Ten tips for more effective letters to the editor (and progressive messaging in general)
Also, the WFP's Karl Stomberg addresses legislative priorites and tensions with Democrats.
By Greg Layton
So you care about a political issue and want to persuade the public and/or its elected representatives to do (or not do) something about it?
Excellent.
This puts you in a rich tradition that can be traced back to those inventors of democracy, the Ancient Greeks, most notably Aristotle.
In his seminal book, “The Art of Rhetoric,” the philosopher described tools for changing minds and influencing decisions, tools that remain widely used in the 21st Century.
He famously found that compelling arguments include four elements: fact-based reasoning (Logos), credibility (Ethos), emotional appeals (Pathos), and opportune moments (Kairos).
Anyone preparing an argument would be wise to contemplate and utilize all four.
They can be applied in conversation, on social media, in public comments to government bodies, and almost everywhere else.
But the study of persuasive arts and sciences did not end in Ancient Greece.
Contemporary scholars have delved even deeper to understand how persuasion affects the physical structures of the human brain and how to capitalize on this knowledge.
Today, I will offer a few best practices for persuasion that can enhance your messaging in any context, with a particular focus on letters to the editor. How to use them elsewhere is primarily a question of length.
These tips do not guarantee that you will win every debate, but they have been proven to help.
FRAME WITH VALUES: Many of us hold the Enlightenment belief that, when presented with facts, most people reach rational conclusions, and, therefore, we load our messages with facts and figures. But, ironically, this belief defies the evidence. Cognitive science has demonstrated that, when facts conflict with people’s values, people dismiss facts quickly. Getting around this obstacle requires presenting our arguments and the facts that support them within a framework that appeals to our audiences’ moral sense, which is rooted within the physical structures of their brains. Of course, audiences’ values vary, but, according to neurolinguist George Lakoff, two sets of values dominate Americans’ political thinking: Nurturant Parent Morality, which is progressive, and Strict Father Morality, which is conservative.
WARNING: Despite the temptation to appeal to adversaries’ values, doing so reinforces their belief systems, which, over time, makes future debates less winnable. In Delaware, where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a significant margin, appealing to Nurturant Parent Morality is always the most effective strategy.
Nurturant Parent Morality (Progressive Values):
Emphasize empathy and responsibility: Caring for others and enhancing their well-being is a core value.
Focus on community and cooperation: Building a strong society requires individuals to work together in collaboration.
Believe in fairness and opportunity: Everyone deserves a chance to succeed.
Support social programs and intervention: The government and private sector have a responsibility to promote citizens’ well-being.
TIE IT TO OTHER COVERAGE: Find an article or a letter to the editor about your topic that was carried recently in the news outlet you would like to publish your letter in. Then, reference that piece in your opening line. Doing so flatters the editors, who hope to be part of the public debate, and increases the odds they will publish your letter. (I say this as a former newspaper editor.)
CONSIDER YOUR AUDIENCE: Most of the tips here address this point, but it bears repeating. Always consider and address what’s at stake for your audience’s sense of right and wrong, not necessarily what’s at stake for them personally, which is a consideration more likely to appeal to conservatives.
USE PEOPLE-FOCUSED STORIES AND METAPHORS: Human beings have evolved to remember stories about people better than they remember hard facts, especially numbers. People also feel a message that explains things through metaphor more deeply. Utilize this knowledge by sharing relevant stories and value-laden metaphors as frequently as possible.
KEEP IT SHORT: In Delaware, most publications that carry letters to the editor limit their length to about 400 words, but the average reader spends less than one minute with short-form content, which means you have less than 240 words to reach them.
KEEP IT EASY: Most Americans read below a sixth-grade level, so – if that’s who you wish to reach – you must avoid ostentatious words (like “ostentatious”) and convoluted sentence structure. You must also avoid technical jargon and most, if not all, acronyms. The average person neither understands nor likes them. (You can probably write slightly more sophisticated prose if your audience is elected officials, but don’t go overboard.) To ensure your audience can understand you, you can check the reading level of your work here.
PROVIDE CONTEXT AND CLARITY: Remember that not everyone is as familiar with your topic as you are, and many will stop reading if they don’t understand the situation. So spell it – quickly but clearly – in a way that fits your framing.
AVOID PARTISAN ATTACKS: People want to be reasoned with in respectful, good faith, more like a teacher than a fighter. And the moment they sense that you are merely toting a party line, most make assumptions about your motivations, and base their reaction solely on their relationship to the party (or organization or movement) you belong to. Many prefer to tune out partisan conflict altogether, so do your best to focus on the values that motivate your position, with little or no reference to anything that could be described as a team.
DO NOT REPEAT YOUR OPPONENTS' CLAIMS: The Illusory Truth Effect holds that people are more likely to believe claims they see repeated, even when there’s no evidence for them. So, when you’re attempting to debunk opponents’ arguments, denouncing them directly might do more harm than good. (I believe it’s usually more effective to state your case without any explicit description of theirs.)
REMEMBER A CALL TO ACTION: You want someone to do (or not do) something, right? Clearly state who you want to do what. It's generally better to place the call to action at or near the end of the letter. This allows the reader to fully engage with the information presented and be more receptive to the requested action after being convinced or informed.
See many of the ideas described above in practice here.
Learn more about framing public issues here.
Subscribe to regular updates about progressive messaging here.
Q&A: Karl Stomberg, Delaware Working Families Party
The Delaware Project regularly features questions to and answers from someone in First State activism or organizing. This week, we talk to Karl Stomberg, the Delaware WFP’s political director, about topics ranging from his organization’s perspective on the end of the Delaware General Assembly to conflicts with Democrats.
Our questions and his answers appear below.
You are an organizer and political director for the Delaware Working Families Party, among other things. Could you tell us more about yourself and how you became involved in progressive political work?
I've always been a bit involved in politics. After my family moved to Delaware when I was five, I grew up in the Unitarian Universalist church, where I learned the importance of equality, justice, and democracy. My dad would also take me out every four years to head across the Pennsylvania border to knock doors for whoever the Democratic presidential candidate was, whether it be Kerry, Obama, or Clinton. I was originally planning to work in the computer science world when I graduated from high school in 2016, but a few things changed that.
The first was getting excited by the Bernie Sanders campaign, which was a real galvanizing force for a lot of people in my generation. He was my first ever vote. The second was getting excited by Eugene Young's campaign for mayor here in Wilmington, which seemed to bring a lot of that energy to a multiracial base in my home city. He was my second-ever vote. Then what really kicked me into gear was Donald Trump winning in November. I had become fairly disillusioned with the Democratic Party at that point, and that was a wake-up call that more work needed to be done.
So in 2017, I got fairly involved in local Democratic politics. In February I joined the College Democrats chapter at UD, that summer I interned for Let America Vote where I knocked thousands of doors in the Virginia House of Delegates election, and that autumn I joined and became field director for Laura Sturgeon's campaign for State Senate, which ended up flipping a red seat blue. I got to meet a bunch of great people and learn some great skills, but also it became clear that there were some limits to the work I was doing. Even with secure Democratic majorities in Delaware, we weren't getting things like minimum wage and renter protections done, and I unfortunately also ran into many people in the party who were resistant to even candidates like Laura Sturgeon running, let alone anyone younger, more diverse, or more progressive.
In 2019, I was drawn into the more progressive side of things. I joined a group called Leftward Delaware and became campaign manager for Madinah Wilson-Anton, who was primarying the former House Majority Whip who had been in office since the year I was born. We ran a really fun campaign that got interrupted by the pandemic as I tried to get by as a new college graduate, but we still pulled it out by 43 votes. This made Madinah the first Muslim elected official in the state, and the youngest at the time. This is how I got connected with the Working Families Party, which absorbed Leftward Delaware that year, and I was lucky enough to be hired on as the state's first staffer out of college.
The Delaware Working Families Party is almost certainly the largest and fastest-growing progressive organization in the state of Delaware. By my count, roughly a third of the Democratic Caucus in the Delaware General Assembly belongs to the WFP. Could you please tell us more about WFP, including the values it represents and its approach to advocating for those values?
I believe we're only about a third of the Democratic caucus specifically: 7 state representatives, 1 state senator, 3 Wilmington city council members, and one county councilman. But I'm very glad to see that we are indeed a growing force.
The core idea of the Working Families Party is this: we are working to build governing power for the multi-racial working class. Essentially, that means that we're working to build the infrastructure to reliably find and elect people who are committed to serving the interests of working people over those of bosses, landlords, and cops. That historically means fighting for things like $15 minimum wage, paid family and medical leave, and tenants' right to representation, and this year we're fighting for things like rent stabilization, universal free school meals, probation and criminal justice reform, voting and immigrant rights, and paid sick and safety leave.
I should clarify that WFP isn’t a third party in the sense of the Greens or Libertarians. We do run as a separate party in some select circumstances, such as the Philadelphia City Council, where we replaced the two Republicans in “minority party” slots with WFP members, or in New York, where fusion voting allows candidates to run on multiple ballot lines. But in Delaware, we largely support Democratic candidates in primaries. In a lot of ways, Working Families Democrats are a throwback to what the Democratic Party was at its best, grounded in labor and social democracy like FDR or LBJ (just without Vietnam and Japanese internment).
However, running as Democrats can lead to its own controversies too. Democrats have majorities in our House and Senate, which means they are the people who usually are the biggest obstacles to these goals, since Republicans oppose but don't have the numbers to stop anything alone. That means we've spent a lot of our energy targeting Democrats who become the biggest obstacles to passing legislation that helps the multi-racial working class, though we have also targeted many red-to-blue seats to get that supermajority for issues like voting rights and reproductive rights.
At least two widely distributed news articles since November 2024 have highlighted conflicts between the WFP and mainstream Democrats, and I hear about them from both sides. Could you please explain those conflicts from your perspective? And, how might those conflicts be resolved -- if you believe they should be resolved?
I think there are a few pieces to this. One is personality conflicts, which are always going to be a problem in politics. When people disagree, they say mean things to each other, and in a small state like Delaware, that is particularly corrosive to a lot of relationships, which leads to mutual distrust. I've tried to be better on this recently (I stopped getting into Facebook and Twitter arguments many years ago), but it's probably safe to say that plenty of people on both sides just straight-up don't like each other for reasons that aren't totally reasonable.
Another piece is political. As I mentioned above, most WFP elections have come in primaries, which often means going against well-established Democratic figures. Running these electoral campaigns means that we highlight problems we have with those figures, sometimes in ways that their friends and allies disagree with. We always make sure to base those contrasts in the truth, but in the heat of the campaign, it's still a thing that makes people upset. Electoral democracy is a tough business: people lose their jobs, power gets shifted around, and people want to maintain control. Now that primaries are much more common than they used to be, and are largely driven by WFP candidates, people are reasonably very upset about that.
The final piece of the conflict is ideological. If I had to distinguish what makes a Working Families Democrat different from an "establishment" Democrat, it would be that a Working Families Democrat is first and foremost focused on representing the interests of the multi-racial working class, including workers, tenants, and community activists. In the Democratic Party more broadly, you have a lot of business owners, landlords, cops, and all sorts of other people who just fundamentally have different interests than the people we're trying to represent.
Those groups have a lot of money and lobbying power, and are very familiar with the establishment. Obviously, it's a big tent, and they're all people and citizens who have the right to make their voices heard. But we are unabashed in who we represent, while many people that we challenge are often more focused on balancing the interests of different groups. I believe that their approach usually skews results to the most powerful, which is why our approach is needed, but our approach is often then seen as more aggressive or black-and-white as a result.
One source of conflict between Democrats and WFP has been the WFP's (successful) backing of progressive primary challengers against moderate Democratic incumbents, such as former House Speaker Valerie Longhurst. Please remind us of those successes and explain the criteria WFP uses to decide whom to primary.
We've been blessed to be on a successful streak over the last few cycles. In 2020, we got involved in 8 primaries and won 6, including defeating Senate Pro Tempore David McBride. In 2022 we were involved with 5 primaries and won 3, including defeated House Majority Whip Larry Mitchell. And in 2024, we were involved in 8 primaries and won 5, including defeating Speaker Valerie Longhurst.
We have three basic things we look at when deciding whether to back a candidate:
Values and Policy Stances - Do they agree with us on the issues and their theory of change?
Readiness and Ability to Run - Can they actually run for office and then do the job?
Network and Community Connection - Do they understand their district and can they bring together a team?
These criteria are aimed at running real grassroots campaigns that involve new voters and volunteers to not just win an election but broaden the base of engagement in each district we work in. That means that hopefully, even if we lose, the district is going to be more engaged and demand more from their legislators. Essentially, we need to make sure that we can build a base, even if we lose the campaign.
In terms of who we target, we focus most on the legislators who are doing the most to hold up important legislation dealing with economic justice, housing, labor, environmental justice, and criminal justice reform, among other issues. The actual final votes are important in this, but anyone who follows legislative hall closely enough knows that a lot of the shady stuff happens behind the scenes. So we also look at procedural moves, committee operations, and off-the-record attempts to hold up important things for insincere reasons.
Democratic leadership in the General Assembly appears skittish about approving new spending this year. They cite a gloomy economic forecast and the loss of federal funding for state programs. Are you more optimistic? What are the WFP's priorities in 2025, and what do you think the General Assembly should do to pay for them?
I think I'd say we're somewhat more optimistic. Obviously, the federal funding is very concerning, but the revenue predictions from the state are less so. We've seen this pattern a lot in recent years: the earlier DEFAC report comes out with lower-than-expected revenues, so leadership holds up any non-favored legislation that has a fiscal note, and then when the May DEFAC report comes out it turns out our revenue is fine, it's too late to get back into gear and pass these priorities, so it always gets kicked down the road. Of course, fiscal responsibility is important (just look at how messy Delaware's budget was in the 1970s), but I think it's equally important that we're doing everything that we can to support families who are struggling under the same Trump administration that's going after our budget as well. However, our members have been kept off the Joint Finance Committee, so we can just make suggestions from the outside.
Overall, I don't think the proposed budget is too bad, about what was expected for now, we'll see how potential federal cuts might change that later in the year. However, I think there are a few things that are clearly missing. The biggest one was increased tax brackets for the wealthy, HS1 for HB 13. Rep. Kowalko had been waving this flag forever, but now that the governor is on board, I think this is the perfect opportunity to pass legislation that would make our tax system significantly more fair. I believe the current bill doesn't actually raise much revenue (I wish it did), but it's a step that would make it much easier for future revenue to be raised equitably. With even the governor's office behind it, it seems like this was the perfect opportunity to get that done.
Our other biggest priority for this year is universal free school meals, which could have easily been covered with a more progressive tax bill. This has obviously gotten a great deal of controversy with Rep. Williams's competing bill and Speaker Minor-Brown's removal of Rep. Moore from the Education committee, but the basic idea is simple: no kid should go hungry at school. Right now, there are stop-gap measures, but we still see school districts ending the year with tens of thousands in lunch debt, so clearly, we have not gone far enough. This is already being done in states like Minnesota and Maine, and the threats from the federal government make it all the more urgent for us now. I believe Rae Moore's bill, HB 125, is the most responsible version, which phases in the program over time, moves to universal meals, and deals with the potential threat of federal funding, and I hope the legislature will see it through.
There were a few other small things that were in the governor's budget that I was hoping to see make it to the final budget, most notably eliminating $50 million of medical debt, which could have been a huge boon to a lot of struggling families here in Delaware.
How can Delawareans get involved in WFP? Please describe the work the party does and what folks can do to help.
We have lots of ways people can get involved. We have regional team meetings across the state (Wilmington, Newark, Central, and Sussex) each month, and a virtual welcome gathering on the last Wednesday of each month for people to learn more about who we are and what we do. There are all sorts of different ways to get involved: running for office, joining a campaign team, knocking on doors, attending events, researching bills, creating social media posts, basically any type of thing you like to do, we can find a space for you.
We, of course, also appreciate it if people are able to become dues-paying members. A lot of progressive groups are under threat right now with the Trump administration, and the more grassroots support we get, the more secure we're able to be.
Feel free to use this space to draw attention to or discuss anything else on your mind that you'd like readers to consider.
Right now, there's a big effort nationally to show how the Democratic Party is going through an identity crisis. I certainly think there are some things that need to be changed, including getting a new generation of leaders, but there's a danger to this narrative that comes down to us in Delaware as well. The very standard disagreements that come within political parties get cast as "Democrats in disarray," and many people in power feel the impulse to use that framing to crack down on dissent. However, I think that right now it's more important than ever to have a proper debate on the left of center about what effective Democratic governance should look like, especially in a deep blue state like Delaware. I believe that means we should be as bold in our resistance and our vision as we can be, but I'm hoping everyone is willing to at least engage in good faith. This seems like it has been a good platform for that, and I am glad that you're doing so much to help facilitate those discussions.