By Chris Satullo

In the deep-blue city where I live, people have been freaking out for weeks about polls that show President Trump essentially even with the leading Democrats in the three states that narrowly gave him the Oval Office in 2016: Michigan, Wisconsin and my Pennsylvania.

Each new blast of panic renews an edgy debate among friends. 

You know the drill. One group claims the only way to beat the incumbent is through a clarion call to transformational reform a la Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

The other side objects: “That’s a sure path to four more horrid years. We need a moderate who will appeal to independents and Trump voters who feel some buyer’s remorse, not someone who’ll scare them back into Trump’s arms.”

Then the inevitable riposte: “We don’t need them. We don’t want them. They’re ignorant and probably racist.  That’s the only way anyone would even consider Trump. We can win just with our growing legion of those on fire to remake this unequal, racist society.”

Personally, I think what’s foolish is framing this as a binary choice between the weak-kneed and the woke.  To back my case, I’d like to call to the stand the estimable John Cassidy of the New Yorker:

“Because candidates can’t rely on monolithic voting patterns, they can’t rely on monolithic electoral strategies either. Successful Presidential candidates, even as they target their core supporters, somehow manage to limit their losses among groups that aren’t inherently favorable to them.”

Cassidy thus argues, and I agree, that Democrats should work to reel back a big chunk of the 6 million voters nationwide who went for Trump in 2016 after backing Obama in 2012.  (Clearly, these voters are open to persuasion in ways that the deeply partisan just don’t get.)

To the progressives and social justice warriors who scoff at this strategy, who simply want to mobilize their base, I’d offer these responses:   

1. The army of the woke is smaller than you imagine, as you nestle into your particular  bubble.
2. Young people (like every newly eligible generation before them, including mine) are notoriously more likely to voice their outrage than to actually go to the polls to vote it.  Twitter just makes this bad habit so much easier to indulge.
3. Finally, and most important, many of these “bridge” voters were not, in fact, driven primarily by racism or misogyny. 

There were more reasons to dislike Hillary Clinton and vote Trump than are dreamt of in some progressives’ philosophy.  But many progressives don’t recognize those rationales – because they know few Trump voters – and talk politics with even fewer. Actually sitting down to listen respectfully to someone explain their ’16 voting choice is a foreign concept.  The dominant mode is denunciation.

Two days after the 2016 election, I took part in a panel discussion in Philly. It was a deep-blue room. First question was: “What should an urban progressive do in response to this election?”

Being the oldest on the panel (by a lot), I was asked to go first.  “Take a Trump voter to lunch,” I replied.  I was nearly booed off my stool.  A person whom I know pretty well led this round of righteous indignation.

Three years later, that’s still my story and I’m sticking to it. 

 If you’re a Dem who wants to avoid waking up the morning of Nov. 4 in a state of despair, one of the most helpful things you can do is seek out a Trump voter who might just be feeling some buyer’s remorse. Engage them in a respectful chat where you do more listening than talking.

But a dialogue where the opening bid is “I think you’re an ignorant bigot,” is not likely to lead to insight or a dawn of trust.

Instead of writing off the voters who decided the last election – which, again, swung entirely on close tallies in those three states, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – doesn’t it make sense to spend some time listening to them describe in their own words how they came to make their fateful choice?

You probably won’t change any minds on the spot.  Nor should you try.

But you might plant a seed.

And you’ll definitely help your side get the intel it needs to avoid the unforced errors and blinkered strategies that helped lose the last election. (Yes, yes, I know: Comey and Russia, Comey and Russia. But it should never have been close enough for those to be decisive.   Progressive self-righteousness and bigotry, epitomized by “basket of deplorables,” were in my view bigger culprits.)

So, from a longtime laborer in the vineyards of civic dialogue, here are a few suggested questions to get that hoped-for conversation with an Obama-Trump voter off to a good start and on to a good result:

1. Tell me what it was that first caught your eye about Donald Trump as a presidential candidate?
2. When you entered the voting booth in November 2016, would you say your vote was more a vote against Hillary Clinton or for Donald Trump?
3. If against Clinton, what was it about her that you just could not support?
4. Tell me about a time when you mentioned your vote for President Trump, or your support for him later on, and got blowback from another person.  How did that experience make you feel?
5. Do you feel like President Trump has delivered on the promises that meant the most to you? If yes, which ones? If not, why do you think that is?  (A possible follow-up where you offer your opinion, gently): To be honest, I have to tell you it seems to me that most of what he’s gotten done, as opposed to what he talked about doing in 2016, is the GOP’s standard pro-corporate, anti-working people stuff.  How do you react to that view?  

(If the person blames “do-nothing Democrats,” at this point feel free to point out – calmly – that the GOP controlled Congress for Trump’s first two years, and that since capturing the House this year, the Democrats have passed insert updated number major bills that Mitch McConnell’s Senate has never bothered to act on.)

6. When President Trump talks about “draining the swamp,” what does that mean to you?

(A possible response to what they say): I always thought that phrase meant reducing the power of big money in elections and preventing elected or appointed officials from profiting personally from their power.  If you agree with that, how do you think he’s doing on that front?

7. I still think of a president as a role model, especially for young people.  Do you consider the President a positive role model?  How so? Again, I have to tell you, if my kids stretched the truth, bragged constantly, refused to admit their mistakes and called people, especially women, names the way Mr. Trump does, they would never stop being grounded.

As you can see, civil dialogue does not mean you avoid areas of disagreement or stay silent about your views. But there are ways of exploring disagreement that fuel further conversation – just as there are ways that stop things dead and leave behind wounds.

The most important thing is to view the “win” for yourself neither as immediate conversion of the other person or some kind of jawboning debate triumph. 

The win is leaving the dialogue with a better grasp of what the other folks think and why they think it (and what you might have done to contribute to that).  Also, they might just leave the exchange with a sense that not all Trump critics are raging enemies of the people, full of insults and venom – people who, in fact, make some points worth pondering.

(Next Saturday: Some tough, fair questions I would welcome Trump voters asking Democrats like me – questions we all would do well to ponder, before we blow another election.)

—

Hello, from Chris Satullo (a civic engagement consultant, formerly an editorial page editor/columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer and vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia):

I’m thrilled to be joining National Interest as a regular contributor.  Big thanks to old friend and colleague Dick Polman for extending the invitation.

My goal is to provide readers of this site some useful, distinctive observations during this momentous year.

Despite surface appearances (Old. White. Guy. With glasses.), Dick and I are not the same person.

For one, I don’t have a beard.

Second, I do not share Dick’s abiding (and, at times, concerning to his friends) obsession with Nazi Germany.

Mine is with the Civil War.

Third, and this is the most relevant distinction, I approach politics and elections from a different angle.  Don’t get me wrong; I love what Dick does, the wit, the deep intellectual honesty, the inside sources, the boundless energy.  I just do something different.

 Most of my career as a journalist has been spent trying to get the newsrooms where I worked to be better at listening to the grassroots, the neighborhoods and subdivisions, to report elections from the ground up as well as from the candidates and consultants down.

Campaigns and elections are not the same thing. Campaigns are what candidates and their collection of paid hands do.  Elections – only voters can make an election.  So, to me, if you want to cover an election right, it helps to start with the people who are the election, the voters.  I leave it to others to cover the tactics of the horse race.

I’ve tried to cover elections that way at all three stops of my journalism career: The Easton, PA, Express-Times, where  an insufferably arrogant and utterly callow reporter grew into a columnist and top editor; the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I was a columnist and editorial page editor (and worked alongside Dick); and WHYY, where I was vice president of news and civic dialogue — and brought Dick into public media to start this indispensable National Interest blog.

You’ve heard, I imagine, that we have a pretty big election coming up.  I’m worried about it – and not only about the results, weighty though they will be. The deeper concern is that, without smart and consistent interventions from people whose first loyalty is to America, not party labels, the national dialogue might not survive this one. 

On both teams, red and blue, far too many people have hair-triggers for grievance, a taste for insult and self-righteous dismissal of others, and a lack of understanding that we’re all in this big boat called America together.

So, as someone who’s worked on civil dialogue for 25 years, learning from both mistakes and successes what works and what does not, I seek to foster small, patriotic acts in support of some fraying democratic principles.

These are: Elections do not have be an iron-cage match; one’s views do not require one to hate all those who do not share them; sometimes both individuals and their country would benefit if they didn’t assume their take on everything was 100 percent right all the time.

This is what I hope to bring to the already fine National Interest offerings – along with the perspective of someone who approaches issues through a religious faith (Episcopalian) that leads me to answer that key question – What Would Jesus Do? – very differently from the Ralphs (Reed and Drollinger) of the world.

Whatever I end up saying, I’ll always be interested in what you have to say in response.  Dialogue is always best when done in the National Interest.