Appeals from executives to the electorate have grown markedly over past decades. However, while insightful, empirical scholars have had difficulty establishing the impacts of such efforts. One possible reason is that microfoundations are underdeveloped. Hence, we analyze a model where the executive can potentially raise the public profile of an issue and, contrary to past theoretical work, send a signal about the quality of one option relative to another while considering a variety of costs and benefits. Our results indicate that the executive's going public is not always associated with observable success—indeed, sometimes failure is guaranteed—and, yet, better choices are likely given the existence of the going public option relative to a hypothetical world without it. Results are largely robust to allowing the chief executive to signal privately without public observance of information transmission. Our findings are roughly consistent with empirical scholarship and have important implications for future work.