David Broockman is a political scientist at UC Berkeley who digs into one of democracy’s core questions: can political messages really change minds? He’s spent his career running careful studies of persuasion, from door-to-door conversations to the effects of cable news, and testing whether the confident claims of political consultants actually hold up.

In our conversation, David shares the path that brought him into political science and the “credibility revolution” that reshaped how researchers study politics. We talk about what persuasion looks like in practice, why it’s so hard to predict which messages will work, and what his research reveals about the gap between political insiders’ instincts and what actually moves the needle.

Source for intro to government shutdowns:

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#109: The Realities of Political Persuasion with David Broockman