation, trust and ideas. You can’t sell them like soap or detergent.

But what you say in defense of those ideas matters, and what people hear matters even more.

Congressional Republicans are currently defined as nothing more than opponents of the president and friends of the powerful. This isn’t my opinion — it’s America’s opinion. My polling firm asked voters nationwide on election night to identify who or what the GOP was fighting for. Twice as many said “the wealthy” and “big business” than “hardworking taxpayers” or “small business.”

Their image is even worse today. The congressional Republicans’ message during the “fiscal cliff” debate last month was confused and chaotic. The debt-ceiling vote next month and the budget debate after that promise more of the same — unless House and Senate Republicans stop bickering and start coordinating and talking differently.

Just saying “no” to the president has its limits. House Republicans, since they have a megaphone that Senate Republicans don’t, will continue to be diminished until they start defining and stop being defined.

Talk is cheap, of course, but bad language is costly. While the new GOP House majority is the second-largest since World War II, more people cast votes for Democratic House candidates than for Republican candidates. On the Senate side, the Democratic advantage was even larger. The GOP paid a price for its out-of-touch language in November and could pay again in 2014, just as it did in 2006, unless the party changes course.

Changing course starts with a values-based approach, and that means talking to Americans about accountability, personal responsibility and freedom — and linking those values to GOP policies. For example, in 1994, congressional Republican candidates developed the Contract With America to announce “a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print . . . to make us all proud again of the way free people govern themselves.”

It was a response to voters who were fed up with politicians who said one thing in their districts and then voted differently in Washington. In 2013, House Republicans need a similar tone that starts with the value of listening, not speaking. When people feel they’re heard and understood, they’ll listen.

The next step is to be more empathetic. Voters will not give you a chance to solve their problems if they think you don’t understand them, especially at a time when Americans feel no one is fighting for them. For example, among 2012 voters who wanted their president to “care about people like me,” President Obama crushed Mitt Romney 81 percent to 18 percent. In part, that’s because the president’s rhetoric is always couched in the language of fairness and justice. He asks the “wealthiest 2 percent” to “pay their fair share” — without defining what “fair share” means. He doesn’t have to; voters ascribe their own definitions.

Republicans on Capitol Hill have great thinkers and communicators with serious ideas and specific answers, from Reps. Paul Ryan and Dave Camp to Sens. Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey. The party should unleash them — now. But they need a new language to communicate their ideas effectively; it starts with abandoning ugly phrases such as “a hostage you might take a chance at shooting” to describe budget negotiations. And Republicans need to stop expressing a willingness to shut down the government if they don’t get their way on the debt ceiling. Americans don’t want a government shutdown — for any reason.

Now consider Obama’s strategy and approach. His pollsters do exactly what I do, figuring out which words resonate with voters — but they have a more willing, disciplined client. Nearly every White House speech during the fiscal cliff debate emphasized a “balanced, responsible approach” — sometimes more than once. Every time you hear phrases like that, know that a pollster crafted them because they resonate with Americans who are angry with the incessant bickering and partisan gridlock in Washington.

Never mind that the fiscal cliff legislation Obama just signed has more than $40 in tax increases for every $1 in cuts or that Social Security and Medicare are hurtling toward insolvency. And it doesn’t matter that the president says he will not negotiate over the debt ceiling; thanks to his effective messaging, it is Republicans who are being blamed for intransigence.