You’re either on-message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.

Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.

This week… Look Who’s Talking.

As the effort to distribute the various COVID-19 vaccines continues across the country a recent poll shows a partisan divide in who has been willing to get the shot so far.

According to CNN, 92 percent of Democrats say they’ll take the vaccine but only 50 percent of Republicans say the same.

This week, former President Donald Trump made some effort to encourage people to get the vaccine during an interview on Fox News with Maria Bartiromo.

***[SOT Trump: “I would recommend it and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly. But again, we have our freedoms and we have to live by that and I agree with that also. But it is a great vaccine. It is a safe vaccine and it is something that works.“]***

The former president had also encouraged people to get vaccinated during his remarks at CPAC a few weeks ago.

But the main question to ask is one of timing. Why is Trump speaking out now about the need to be vaccinated?

It’s possible he considers it his patriotic duty to wield some of his still considerable influence to move his supporters to do the right thing.

But it’s also possible he recognizes the likelihood the Biden administration will get credit not only for a successful rollout of the vaccine (which they deserve) but also credit for developing the vaccine so rapidly (something that, politically at least, Trump should take credit for).

After all, history is written by the victors.

So, what’s the lesson?

When you have a message you or your organization wants to deliver, choosing the right spokesperson is essential. And sometimes that means choosing more than one mouthpiece for the various segments of your audience.

In the overall effort to get a high enough number of people vaccinated that we get COVID under control in a divided country, we need the right spokesperson for each group.

Democrats won’t listen to Trump; as the polls show, they are ready to line up behind President Biden.

But Republicans (at least the portion of the party that are Trump supporters) need to hear from someone they will listen to.

It’s quite possible that, by the time we are ready to vaccinate teenagers and young adults, we’ll need to enlist TikTok stars in the persuasion effort.

Effective communication is a critical element of any strategy and, whatever your objective may be, using the right spokesperson to persuade the audience or audiences you target could very well be the difference between success and failure.

One final note… You can also look at who’s not talking.

I often said when I worked as Governor Herbert’s spokesman that the governor gets to deliver good news and it was my job to deliver bad news.

In his first 100 days in office, Governor Spencer Cox has done a nice job of keeping a mostly-laudatory media spotlight trained on himself.

He’s certainly the most social media savvy elected official we’ve seen in the state at any level and he’s proven he can keep the traditional media beast fed, as well.

And when the news isn’t so positive, that’s when we hear from his spokeswomen, Jennifer Napier Pearce.

The Salt Lake Tribune published a story this week citing the state’s policy not to collect information from people receiving COVID tests that would allow the state to bill insurance companies for the procedure, rather than passing the cost on to taxpayers.

The story cited emails from senior staffers in the health department but it included no comment from the governor directly.

Picking the right spokesperson is not dissimilar to picking your battles. There are times when you just don’t want your name tied to the story, whether you’re a governor, a business or a Regular Joe.

It’s not a criticism so much as a trope you can look for to see if a politician wants to be part of a story or doesn’t, based on whether they step forward or send someone to speak for them.

That’s it for this week.

More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our new YouTube channel.

If you haven’t already, you should subscribe to our Utah Political Underground email so you get each issue delivered directly to your inbox.