 Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. I think we still have a few more people joining us. So thank you for joining the public policy and institutional discrimination discussion series where today's topic is race, media and political attitudes. So this is the second of four sessions of the discussion series. And before introducing the faculty discussant, I'd just like to take a few moments to talk about the goal and the format of today's event. So the goal of this series, as well as today's format, is to create opportunities for community engagement for members of the Ford School community and also to foster dialogue on important issues of U.S. public policy. This format is also an opportunity for students to engage with and get to know faculty as well as their research and perhaps what they do beyond the classroom. Concerning today's format, Dr. Mara Cecilia Ostfeld. She will be the faculty discussant and she will lead and we're very excited to have her with us today. And she will speak for about 30 minutes on the topic. And the last 20 minutes of the discussion will be reserved for questions and answers from the audience. And to allow for more interaction, participants are encouraged to make use of the chat box. You can also unmute your microphones and pose a question directly to Dr. Mara Ostfeld. And Dr. Ostfeld is also, she is fully comfortable with people jumping in and with asking questions and clarifications as they arise. And concerning the rest of the winter series or winter semester, Professor Earl Lewis will facilitate a session on February the 18th and that session will be on history, reparations and policy 2.0. And following that session, Roderick Johnson will facilitate the March 11th session on lobbying and mass incarceration. So today's faculty discussant is Dr. Mara Cecilia Ostfeld. She is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan with a courtesy appointment at the Ford School of Public Policy. Her research broadly focuses on the relation between media and political attitudes, which is the topic for today's discussion. And she is currently working on projects exploring media coverage of protest activities, which is extremely timely. Her work has been published in journals that include political psychology and political communication. And her work has also been funded by places including the Institute for the Study of Citizens and Politics and the Russell Sage Foundation. She currently has a book project underway looking at the political, environmental and psychological factors that shape how we identify our skin color. So during national elections, she also works as an analyst at NBC and Telemundo. So please help me welcome faculty discussant, Dr. Cecilia Mara Cecilia Ostfeld. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for organizing this. I really appreciate it. I'm especially grateful for the discussion nature of this, that it is meant to be a discussion. So I'm really excited to share some of the work that's been done in the field of race, media and political attitudes, especially some of the more canonical work. And then just discuss a little bit about how it's evolved and how it's changed. And then how some people talk about where it is going or where it could be going. And as people who are highly engaged in policy and political science, I'd love to get everyone else's thoughts on this. So I just wanna start and begin this overview with one of the most infamous campaign ads that engaged with issues of race. And many of you may be already familiar with it. It's the Willie Horton ad that was created by one of the supporters of George H.W. Bush in his 1988 run against Dukakis. Bush and Dukakis on crime. Bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. One was Willie Horton, who murdered a boy in a robbery, stabbing him 19 times. Despite a life sentence, Horton received 10 weekend passes from prison. Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. Weekend prison passes. Dukakis on crime. There's a couple of things that are key about this ad. And this was one of the foundational campaign ads that started a really robust body of research, exploring the relationship between race, media and political attitude. What's key about this is that it primes racial stereotypes and fears that especially many white people had about black people in the context of politics without explicitly endorsing these stereotypes or generalization. They weren't explicitly saying, like a lot of bad people or all black people are criminals, but they definitely primed the stereotype and primed it in the context of the campaign that was occurring at the time. The ad validated racist belief systems without making people feel like they were necessarily being racist by accepting them. As a result, the ad and tons of others like it have been found to activate racial resentment, whose support for the more racially conservative candidate sponsoring the ad and increased opposition to the redistributive policies and restorative policies that disproportionately are of benefit to people. Importantly, once this ad was called out as racist, the effects it had on public opinion at the time were largely undone. Many people were compelled and persuaded by the ad, but they didn't want to be labeled as racist. Bush and Dukakis on- Tali Mendelberg was one of the people who really wrote a lot about this ad and kind of founded a lot of this literature. Pretty succinctly summarizes this dynamic and says that in the age of equality, politicians cannot prime race with impunity due to a norm of racial equality that prohibits racist speech. Yet incentives to appeal to white voters remain strong. As a result, politicians often resort to more subtle uses of race to win elections. So at the time and for a while, we often saw ads that operated in a similar way where they made racist appeals without explicitly like articulating the whole racist belief system. So often they would use racialized imagery like this one where they both use racialized imagery associating Latinos with gangs or crime and using very evocative racialized, kind of coded racialized language. This one, it was illegal aliens, but it's often looks like inner city welfare undocumented criminal alien law and order. The thing that all of these have in common, again, is that they evoke racist stereotypes without necessarily saying some type of explicitly racist generalization. This of course has changed a lot in recent years. Trump in particular has made a number of very explicitly racist statements, not only faced no backlash or repercussions, but often received greater support after saying them. So he had referred to immigrants and refugees, especially Mexican-Americans and Muslims using language such as rapists, animals, ISIS fighters, people who all have AIDS and as criminals. He's referred to people of color in general as people who are ruining suburbs, as people with no education or jobs. And he referred to Baltimore as a disgusting rat and rodent and bested myths. So what's changed? Why was there this dynamic where you needed to be implicit and if it was explicit, then everyone would kind of pull back. But now you can say something very explicit in people, a lot of people, especially Republicans tend to be even more supportive after it's stated explicitly. And there's been a lot of research done on this by especially our colleague Valentino Nunez and Vandenbroek who argued that there's been two dynamics that have really resulted in the shift from having to rely on implicit racial cues to a context in which explicit racial cues are more acceptable. The first one is just that the two parties have become more cleanly sorted along lines of racial attitudes and we saw this very clearly in the last election. So just looking at people who voted for Biden versus people who voted for Trump in 2020, 80% of the people who voted for Biden had favorable views of the Black Lives Matter movement, whereas about an equal number among Trump supporters had an unfavorable view of the Black Lives Matter movement. When we look at views on the criminal justice system, a similar number about a little over 80% of Biden supporters saw the criminal justice system as a system that treats Black people unfairly, whereas about 80% of Trump supporters thought it treated all people fairly. So because of this, people, especially Republicans can say something very explicitly racist and not have to worry about offending their base because most people in their base today are fairly comfortable with either explicitly racist views or are very outspoken about their levels of racial resentment. The other dynamic is that there's been a lot more attention in recent years to the fact that white Americans are a shrinking share of the US population and that's made the white identity much more salient and much more important to a lot of white Americans. So today up to 42% of white Americans say their white identity is very or extremely important to them. And there's a lot more concern, especially among white Americans, if you can see right here that the country has gone too far in terms of giving Black people equal rights with whites. So we have these two dynamics where the parties are now more cleanly sorted along racial lines in terms of attitudes towards racialized public policy and two, there's increasing concern about racial threat. And so today Trump and other candidates can run ads like this, which are very explicitly racist, very explicitly linking in this ad Muslims to stereotypes about criminality or terrorism with no consequences. And so for a while, we've known that implicit appeals to racism can evoke racial resentment in public policy preferences, that explicit appeals to racism can be effective tools that evoking racial resentment in public policy preferences. But it's also racist question about, is this it? Do even positive appeals to non-whites? Does even general outreach to non-white voters, does that also evoke racial resentment? And I explored this in some of my own work, just looking at first in 2012, I just looked at Obama's outreach to Latino voters and whether when ads were narrated entirely in English, if white voters were more supportive of Obama than when they saw ads that were partially in English and partially in Spanish with English slide titles. And when it's in Spanish, the obvious thing is that it's a tool of outreach to primarily Latino voters. And what I found was that especially that overall you can see that white Republicans and white Democrats were both less likely or viewed Obama less favorably when they saw the ad that had Spanish language content in it than when they saw the ad that was entirely in English, entirely in English. But the difference was much larger for Democrats than it was for Republicans. I looked at this again to see if even when it's not Spanish language outreach, what if it's just when candidates are just courting Latino voters, if that also has a similar effect, if just indicating that a candidate is doing outreach to non-white voters, if that has a similar effect. So I ran another experiment in which I asked a random sample of white Democrats since that seemed to be where the action was happening. I asked them to evaluate a news website that I made up. And I asked them to say, okay, like how clean does this website look? How much do you like the photos? How do you feel about the layout? And at the end they also asked them about their views on political candidates. This was right before the 2016 election. And so the only difference between the two treatments or the two types of websites that people saw was the headline and one treatment and one website featured a story saying that Hillary courts undecided voters, whereas in the second one, it was the exact same layout, but it said Hillary courts Latino voters. And I found a very similar effect, again, among white Democrats or whites who identified as Democrat, that when they saw the ad saying that Hillary was courting Latino voters, they viewed Hillary much less favorably and were much more likely to view Trump favorably. When I asked about who they were like most likely to vote for, and this was in the months, I think it was like September of 2016, who they were most likely to vote for in the 2016 elections. They were much less likely to say they were gonna vote for Hillary, about nine percentage points, less likely to say they were gonna vote for Hillary Clinton, and about 11 percentage points, more likely to say that they intended to support Trump when they saw the headline saying Hillary courts Latino voters as opposed to Hillary courts undecided voters. And so we've seen this evolution of research on race, media, and political attitudes where the types of messages that activate racial resentment went from being just implicit appeals to racism that didn't explicitly say anything racist, to then even implicit, explicit appeals to racism outright, racist stereotype statements have been shown to be to want to activate racial resentment and have it kind of shape people's political preference and candidate views at the time. And now we've seen robust evidence as well that even positive outreach to non-whites, stuff that doesn't evoke any of these stereotypes at all is enough to activate racial resentment among especially whites political views. So what types of messages advance a racially progressive agenda? So we know that a lot of things, almost any discussion of race can evoke racial resentment among people who hold high levels of racial resentment, but what types of messages could be used to advance greater support for, again, a racially progressive agenda or an agenda that takes more action to address racial and economic disparities? And there's been one argument that was put forth relatively recently by a scholar named Ian Haney Lopez who was a law professor at Harvard and is now at Berkeley. And he makes this argument in his book, Merge Left, that there's really three groups of people, right? So there's the base of Americans that actively supports institutional action to address racial and economic disparities. And it's about, again, 23% of the population. And there's this other group of Americans who are pretty opposed and unpersuadable. They believe very strongly in views of individualism and meritocracy that people are responsible for their own experiences and opportunities. And there's very little you can do to persuade them or get them to shift their preferences to support redistributive policies or proactive policies to address racial and economic disparities. But there's this third group, about 60% of the population that is persuadable. And he defines them as people who do think that racial and economic disparities are real, that they do need to be addressed, but they're not sure about institutional action. They often will accept concerns or will embrace concerns about reverse racism, but they also can be persuaded, again, to support more proactive policies about addressing racial disparities. And so he focuses on doing a lot of focus groups. He focuses on doing focus groups throughout the United States to try to understand what types of messages appeal to this group of voters. What types of messages increase the likelihood of persuadables to endorse these types of policies. And so he argues there's a lot of content here, but I wanna try to break it down a little bit. That it's important to not ignore differences that it's valuable to use language that no matter our differences, most of us want pretty similar things. So don't say that we all have the same experiences. Don't say we all come from the same place or same types of contact, but highlight that most of us want pretty similar things even with those differences in mind. But he argues beyond that, that we should focus on aspiration, common experiences and shared interests. So it's important he argues or he says it's been effective to make race explicit, but often talk about race as black people, brown people, white people all share these experiences or all share these goals and that's something we can work together towards. So instead of just saying, for example, working people, we might say working people, whether white, black or brown and he finds that it's really valuable to not just say working brown people or working people of color, but to say working white people and people of color. So the valuable thing in this is that he finds that it does increase support among persuadables for more progressive policies on racialized political issues. The critique that many people have put forth is it seems to focus on really assuaging kind of concerns among this middle group, kind of really focusing on making them feel included, almost to a degree where it minimizes the level of disparities has been the critique, but that's kind of the political trade off that many people have put forth. So I really wanted to end there and I wanna leave this up and just ask people what everyone else's thoughts are on this, what people's reactions are to this and what people's reactions are to all of this in the context of the last election. So I will leave it there. So thank you so much for your thoughts on this, media and political issues. And this includes the types of messages that can help us in making a rich, religious agenda that work in victimizing disparities and so forth and so on. And for the remainder of the session, I will just open it up to discussion for you all to ask a few questions. And as a reminder, you can make use of the chat box, you're invited to do so, or to unmute your microphones and pose the questions directly to the faculty discussant. My Zoom is freezing a little bit, so I can't see the chat box, but I really wanna know people's thoughts, especially as people again, really engaged in politics and policy. This is really the language that Bernie Sanders campaign was very focused on. He was focused on, again, using language that didn't just focus on black and brown people, didn't just focus on white people, but consistently referring to this unified collective of white, black and brown people who share similar aspirations. And I just wanna get people's thoughts on how effective that was or would be in a different campaign or appropriate it was. So we do have an comment in the chat box from Jamila James. She says, I feel like once again, it shows that if you want real change, you have to make sure you are comforting white people, making sure they don't feel bad. I mean, I think that was the big critique of this approach. I think, I agree. I mean, it's very much focused on like, again, assuaging white guilt or maybe making white people not feel like they're too different, so I think that's a valid concern. Professor Anlion has a question. First of all, Mara, this is just fascinating. Thank you so much. I think when I was thinking about the studies you were presenting about Latino using Spanish or using appeals to Latinos and how that affects support, one of the things that made me think of was the Republican convention this year because the Republican convention did a lot to sort of overtly appeal to voters of color, whether they had a lot of black speakers, they had a lot of Latino speakers. And I wonder if there's something different about having, so if Democrats make appeals to Latinos or African-Americans or Asians, then people take that for granted. I wonder if having the Republican party make those appeals would cause a different result, a different kind of, would it cause the same kind of decline in support among Republicans or might it even show an increase in support among white Republicans that you're hearing these kinds of appeals? I think that's a really good question. And I think where I hear your intuition going is exactly where my intuition would go as well, that because these parties views are so distinct on racialized political issues and the action that should be taken about racialized disparities, that it would not at all fall flat when it's used by Republicans that in that case, it might actually be super effective because it would again, it'd be like, saying that see like we're really, we don't have these racist concerns. It's like when Trump was like, I eat tacos or I had tacos on Cinco de Mayo, like he says these very superficial statements and it's taken as this very significant outreach. I think if they started doing it too much then I could see it going in the other direction but I don't see that happening. A lot of this is just built on evidence and there had been another group of scholars who had just showed a lot. And I know you already know this end but that just showed a lot of white voters that the percentage of the American population that's non-white that is growing and they're gaining greater access to power and resources and that that evoked a lot of racial threat among white people. And so as long as there's nothing that conveys that, I think anything short of that is really effective but I think just like Jamila said, is this really, I mean, do we always wanna have to be so sensitive, is that really making progress if we're just kind of like dancing around other people's discomfort? So Allison has a question in the chat box. We have a couple of questions in the chat box and also a couple of hands that are raised. So I'll go to a question in the chat box first before I acknowledge those with raised hands. So this question comes from Allison's. Allison, how do you shift your language to meet people where they are without a condoning racism? How do we hold people accountable and invite them into the change? I think that's a great question. I think there's so much really good work being done on this not just when it comes to racialized political issues but even like when it comes to talking across party lines or other lines of difference that and this is really what Ian Haney Lopez does or argues is effective. It's just highlighting any type of commonality even if that's commonality in where you wanna go. Even if you like say like, okay, we've had different experiences and we come from different places and our experience in the world is completely different but we both wanna get to this point. And so we need to recognize that so-and-so he argues that identifying shared like enemies or whatever you wanna call it is really useful. So in this example, he talks about wealthy special interests who rig the rules. So not just saying wealthy people, not kind of villainizing people because of the category they occupy but based on like the ideas that they're putting forth. His argument is that that's been really key. So we have two raised hand. One is Zoe. I don't see your hand raised now but Zoe, would you like to unmute your mic and ask a question? Yeah, I would love to, thank you. It's a question slash a comment. I just regarding the third point about making risks explicit. I feel like it depends on the audiences and if you have a really diverse group of audiences it feels challenging because you don't wanna leave out certain races and by looking at working people whether white, black or brown, I'm already wondering like, then what about like East Asian people? So I wonder like what is a better way to make race explicit but also be inclusive when you call out races? I think that's a good point. And the other point I think that your comment gets at is that I might use a label to refer to myself or I might use a certain label that I'm okay with like, some people are comfortable with lepinax but some people really prefer Hispanic and so then which label do you use? Even among, if you're talking about like Air Americans some people prefer Southwest, North African. There's just a variety of Middle Eastern, North African. There's so many different ways of representing ourselves and so you don't wanna use a term that some people find offensive. So I think that's another really important point. I don't think he addresses any way to get around that. I mean, he's also said in some of his focus group where just weaving in different groups even if you don't say them all at once but just weaving in different groups throughout like the conversation you're having so that no one group is constantly the focus but others are also kind of represented and included. But if you have thoughts or other people have thoughts or reactions even just like gut reactions I would love to hear that. So I do have, there is a question that I'd like to go to in the chat box and then I will acknowledge Jitam so she can make her comments. So the question in the chat box is sent to me, not a public message but this is a white from a white UM staff member here. So thank you for the very helpful advice on what to say and what not to say as a program leader slash manager I'm very conscious of the fact that I could say something that is offensive to other white people and those that are part of the BIPOC community meaning the black indigenous people of color community. So that's a comment and Jitam will go straight to Jitam. Good afternoon Dr. Osfield. Wonderful and very timely research as we've seen just different things shift over the last week. One of the conversations that I frequently have with my classmates last year during the primary season was around Bernie Sanders focused on class instead of race. I mean as a black woman from North Carolina I told them that's not gonna go well for black people because we understand we see every day how race is providing certain barriers in our lives. And so it's very interesting to see the poll data around majority of white people believing that that's not the case that we've gone too far, we've done just enough. So I just wanted to know like from your thoughts and just thinking about what we've seen in Arizona, Nevada, Detroit, Michigan, Philadelphia and Georgia and how these racial groups are actually shifting and winning elections in certain areas. What are your thoughts on how do we mobilize this group while also not isolating white Americans? You know what's so interesting about your comments too is that I mean I think so the data that I drew from kind of glasses over this other aspect that there's been a shift in how parties align along class. So we know that in the most recent election a lot of the wealthier, more educated people are voting Democrat. And then a lot of working class and lower income people and not just among white people there was a shift across racial groups towards Republicans that I think was really surprising to a lot of people. And I'm not really, that was very surprising to me I think it's still out, we've had so many problems with all our exit polls and our pre-election polls like how robust, how big that is. I really liked your point. There's another scholar who just focuses on the distinctiveness of like Southern identity and how that can intersect and really important ways with how people express their views on racialized political issues and in distinctive ways for whites who have strong Southern identity and non-whites especially blacks who have strong Southern identity. And so I think you're getting at a lot of divisions that weren't closely like fleshed out in a lot of Biden campaigning. Unmuted. So we have a question in the chat box and then I see where Susan Page has her hand raised. So we'll go to the audience after this question in the chat box. So this is from Jeffrey Grimm. Thanks for joining us today, Jeff. Dr. Osville, thanks so much for your talk. It made me miss our 2016 class in the Ford School because it seems like the media and public surprisingly learned this year that the Latinx vote is not a monolith. With your earlier study showing how Latinx voters respond to messaging, are there differences within the Latinx diaspora with political messaging? Yeah, I think, I just wanna be clear that the last, the experimental data I shared was all among white non-Latinos. So there were Latinos in that specific study but I do think that Jeff is getting at something really important that we know there's big differences in like Latino's political preferences and how they respond to campaign outreach. There was, and I think it's really unfortunate how both Latino and Black and Asian American and Arab American voters have often been treated as being completely driven by like singular issues that all Latinos are completely driven by immigration attitudes and that all people, all Cubans are completely concerned about foreign policy towards Cuba. And that's just not the case. When we saw that, there was a big shift, for example, in Southern Texas and the Rio Grande Valley towards Trump and a lot of that was because in economic concerns is what existing data has pointed to a lot of, there's not as many jobs in that area, one of the biggest employers in the area is border control. And so concerns about defunding the police while often has positive aspects because then a lot of communities of color are left police but especially in that area, that's the main employer of a lot of Latino families. So then it has this other concern of like, how am I gonna support my family if we defund the police and different police institutions? And so all of these are very multi-layered. And then there's the concern that a lot of people of color are just being tired or very tired of being painted as kind of an assumed democratic vote. And I think we're seeing growing people really wanna push back against that because it results in parties and candidates not really putting as much effort into campaigning or doing outreach for BIPOC votes as they do among suburban white women and working class whites. Okay, we do have a hand raised from Susan Page. So Susan, please unmute your mic. Thank you very much, Dr. Ostfield. And I'm sorry that I missed a little bit. So I hope that this is not a sort of repeated question but it kind of follows a little bit on the last question that you just answered. But how do we, okay, as a person of color myself as a black woman, how do we help in particular, let's say, Democrats and Republicans understand exactly what you're just saying, which is that guess what? You can't take all of these votes for granted. Whether Republican or Democrat, you can't assume that everyone is, from the Latinx community is only concerned about socialism or communism if you're a Cuban American or immigration or if you're a person of color that it's only about race. When Michael Eric Dyson talked about this, I don't know, maybe two years ago, that black people are generally very conservative and socially conservative in particular. I'm not getting anything. I don't know, did Susan ask her question? I'm sorry, I didn't hear it if she did. Well, you can't hear me. Stephanie, can you hear me? I can hear you. Do you mind if I put it in the check box? Sure. So the question in the check box and this is from Theodore Ma. So he says, I've noticed that if you do have a shared common experience, that common experience can sometimes be used as a tool to discredit institutional racism that an individual may have experience. For example, when I comment on the challenges and subtle discriminations that I had experienced during high school as a first generation immigrant, I've had some respond by saying, oh, I'm sorry you had to go through that. But that's not what I experienced in high school. A similar attitude sometimes came from some self-proclaimed liberals as well. What would be the best approach to address this? And that's a really good question. And I have to say, I am not a campaign strategist. I am not like, I've really been, I've really been, I've studied the effects of different like messaging, but I can't say I figured it all out. I will say that I think it's hard when you're doing exact, I mean, I think you're getting at exactly what Ian Hennie Lopez had said, that it's good to talk about commonality, but sometimes it will be accepted, sometimes it will not be accepted. And sometimes it can even be kind of dismissed or commodified, or you can, as a result feel reduced to that. And that's not optimal either. I mean, I think the hardest thing is that everybody, everybody is different. And so I think especially when it comes to sharing your own experiences with discrimination, I would say you really have to focus on first prioritizing what makes you feel respected and taking care of yourself, especially in this context. But yeah, I mean, there's just such a range of reactions you can get from people. And it's a really vulnerable position to be in when you're sharing something that personal and intimate and not know how people are gonna take it or use it. So there's some, some really, some tension that's on the side of the phone. So building on, so this is when it comes from, I'm getting feedback. Building on both Jeff and JaTem's comments, there's a really interesting contrast between Hennie Lopez's focus on commonalities and what companies are doing, are now doing, which is micro-targeting. Yeah, I mean, it's like, you know, like campaigns can buy, Facebook buys, like the tiniest in sales, like the tiniest slivers of information about you, about what you searched for, about like what you've purchased on Amazon recently. They have these representations of groups about, you know, it started off with just soccer moms, but then it evolved into like, I don't know, like insecure millennials or like you hear all these labels. And I think what they're trying to do is say if they have all this data on you, but it just, it still comes across as kind of like high resolution stereotypes in some ways. Like the fact is that I think the focus of campaigns has shifted too much to trying to buy voters and too far away from just trying to like sell ideas. What are you about? What are you gonna do? Don't try to tell me who you think I am, just tell me what you wanna do. And I think that's like, that's a really tragic component of where our political system has gone. Susan, do you wanna cry again? Dr. Osfeld, can you hear me now? Dr. Sanders, maybe you can just read the, it's not very eloquent. Let's see, let's see. So Dr. Osfeld, can you hear me? Yep, I can hear you. Okay, all right. Susan, maybe something's, yeah, technical difficulties here. So this question is from Susan Page. How do we convince politicians to look at people for their values? It says, black Americans tend to be very conservative, socially and economically. Many black Americans are very religious and align more with conservatives or Republicans on these issues. But many Republicans don't seem to know that they could grow the Republican base without recourse to race by focusing on conservative values, quote unquote conservative values. In other words, back to the assumption, in other words, back to the assumption that blacks are only Democrats. Let's see. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, okay. I mean, essentially does she have a comment? I think that's a great point. And I think that's the point a lot of people have been trying to make that there needs to be this assumption, especially that blacks are always gonna vote Democrat and to a lesser degree, but to a similar way that Latinos are always gonna vote Democrat has not always served these groups very well because then it's, sometimes there will be like a little bit of outreach by Democrats, but for the most part they're considered the solid base that's not really either not really gonna vote or not really gonna be a risk of not voting for them. And I know Angela Dillard really focuses on black conservatives and the importance of getting Republicans to invest more in the arts that they've made, they claim to have made efforts and most of them have come across as relatively superficial, but I think you're getting at something really, really important and problematic in our party system. Yeah, and I know you can't hear me, but Dr. Sanders can. I would just say, I'm not trying to suggest that a political strategy, but adding simply to what you're saying. So Susan said she's not trying to add to a political strategy if you can hear me. Can you hear me, Professor Osveld? Yeah, I can hear you great. Okay, all right. Thanks Susan so much for working through those technical difficulties. So there is a question in the chat box from Elizabeth LaPorte. So she says, in general, Dem seemed to develop much more complex messaging and GOP seemed to convey simpler messages. How can more liberal BIPOC supportive candidates take better advantage of simpler but meaningful messages about key issues? I'm gonna look, what do you mean? I'm gonna ask you to elaborate that. Like what are you meaning when you say to take advantage of that? Elizabeth, please feel free to unmute your microphone. Hi there. First off, thanks for everybody that's contributing to this. It's just been a really rich discussion. I think that's the piece is that what we saw with Hillary and other candidates was that their messaging was quite complex. They were addressing meaty issues. But I think people got lost in some of the detail. And so while I'm certainly not a Trump supporter, what I noticed about a lot of the Republican messaging was that- I am not getting any sound from anyone but you, Stephanie. I'm sorry. Elizabeth? Yeah. Can you hear me? She can hear me, but she's not getting sound from anyone else. So read your question again. Or if you could say it again and then I'll repeat it, I'll rephrase it and repeat it. So I noticed that Democrats are developing complex messaging and GOPs seem to convey simpler messages. So my question is, how can more liberal BIPOC supportive candidates develop simpler but meaningful messages? And how can they convey things just in a clearer way that I know it doesn't always have to be sound bites, but it seems to me that things are sometimes overly complex in terms of their communication strategy. So Professor Osveld, this will be the final question we are running out of time, but I'll rephrase here. How can liberals develop a simpler message, especially for BIPOC communities and convey a clearer message? It seems to be that some of the messages are really complex or for certain communities, such as a BIPOC community, how can liberals develop a more simpler message? I think that's a great question. And I think unfortunately the challenges that a lot of the outreach that campaigns typically do to communities of color tends to be really heavy on the symbolism. So they'll often rely on things like they'll translate something to Spanish or they'll have some type of cultural icons or music. But I would actually argue that there needs to be more of an investment into actually communicating policy in the outreach, especially to communities of color, because it's often very thin and superficial, like we're pro-immigration or pro-immigrant, but what does that mean? What exactly are you saying? Are you committing to supporting DACA? Are you committing to making that a priority? And I think that turns off a lot of people that then there's less capacity to hold them accountable. But I think, I mean, there's another aspect of what you're getting at that everyone is not as politically passionate as the people who spend their lunch hour coming to talks on this. And so how do we keep those people engaged while ensuring that the content of outreach is not reduced to symbolism? And I mean, some people would say that's where micro-targeting becomes valuable, but I think that that just comes with such a host of assumptions that can be very, like that can really minimize people. And so, I mean, I think there's some ways where you can provide information where people can like pursue more. So start with basics and then opportunities to get more information in various languages. Probably a good way to go and very spokespeople. Well, that's, it's, we are at time. So it's 1251, but we really appreciate everyone for joining us during the lunchtime hour today. Thank you so much for joining us for the second installment of the Public Policy and Institutional Discrimination Discussion Series. Thank you so much, Dr. Osfeld, for talking to us today about a very complex issue. And there was a lot of engagement around this topic. So I really appreciate you for joining us and engaging with the Ford School. So we will resume the discussion series on February the 18th with faculty discussant, Dr. Earl Lewis, who will discuss history, reparations and public policy 2.0. So this concludes today's event. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, everyone.