In our fast-moving digital communication environment, where citizens regularly make their voices heard, political parties and candidates face an important dilemma: should they stick to their message or adapt it to keep up with the times at the risk of being perceived as “flip-flopping”?  Evidence suggests that elite repositioning on specific policy issues can influence voters. Recent research shows that when parties change their position on an issue, they adopt specific communication strategies in anticipation of potential electoral punishment – by framing their new position differently from the previous one. However, little is known about the extent to which such communication strategies affect voter perception. As an important contribution to the literature, in this paper we empirically test how political elites’ reframing of their message when changing position on an issue affects the public's credibility perception and voting intention. Using a cutting-edge experimental survey design, we present different vignettes of a fictitious (online) newspaper article to a representative sample of the Swiss population. The vignette exposes respondents to statements by a fictitious politician on an issue at two points in time, where the text varies in terms of whether the politician changes position or not, and whether the politician changes the frame or not. Our results indicate that voters are indeed more forgiving of political elites who shift their position along with their frame. Given the declining political trust in many advanced democracies, our findings highlight a crucial issue for the influence of elite communication on public perceptions.