It was Lake’s research that also formed the foundation of the marketing campaign to promote President Obama’s health-care reform bill. She provided the survey data to the Herndon Alliance, which reportedly was behind the false claim that Americans can maintain their “choice” of doctors and insurance plans.
An April 16, 2007, Newsweek article on the marketing of “climate change” notes that Lake “actually endorsed ‘climate change’ in 2004 on the grounds that ‘global warming’ only works for half the year.”
“Every time we’d use the term in the winter, people would say, ‘It doesn’t feel that warm to me,’” she told Newsweek.
Lake expounded on the marketing concept in a 2009 Huffington Post article, saying her surveys revealed the public was not connecting enough with the “global warming” term.
“Every time we used the term ‘global warming’ in a message, we ‘lost’ men and moderate Republican voters who were otherwise willing to hear us out,” she wrote.
She found “global warming is such an abstract concept that it’s hard for most people to get worked up about it unless they’re activists.”
Lake wrote that while she thought “‘warming’ accurately reflects a long-term trend observed by scientists,” it is nonetheless the “wrong word to include for nonscientists in a phrase intended to denote something destructive, because its connotations … are largely positive.”