Value Them Both Fails to Persuade Kansas Voters: A Rhetorical Analysis
September 2022, University of Missouri–Kansas City
Media analysis, Political communication, Rhetoric, Academic
How the 'Value Them Both' campaign tried to persuade Kansas voters ahead of the 2022 abortion amendment, and why it didn't work. A look at the slogans, the cherry-picked numbers, and the ballot language.
Overview
On August 2, 2022, Kansas voters went to the polls on a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the state legislature to further restrict abortion access. The “Value Them Both” campaign, funded by Catholic organizations and conservative PACs, ran a multi-channel persuasion effort across television, social media, and online platforms. Despite the campaign’s reach, Kansas voters rejected the amendment decisively.
This paper analyzes the rhetorical strategies the campaign employed, drawing on concepts from persuasion theory and political communication.
Persuasion techniques examined
Slogans and imagery. The “Value Them Both” slogan is a glittering generality: it frames the campaign in terms so broadly appealing that opposition seems unreasonable. Paired consistently with images of mothers and infants, the visual rhetoric created positive emotional associations designed to override policy reasoning.
Downplaying through diversion and omission. Campaign ads employed ad hominem attacks on the opposition (“the radical lying about Value Them Both”) rather than substantive engagement with competing arguments. Cherry-picked data (including a claim that abortions would increase 1,000% if the amendment failed, drawn from a single prediction in the Kansas City Star) was used to manufacture urgency without any methodological basis.
Inflated and distorted language. The campaign’s use of terms like “abortion industry,” “preborn babies,” and “the unborn” in place of clinical terminology represents a deliberate linguistic strategy to reframe the debate. The ballot language itself was written in dense legal prose calculated to confuse, with the practical effect of making a “yes” vote appear to be the safe, status-quo option.
Conclusion
The Value Them Both campaign’s failure illustrates that even well-funded, multi-channel persuasion efforts can be rejected when voters engage critically with the underlying claims. At the same time, the campaign’s reliance on half-truths, cherry-picked data, and emotionally manipulative imagery raises persistent ethical questions about the standards applied, and the standards that should be applied, to political communication.