Political practitioners poorly predict which messages persuade the public.

Do political practitioners have good intuitions about how to persuade the public? Longstanding theories that political elites' messages have large effects on public opinion and the large sums spent to secure some practitioners' messaging advice suggest they should. However, findings regarding the surprising limits of expert forecasts in other domains suggest they may not. In this paper, we evaluate how well political practitioners can predict which messages are most persuasive.