What Great Political Speakers Know About Persuasion
Updated: 5 days ago
In 2020, Rep. Katie Porter sat across from a pharmaceutical executive during a congressional hearing and started doing math.
Armed with her now-famous whiteboard, Porter walked through the relationship between price increases for a cancer drug and the executive’s compensation. She asked questions, wrote down numbers, and made him account for the results.
She could have delivered a speech about corporate greed. Instead, she made the executive participate in an argument against his own company’s practices.
Political Persuasion: Ethos, Pathos, & Logos
More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle identified three ways people make persuasive arguments. He called them ethos, pathos, and logos.
Ethos is credibility. What makes someone worth listening to?
Pathos is emotion. What makes the audience care?
Logos is reasoning. What makes the argument hold together?
Most effective arguments use some combination of all three. The interesting part is how differently they can be applied.
A job title tells people what you do. A specific experience can tell them why your perspective matters.
In 2004, Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator delivering a keynote address at the Democratic National Convention. Most Americans had never heard of him. He could have spent his opening minutes establishing his political qualifications. Instead, he talked about his family. His father came from Kenya. His mother grew up in Kansas. His grandfather served in World War II. The story gave Americans an introduction to Obama, but it also served another purpose. His family history became the evidence for his argument about American identity.
The audience didn’t need to agree with his politics to understand how his life informed his worldview. This is ethos at work. Obama established credibility through his personal experience rather than relying entirely on his title.
Emotion doesn’t require theatrics
In 1974, Rep. Barbara Jordan, a constitutional scholar, addressed the House Judiciary Committee during the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. She began her remarks with a personal observation about the Constitution, that it's opening words, “We, the people,” were written, when people like her had not been included in that promise.
Jordan then explained how constitutional amendments and legal decisions had changed that reality before turning to the question of impeachment. Click here to read Barbara Jordan’s 1974 impeachment remarks.
Her opening carried considerable emotional weight, but she wasn’t asking the committee to decide the matter based on her feelings. She was establishing her relationship to the Constitution before making an argument about what it required.
That’s pathos, but not in the way people sometimes understand it.
Emotion in political communication isn’t limited to anger, grief, or a story designed to make somebody cry. Pride, humor, recognition, frustration, and even curiosity can make people more receptive to an argument.
Jordan’s opening also demonstrates how ethos, pathos, and logos overlap. Her personal history, constitutional authority, and legal reasoning reinforce one another.
Specificity creates meaning
When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez responded to a fellow member of Congress who had directed a vulgar insult toward her in 2020, she didn’t simply describe the exchange. She talked about waiting tables, working in bars, and encountering similar behavior throughout her life. The incident was specific, but the experience was familiar to many women.
Then she challenged the idea that a man’s relationships with women automatically establish that he respects them. Notice what happened.
Ocasio-Cortez began with an incident involving two politicians and used it to explain a broader pattern of behavior. Her experience established credibility, the familiar indignity created an emotional connection, and her reasoning challenged the defense offered by her colleague.
It’s a useful approach when communicating about problems that are easy to dismiss individually but significant when considered together. One broken streetlight might seem trivial. A neighborhood where residents repeatedly report broken streetlights without getting a response raises a larger question about how the government handles everyday problems. The specific incident gives people something to picture. The larger pattern gives them something to consider.
How to use Ethos, Pathos, & Logos for Political Persuasion
Let's pretend we are preparing two minutes of testimony asking your city to repair a dangerous intersection.
Ethos: Open with your experience crossing it every day.
Pathos: Help the audience picture the danger by describing what happens when a driver approaches the corner and can’t see pedestrians behind an overgrown hedge.
Logos: Explain how many complaints have been filed, what the city can do about it, and why the proposed fix makes sense.
You’ve given the audience a reason to listen, a problem they can understand, and a specific action to consider.
Now try rearranging those elements. What happens if you start with the number of complaints? What if you open with a question? What if you show a photograph instead of describing the intersection? Each version makes a slightly different argument, even though the facts haven’t changed. That’s where understanding rhetoric becomes useful. You start making deliberate choices about how people encounter your ideas.
And you don’t have to be running for president, testifying before Congress, or carrying a whiteboard to put it to work.
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