  I propose a cheap-talk model in which the sender can use private messages and
only cares about persuading a subset of her audience. For example, a candidate
only needs to persuade a majority of the electorate in order to win an
election. I find that senders can gain credibility by speaking truthfully to
some receivers while lying to others. In general settings, the model admits
information transmission in equilibrium for some prior beliefs. The sender can
approximate her preferred outcome when the fraction of the audience she needs
to persuade is sufficiently small. I characterize the sender-optimal
equilibrium and the benefit of not having to persuade your whole audience in
separable environments. I also analyze different applications and verify that
the results are robust to some perturbations of the model, including
non-transparent motives as in Crawford and Sobel (1982), and full commitment as
in Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011).
