PoliticalDUAL-USE

Plain Folks Appeal

What it is

A powerful person presenting themselves as an ordinary, relatable individual to gain the trust and identification of common people.

How it works

By eating at diners, rolling up sleeves, using colloquial language, and sharing "regular person" stories, elite figures create the illusion that they share the experiences and interests of ordinary people. This identification suppresses the audience's awareness of the vast power and resource asymmetry between them and the "plain folks" speaker.

Real-world examples

•1948: Harry Truman's whistle-stop tour; 2000 to 2008: George W. Bush clearing brush at his Crawford ranch, a property purchased in 1999.
•2016: Donald Trump photographed eating McDonald's on his private jet; 2015: Hillary Clinton's Chipotle stop in Ohio on her first campaign trip.
•United Kingdom: Boris Johnson stuck on a zip wire in 2012 and Nigel Farage's pint-in-hand photographs; Ed Miliband's 2014 bacon-sandwich photograph shows how the performance can fail.
•Corporate origin myths: Hewlett-Packard's 1939 Palo Alto garage is real; Steve Wozniak said in 2014 that the Apple garage story was a bit of a myth; executives' day-in-the-life videos edit out staff and wealth.
•Wealthy populists: Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg each campaigned as outsiders against elites while being among the richest people in their countries.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Speaking plainly and sharing real common ground is authentic. It becomes manipulation when ordinariness is staged to hide a record, wealth, or interests the audience would weigh differently.

●There is nothing wrong with being relatable — the manipulation is in the performance of an identity you don't actually hold.
●When elites perform ordinariness to avoid accountability for their extraordinary power, it's deception.
●Audiences deserve to know who they are actually dealing with.

How to defend against it

►Judge powerful people by their policies and actions, not by their relatability performance.
►When someone who lives nothing like you performs being "just like you," ask what they want from the identification.
►Look at financial disclosures and actual lifestyles, not campaign photo opportunities.

From the Defense Playbook

Sunlight Against Astroturftakes practice

When a "grassroots" campaign, citizens' coalition, or flood of public comments appears, establish who organized and paid for it and make that public, because manufactured support loses most of its force once the audience knows it is manufactured.

Disclosure Checklistminutes

Before publishing sponsored, affiliated, incentivized, or endorsed content, check that every material connection between the speaker and the brand or cause is disclosed clearly, conspicuously, in plain language, and in the same place and format as the claim it qualifies.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

Lee, A. M., & Lee, E. B. (Eds.), for the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (1939). The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches. Harcourt, Brace and Company
Origin of 'plain folks' as one of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis's seven devices: a speaker winning confidence by appearing to be one of the people, sharing their ways and their interests — the entry's definition.
Burke, K. (1950). A Rhetoric of Motives. Prentice-Hall (reissued University of California Press, 1969)
The mechanism: Burke's account of persuasion through identification — a speaker persuades by making the audience feel that their ways, interests and language are shared, which is what diner visits, rolled-up sleeves and colloquial speech perform.

Last reviewed 2026-09-12

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