Unbiased

Arjun: For four years, Diane Hessan has been in weekly conversations with more than 500 voters around the United States. She shared many of her findings in a weekly column, published in the Boston Globe, which she recently pulled together in a book titled, our common ground.

I just finished reading the book in about 48 hours and it was fantastic. I found it so insightful that I've on the pages, on the margins, on nearly every other page. It's, it's really brilliant. Her key insight is that we aren't as polarized as we might imagine. voters for both political parties have a lot more in common than we realize.

So Dan and I are delighted to welcome Diane to our show, her insights about what Americans really want, why we struggle to understand each other, how we might move forward as a nation. Diane is the founder and chairman of C- space, company to leverage social media for consumer insights. She's also extraordinarily well educated. She received a BA from Tufts university, and her MBA from Harvard business school. Welcome again, Diane. Great to have you on the show.

Diane: Thank you Arjun. Hi Dan. Hi everybody. Great to be here.

Arjun: Wonderful. So we have a slew of things we wanted to ask you after we read the book I've tried to keep our questions relatively short, but I think it's going to be a fascinating discussion that'll probably go in a number of directions. Maybe the first one I'll start with is, you know, as I was reading the book, I found myself reading the passages from Republican voters a little bit more closely because I feel like I understood the Democratic point of view somewhat, already.

Maybe it's a little bit more prevalent in the press, but the Republican side, sometimes I didn't. Did you find this kind of curiosity of you know, the other side when you talked to your research participants?

Diane: Hm. I don't know Arjun. I think that your curiosity about the other side says a lot about you. I mean, I would say there is not a lot of curiosity on either side, because in general, you know, we are hammered with so much news about how awful the other side is that I think most people and most of my voters had already made their minds up.

I mean, most people think they understand the other side. So for instance, if you ask Democrats about Republicans and especially Trump's supporters, they don't say I wonder... What's behind all of their thinking. They say they're a bunch of hypocritical, uneducated deplorables, who sleep with their guns, refuse to wear masks, deny that climate change is happening, and never met a black person they liked.

Or, if you ask most Republicans about the democratic party, they will say something like Democrats are a bunch of elitist socialists who want to take my hard earned tax dollars and give them away to criminals and illegal immigrants and people who are too lazy to work. And they want to take away guns and allow women to use abortion as birth control. And they want to completely dismantle policing.

So both of these are wrong, but these stereotypes were on the ballot last fall. They're on the ballot all the time in our country and they really dominate the media. So part of why I wrote Our Common Ground, here's my book. My publisher always says, I should show it. Part of why I wrote the book is I wanted to get, people to feel more curious or to kind of be open to the notion that maybe they don't have it all figured out about the other side.

Arjun: And did you find that over the course of, I mean, your readers knew who you were, the knew you were a columnist for the Boston globe. They're presumably reading your columns as they're coming out. Did you see a shift

in tone? Over the course of those four years that you were talking to these folks saying, you know, Diane, I read that column and that really surprised me or my goodness that opened my eyes. Did you see that happen?

Diane: You know, the goal of the research wasn't to get people to understand each other. It was really to have people educate me about their lives, their dreams, their opinions, and so on. So the way I structured this is: I had a half-hour conversation with each one of them over the phone. And that was partially to do my geeky research stuff and collect some demographic data.

It was also to make sure that they knew that there was like a live person on the other end of everything that was going to happen with this project who was not going to judge them. And I think a lot of people, although they knew my politics, a lot of Trump's supporters were extremely interested in helping to educate me about who they really were and why they weren't maybe what I expected.

So and I also say that they didn't really believe me about the common ground. I mean, I would say there's so much common ground on immigration. Isn't this amazing. And here's what all of you would support and they'd say, yeah, but then why do I turn on the television and see Alexandria Ocasio Cortez say she wants to open up our borders completely.

So... my goal wasn't really to get them to listen to each other. And I think in general, most people just had a really good time feeling heard and feeling like they were going to have an influence on whatever I would be writing about, you know, on that particular week.

Dan: Arjun, I want to jump in here because I found that point very interesting. The other thing that jumped out at me about your book and, and full disclosure to everyone listening, I completed the book in 60 hours. That's not a comment on the book. I'm just a little slower than my friend origin. Well, you know, one of the things I found really interesting is that the both sides, Democrats and Republicans, the, the folks you spoke with you really yearned for moderation, there really seem to be a desire for more moderate candidates.

Why do you think it is that, you know, more moderate candidates like Howard Schultz, for instance, or Mike Bloomberg, compare poorly with more polemic figures like Trump, for instance.

Diane: That's a great question, Dan. So , your point is true, at least at the moment, I would say that about 70% of Americans would characterize themselves as moderate. And I know that sounds like a big number. If anything, according to the 7 million pieces of data, I have that number is a little low, but the extremes are getting the airtime.

So you'd never know that. We have just very inaccurate perceptions. So as for Howard Schultz and Michael Bloomberg, it's exactly what you would think. The common ground that I talk about in the book is on policy. There is tremendous common ground on the issues of the day: on immigration, on gun control, on healthcare, on infrastructure, on climate change and so on and so forth.

But people don't just vote on policy. They vote on the character and charisma of the candidates, and there's another dynamic that I call voting against versus voting for. So if we go all the way back to 2016, the number one reason that people voted for Donald Trump was not that they thought he was a really great guy. They just hated Hillary Clinton. And this is not, oh, I think I don't like her style. Many people thought she was totally corrupt. Which was just shocking to me because I was started this project by working for someone in her campaign, but they would stay an entire lifetime of questionable activities.

Whitewater, Vince foster, the Clinton Foundation, Ben Ghazi, stealing furniture from the White House, defending her husband against women who accused him of sexual harassment and then saying she was a ,supporter of women. And the email scandal was just one more thing. So this dislike of the alternative is a really important dynamic. It also happened in 2020, lots of people who voted for Biden were just voting against Trump. Lots of people who voted for Trump were just voting against Biden.

Or let's look at, you know, the reason Virginia election. So we have an unknown guy Youngkin who won and to many voting for him, you know, was a vote...You know, this whole issue about, you know, saying that parents had no role in impacting their school curriculum turned out to be the primary reason that people were voting for him. I mean, how could you vote for someone who said that parents shouldn't have a role there. Just like the word when Hillary Clinton came out and talked about deplorables, that was a downfall for her. Mitt Romney way back, that he wasn't going to worry about 47% of the country.

How could you vote for someone like that? So it's this constant, you know, one misstep that sticks --amplified by the media can be the end of a campaign. So Howard Schultz, you asked about, you know, he had this scandal, he claimed to get more military experience and more engagement than any other candidates.

People hated that there was some veterans running that was out of touch. Or by Bloomberg had issues with stop and frisk. He had a disastrous record on women's issues . So what am I voting against? It's very often the big issue for people. And by the way, we haven't always voted against things.

I mean, from time to time, there's a candidate who was so magnetic were so inspirational. Like Obama was particularly in 2008 that people vote for someone. But a lot of the way people get eliminated is from one particular moment.

Arjun: There were like six questions that came to my head that was so good. Actually just a little bit of a sidebar, but such a fascinating comment. If people voted for Obama in '08 or again, whatever fraction that did, what is it that happened in his two terms that set the stage for president Trump?

What did he do in the eyes of Republican voters that said you're dead to me. And I'm going to go with someone that is an outsider. I really, I want to upset the applecart. What happened?

Diane: Everybody says, Trump had this great slogan Make American Great Again. According to my voters, he had another slogan that was even more effective, which was Drain The Swamp. You can get into lots of issues related to Obama. Republicans talk about his apology tour, where he went to the middle east and said that the United States was a bad country or whatever else.

I mean, there are lots of reasons that people got disillusioned with Obama. But I think in general, as you look at all of this, the "drain the swamp" thing worked because people don't believe that government is serving them. They don't believe that they're hard earned tax dollars are going to something that's going to really pay off for them.

So they see waste, they see bureaucracy, and they see funding going to special issues. 78% of American full-time workers say they live paycheck to paycheck. 71% are in debt. Over half of those in debt, say they're in over their heads. They say less than a hundred dollars each month. When you are in that situation... Every time some politician gets up there and says, here's what I'm going to do, make your life better. You know, there's a moment where you just think maybe things will change. But I think a lot of people got disillusioned because their lives didn't change as much as they actually expected them to, you know, between 2008 and 2016.

Dan: Hey Arjun do you mind if I throw another sidebar there too? cause that, you know, that that really plays into what, what you mentioned earlier about people voting based on partisan antipathy or voting against someone as well. And one of the analogies you had your book, which I really appreciated being in Boston was the analogy between people's allegiance to their political party and New England Patriots fans where, you know, the Patriots

Diane: That was my most controversial article. got more, I people even asked me about that in the book. People say, everybody agrees with that article, that all of the New England bias about the Patriots fans is because we love them. We're just like, you know, people who are not willing to hear bad news about Trump. Everybody agrees with that except for new England fans.

Dan: Mind you, dear listener, she published this in Boston, so I don't know... are you, do you still have a police detail outside your house or is that?

Diane: You can actually find it. You can like Google that. I mean, I have a variation of some of my articles are in the book, but if you Google that you see a lot of really, really mean comments.

Dan: I'm going to go and read them. sorry. I really have to. I guess the, the thing that, that got me thinking is, do you get the sense that the voters you talked to were really ideological or was it more like being a Patriots fan where yes, maybe I have common ground with these people, but I root blue or I root red, and that's the way I'm going to vote because they're all crooked.

Diane: I would say, there are universal things that people believe. Most people believe that government just doesn't do a lot for them. You even asked voters now about the infrastructure bill that has passed and people feel that a lot of the money is going to get wasted.

Let's see how long it takes for the money. That's going to fix the T in Boston to actually get to us or the money that's going to fix that crumbling bridge. You know, they don't see government is as able to implement and execute in the way that the businesses that they work for do. Are they ideological?

I think they are centered on their own lives, just trying to get by. And what they worry about is that, you know, the American dream that they had, is not going to work. You know, they want a new deal. They want a promise that if you live in the United States, the sky's the limit; that upward mobility is wired into the way things work.

Here's the deal in exchange for the benefits of living in extraordinary country, the citizens will work hard and participate in their communities and respect and honor diverse opinions and not expect to be taken care of unconditionally.

I think that's where their ideologues, you know, most of them are, you know, that we do have single issue voters. I mean, there are people who care about immigration and nothing else. There are lots of people who care about abortion and nothing else. But I think for the most part, I have a sense of personal accountability. I'll work my two jobs. I want to take care of my family. I want to be treated fairly and otherwise, you know, I don't have to have government do everything in my life. They're totally for taking care of people who are really, really needy. They just don't want to do it unconditionally and forever.

They want to give people the incentive to kind of get up by their bootstraps and get their lives back together again.

Arjun: So you mentioned something earlier, you said, you know, there's a lot of common ground on policy and a lot of your book is dedicated to addressing these. You have chapter by chapter on all the biggest policy issues that come up in the news that tend to divide Americans. So I want to go into this a little bit because I found that to be the most illuminating for me as, this is the stuff that matters, forget the mudslinging, the politics, this is stuff that actually impacts our lives.

And let's start with sort of the biggest thing in the news, probably the last three months, which is the infrastructure bill. You know, you wrote a post on The Factual recently and we've run polls with our readership about support for this bill. And at a high level, it seems like the majority is against this.

But it seems like it's perhaps driven a little bit by the price tag. And when we dig a little bit deeper into specific provisions like universal pre-K, or dental care being added to Medicare, then people are like, oh, actually that's a pretty good idea. What do you make of this. What's the deal over here?

Diane: I think this is one of the most important, trickiest issues that we're going to deal with over the next year. First of all, can you do a bill that is I think of as a grab where you take all, you know, ah, Congress isn't working, it takes too long to get stuff.

Let's take everything we care about from childcare, to healthcare, to climate change. Let's put it all into one big bill and get it passed at once. You know, I think that is a very heavy lift. If you listen to the media, they say this doesn't make sense. Americans - they're all for the policies and the Build Back Better bill.

And yet they're against the bill. So what's the problem. And I think there are two problems. One is what you've just said, which is the cost. I mean, sure people are for the policies in the bill, but given that they all been lumped together, it feels irresponsible to people that we are spending way beyond our means, especially at a time when everyone is faced with inflation.

So if Congress were going to try to pass a bill for $200 billion to give everyone four weeks of paid family and medical leave, that might be popular and, that might pass. But people do feel like it's a big grab bag now. And I think that is not serving anyone well.

What I worry about also for the Democrats is that this big bill, all of this Build Back Better, bill feeds into the primary Republican narrative that is working against the Democrats, that the Democrats are turning us into a radical socialist country.

Where your tax dollars are going for free stuff for people who just don't want to work hard, that narrative is working.

Now, some Democrats get super intellectual about this. They go, oh, those people don't really understand what socialism is. Let me tell you what socialism is. Well nobody really wants to hear that. They don't want to hear the intellectual argument. They don't like the idea that we're getting free, free, free, free at a time when we absolutely can't afford it.

So that could really be, you know, when I, when I look at 2022 and what is going against the Democrats, the notion that we decided to pass this grab bag of what people see as social programs that are great, but unaffordable could be absolutely the worst thing that could possibly happen of the Democrats, as we look towards November of 2020,

Dan: That plays very well, with something you said earlier, which is, you know, if you look at your average voter to your point, you wouldn't call them apathetic about policy, but they have other things on their mind. You know, they're working long hours, they're worried about making ends meet.

And so, very often I think it's the sound bite that's going to win. And that actually, that might answer my question about another tricky policy issue, which is climate change. Because one of the things that, that really stuck out to me in your book was the fact that Republicans actually are concerned about climate change. Yet, if you look at the people in the party and you look at the party platform, it doesn't seem to reflect that sentiment. Why do you think that is?

Diane: I'm not sure why Trump pushed so hard being like an anti-climate change person. Other than the notion that he was playing to his base. It's easy to take climate change and punch holes in the theories. And so you get a lot of good talking points. I also think Trump wanted to have the oil companies on his side and to appeal to people who believe that the private sector should handle the problem.

But I will tell you that I had lots and lots of Trump voters in my town who told me that they were disappointed in his stand on climate change. One of the problems is there aren't a lot of single issue voters on climate change. So for instance, there are a lot of single issue voters on abortion, and we can come back to that, but there are lots and lots of voters who will say you could have a candidate that I agree with on every single policy out there.

But if they're pro- choice, they're not getting my vote or vice versa. If they're pro-life, they're not getting m y vote there, not a lot of single voter ish single issue voters on climate change. So if Trump is bad on climate change, but good on a lot of other things that people care about, then they're okay.

They're okay just kind of ignoring that. You know, for those of you who are listening, who are passionate about climate change there's a really great organization called the Environmental Voter Project, which is based in Boston, led by a friend of mine -Nathaniel Stinnett and Nathaniel found a few years ago that people who were passionate about environmental issues tended not to vote.

They were active politically. They protested, they wrote letters to their representatives. They went to their state house with signs and talked about climate change, but they weren't voting. And so the Environmental Voter Project is working to change that. So sometimes it's just about which issues are really polarizing and which people really go to the mat for.

Arjun: Wow. That's really surprising. I wouldn't have guessed that at all.

Diane: There's so many things that are surprising! One of the things that is really shocking to me is how little people care about foreign policy, as an example. I mean, I would list 20 issues for voters and ask them to pick the top 10 that they cared about the most foreign policy almost never made the list.

One of my favorite stories, I had a voter from Pennsylvania and we were blabbing back and forth. And I said to him, you know, you're like college educated you're blah, blah, blah. You know, he had just come back from some business trip in Europe. And I said to him, you know, how do you explain this? He said, Diane, let me tell you about my cousin.

And he said, my cousin lives in Eastern Pennsylvania. And he got into a college --Bloomsburg State. That is probably in what you call in central Pennsylvania. He said, when my cousin went to college, it was like a three hour trip. His parents got into the car, packed him up, and they stopped midway at this voter's house to break up the trip.

In other words, it was such a huge deal for them to go three or four hours west in the state of Pennsylvania. That was an enormous trip for them, that they had to stop in between and break up the trip overnight. And then he said to me, Diane, do you think those people know where Ukraine is? And, you can say that that's really depressing, but I also found it to be profound that, you know, not everybody travels the world, not everybody has that kind of perspective.

And so when he said to me is, he said, you know, I'm a Republican and I'm a Trump supporter, but the Democrats had to be idiots of all of the things that they wanted to impeach Trump on. They picked the Ukraine, they picked Ukraine. They picked an issue that people couldn't even relate to cause they couldn't even find the country on a map. As opposed to something that people could really relate to. And so there was never a lot of passion in the country for the impeachment because people didn't really understand what the big deal was with a country that they had never really heard of before.

Arjun: Fascinating.

Dan: I absolutely love that.

Diane: I don't, I don't think this is about lack of education and stupidity. I think this is about how you're living your life and what's really in front of your face and what your priorities are and how you think about your life and how you think about the world.

Arjun: And it goes back to what you said. You know, if, if 70% of us are living paycheck to paycheck are not saving. Why would foreign policy be at the top of the issues that you care about? Of course not. You just need to make ends meet and feed the family. I completely that. When you put it all together with your data, it doesn't actually seem that surprising. It's like, actually, yeah, it's kind of obvious now.

Diane: Right.

Arjun: So actually one of the issues that does come up a lot, and actually even came up a little bit in the Virginia election as well, is around education and particularly around critical race theory and the influence of race on a lot of policies.

In 2019 in your book, you had this passage, one of the Republican voters you spoke to about president Trump's apparent racism said, "I don't think anyone knows what racism is anymore. It's used so often it's lost its bite" endquote What do you think about that?

Are the Democrats out of touch for talking about race so much and talking about social justice goals. Where are they on this issue?

Diane: This is such a sensitive area because it's full of emotion. So, what I can tell you is this: if you feel that you are not racist with whatever criteria you have for that, there is nothing worse than someone saying to you, you are racist. I mean, it's such a punch in the gut for people. So if somebody says all Trump supporters are racist, like you must be racist if you support that guy, you get backlash because people truly believe they are not. And I think we got to think about this in context then. So I would never tell you that pushing for social justice is a bad idea, but how it's done and where the emphasis is matters. So let's take something related. It's like that transgender bathroom issue.

I don't know if you remember was a very hot issue back in 2000 16, 17, 18. Started with the North Carolina law that prohibited trans people from using their gender identity when they chose bathrooms. A firestorm erupted, but the issue was major in our country. And so if you live far from North Carolina, you live in Wyoming, you're holding down two jobs, you're trying to make ends meet. You're worried about your health care costs. And you look at what's going on and you say, oh my gosh, I have all these fundamental things I'm worried about. And our country is getting hysterical about transgender bathrooms. Like even if you thought they were important, you wonder where our priorities are.

So with racism, it's a matter of who is calling who racist and how that plays out as a priority. And I think stuff around the fringes doesn't serve us. So I ran a story last week about an Arizona state university professor who thought that grades should only be about effort and not the quality of the response, because if you judge it by the quality of the response, that's racist. That kind of stuff just makes voters crazy.

So, you know, you watch Fox and you see some crazy story or whatever people start feeling everything's out of control, but no, I don't think pushing for social justice issues. It's I don't think that's ever unimportant. It's just making sure that we're grounded and also in touch with what's happening with people's everyday lives and where they're really struggling.

Dan: Arjun. Do we have time for me to throw one that's not on the list?

Arjun: Yeah, yeah, go for it. We got plenty time.

Dan: Diane, this speaks to something that there is an experience I had about a year ago. So this is at the tail end of the the presidential race. And I was up in Maine and TV and a Joe Biden ad came on.

And one of the things that the Biden ad emphasized was social justice in the form of allocating more funding towards minority owned businesses. And I was watching it totally behind the policy, but I was sitting there thinking to myself, okay, we're in Maine, which is not a particularly wealthy state, nor is it a particularly diverse state.

And one of the things that came to mind is somebody sitting there who's white, maybe not in the best financial circumstances, looking at that ad and thinking, what about me? Did that sentiment come out at all in any of the voters you spoke with?

Diane: Yeah. I mean, I love your example, Dan, look, I don't think this is about racism. I mean, I'll give you another example. You would think that eliminating student debt is a popular policy. Guess what? It's not. Voters really don't like it. Why do they not like it? Because they had kids with student loans, they scraped, they saved, they worked hard. They literally had one voter talking to me about how he had three jobs. He helped pay off his kids, student loans, they all did it. And now we're going to have a new program where for future generations, you don't have to do that. People think that's super unfair. I had a voter who had $300,000 in student loans, took them 25 years to pay the thing off. That just doesn't seem right. And so it's all of those sorts of issues. Absolutely. People say, what about me?

Dan: I'm laughing at what you're saying. Cause when I was reading that part of your book that talked about student loan debt, I thought to myself, you know, I have a son who was in college and I was like, why have we been writing checks for this kid for the last three years? Like we could, we could have just gotten it all written off. So at any rate that's, that's not important, but just something I thought I'd throw out

Arjun: You know, Diane, the bit about fairness is so interesting to me that people are upset about the student loan thing, because he thought it was unfair. And that comes up again in immigration, which you've said, we've actually got a lot of common ground and. Many people might not understand that unfairness is at the

root of why some people have an issue with certain immigration policies. So talk a little bit about what you found out on immigration, where the rub is and where the common ground is.

Diane: Most of what's going on in immigration is you know, people would have in common. I mean, I said to most, if you said I'll ask the two of you, we're, we're really stuck on immigration. Would you be okay with a bill that gave the dreamers a path to citizenship, built a physical wall on some parts of the Southern border of our country, added a bunch of technology at the border, didn't give immigrants the right to have a driver's license in their first six months, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And even if I gave you some of that stuff, you'd say actually, there's stuff that I really love in that bill. There's stuff that I don't like in that bill, but I'd be okay with it. Let's just make progress.

80% of Americans are in that situation where if I laid out what actually technically is the 2013 immigration act that almost passed Congress, most Americans are totally cool with that. It's just that again, the messages that we get about the bills are the extremes.

So what you hear from Republicans, the Democrats want to completely open up our borders. They want immigrants to pour into the country-- not true. What you hear from Democrats about Republicans is they want no immigrants. They're totally anti-immigration. By the way, most Republicans are for immigration pro- immigration. They just don't like illegal immigration. So the messages mess us up.

And the other thing is immigration for a politician gives you a lot of really juicy talking points. I mean, you can scream and yell, you know, you vote for me and I'll make sure no illegal person gets through that border or you vote for me and I'll never put a child in a cage. Again, there's so many good talking points that the resolution of the issue, the passage of the bill just takes the talking points away. And so we sit.

I think the other thing is there's just a big difference between talking to a voter that lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and talking to a voter that lives down at the Southern border, that has a lot of experience with seeing immigrants coming into the country that knows a lot about the difference between illegal and legal immigrants and what the ramifications of that are. So I think this is also about people saying you just don't understand just like I might say, you just don't understand, actually, this Ukraine thing is a big deal. There are people who are living at the Southern border saying you just don't understand your, your whole approach to immigration is theoretical. Whereas it's impacting my day-to-day life.

Arjun: Fascinating and on a, on a personal note, I, myself, and am immigrant. and so interestingly enough, I understand that issue more deeply at some level and, and actually the Republican point of view, because it took me 20 years to get my green card. The processes is, unfortunately, very, very slow. And for folks that are stuck in that system, it's terrible. Your life feels like it's hanging in the balance.

It's so understandable how immigration is such a difficult and polarizing issue. But I also understand why, frankly, a lot of people who are immigrants tend to be Republican on this issue. 'cause a lot of times they're like, well, I slogged in that line. It was awful. I waited

years, decades in fact. And so you

have these

Diane: I slogged in that line. I paid off my student loan debt. I did, you know, all of those things. I mean, it's not irrational. It's just, why would somebody get free when I did the American thing and took responsibility for worrying about my own challenges.

Arjun: It's And, and and my father, I remember when I was earlier in my life, perhaps like a lot of young people, you tend to be more liberal when you're young, you tend to be more conservative as you get older. And I remember I was talking to him about immigration. I was like, you know, we have these policies as bad as that.

He's like, you know, you, you say all this about America. Why is it that this is still the number one destination for most immigrants? Why does everyone still want to come here? And boy did he put me in my spot. You know, I was just like, kinda got me. And as, as bad as things sometimes can be immigrants, especially realize this country actually does give you the best chance at upward mobility.

It's not perfect by any means. Of course, we've got to make things better, but all the stuff you said Diane earlier, like, what is it that people want out of this country? Instead, if I work hard, I pay my bills, I do everything... the government's not gonna take full care of me, but I've got the best chance at upward mobility. That vision is actually held by a lot of immigrants. And it's one of the reasons why they do want to come here is if I put my head down and work hard, stay within the law, this is going to actually turn out pretty good. That's quite a Testament to what America stands for for people outside America.

Diane: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think you said it perfectly it's, it's so true. And you know, when you walk in other people's shoes and hear the stories, like what you've just talked about, it really brings to light that this is not this oh. You know, how can you not be for immigration? Don't you understand how difficult it is for these people's sort of issue. There's just so much texture and so much nuance and yeah. People get affected by their personal experience.

Dan: A lot of what you prescribe in the book is really recommending people talk to each other and more importantly, listen to each other. And yet one of the things we are maybe one of the advantages or disadvantages about America is it's a very large country. And so to your point, I may be learning about the situation of the Southern border because I live in Brownsville, Texas, or I may be learning about the situation at the Southern border because I live in Michigan and watch Fox news. And, you know, I'm going to get a much different perspective on things. And I guess what role do you feel the media plays in, in voter education and maybe in, in encouraging assumptions about people.

Diane: Most of my voters basically said that they think that the media is biased. Period. That affects everything. I've done a lot of watching of cable news, reading of media and everything. I wouldn't put The Factual in this category. But, first of all, most Americans are not watching CNN, Fox, MSNBC every night. They're just not. They're working, where they're hanging out with their family, or they're doing the dishes, or they're vegging out, watching something a lot more fun on TV.

So I think we have this overblown sense of how much all of us are tied to the media, which we're not. And you know, the first section of my book after I do this intro, the first section of my book basically says, people are not watching TV, even though you think they are, but there are moments in our country when everybody turns on the TV or looks on their news channel and tries to hear what's going on.

And in those moments, you can see how we become polarized. Such as Charlottesville or such as the Brett Kavanaugh hearings or there are just times when everybody's really drawn in.

You guys are more expert in this than I am. I think our media model is broken. It's really, really much easier to make money if you're being very provocative and very negative and if you have an enemy. People yearn for the days when we had three television stations and they all said the same thing, and I think those days are basically over. We're in phase one here, but we will build new skills as a society. We will learn to identify fake videos or to wonder whether a video is fake.

We will learn to be discerning about what we hear. We will learn about the difference between opinion and fact. We will have technology that helps us fact check what we are listening to. Instead of saying, gee, I wish we were back in the days when I could trust the media, we'll read the media to help shape our thinking and to listen to opinion, but we'll go to other places for fact.

I just think we'll be more discerning and we're going to need companies in place to actually help us do that. But I don't think we're going to expect to turn on the television set and see all truth. I think those days are over.

Arjun: Obviously a topic near and dear to my heart, which I've spent a lot of years working on. without trying to plug The Factual, per se, just continuing on that thread, I think what's really interesting is that, trust in the media has been declining for a while across all demographics. But it's always been lower with Republicans than Democrats. Why do you think that is.

Diane: I think the fact that 92% believe the media is biased as an astounding number and that's the same for Republicans and Democrats. So I'm not sure I would actually believe that.

I think Fox is one place where people go and Fox loves to say, you know, here's what was said on the media last night. Here's what was said on the media last night. So I think that the Republicans do a better job of catching the liberal media in the process of exaggerating, saying something's wrong, or at least not being as objective as they possibly could. And so that probably engenders that distrust, but I wouldn't say either side is really doing very well in that arena.

Dan: It's interesting you say that too. And especially the part about how people aren't glued to their TV screens, because I think one of the kind of recurring themes that I picked up in your book was the fact that people really want to be recognized as individuals. And don't want to be recognized as part of this monolithic partisan group.

I almost felt like when you said that, I almost feel like in a lot of ways for us, maybe we use the media as more of a cop-out or more of an excuse, not to understand other people. You know, maybe we say, ah, they're just brainwashed by Fox news, or they're just brainwashed by MSNBC. And we just make these assumptions about people. When in reality, maybe they're like my house and we spend a lot of time watching real Housewives and Below Deck reruns, not to, not to reveal much about my personal life.

Diane: That's good. I know you have a bunch of kids. I thought you were going to just say you were watching Sesame street and cartoons

Dan: no, we have a separate TV. It's awful. We keep them downstairs and they're into anime now.

Diane: I remember those days, I remember, you know, yearning for the days when I could watch real people on TV as characters.

Dan: right.

Diane: Yeah. I'm not sure people feel like the government needs to recognize them as individuals, but I do think people don't want to be stereotyped. They just don't. And we all tend to do that. I mean, I did a little project I wrote about in the book where you know, in the beginning of COVID I was just positive that everybody walking around without a mask was Republican. And everybody who had a mask on was, you know, like conservatives and liberals.

And I just thought this is crazy. Like I got to go out and understand this. And I went out with my notepad and said, hi, my name's Diane Hessan and I'm a writer for the Boston globe, Baba. I noticed you're not wearing a mask. Could you just talk to me a little bit about what's going on? And, you know, it's amazing what I learned.

You know, about people say, well, you know, I'm outside. I mean, this is the early days. So now we understand that, but people would say, well, I'm outside. I feel like I can keep my social distance from people. And you know, where I forgot my mask, or I'm so sorry about this or whatever, but it was completely different than what I expected.

You know, everybody has circumstances in their lives. The chapter that a lot of people ask me about more than any other one is the abortion chapter. And I open that chapter with a story about one of my voters from Alabama, who was a single issue pro-life supporter you know, obviously a Republican.

And he literally wrote to me one day and wanted to talk on the phone. And he told me that over the weekend on that Friday, this was a Monday, he said, oh, we learned that my 15 year old daughter is pregnant. He said, and I just thought, I'd talk it through with you. He said our family got together and we talked and we prayed and she got an abortion.

I mean, I was on the floor. I just, I was speechless. It was just tell me more, tell me more. And we talked for about an hour and a half and he was quite upset over it. And he said, you know, here's the thing, the difference between me and people who are pro-choice though, is that pro-choice people it's so much easier for them.

It's like they're pregnant and they just go across the street and get an abortion or whatever. I mean, his perception was the people who are pro-choice are casual and cavalier about. And that it's not for them excruciating. It's not something that they might pray about or whatever else, which of course is not true.

But the narrative that's in his head is-- people who are, pro-choice feel that abortion is just something you do if you're actually, you know, too lazy to use a condom. That was very eye opening for him. And it was eye-opening for me to realize that I couldn't even take somebody like that and just, you know, put them in this corner where I was pretty sure that he belonged.

Arjun: I thought that chapter on abortion was so interesting because it's perhaps the issue that maybe there's the least common ground on in some ways. But it also helped really elucidate sort of what the different viewpoints are. And I've seen poll after poll that says there's actually a majority of support for having abortion. but there's also a strong support for keeping a difficult to get and making it, basically not easy, which sort of reflects this voters point of view.

I don't know if you saw any of this Diane in talking to these people, but with that backdrop, if most people are saying we do want abortion, we just don't want to make it very easy, because it is a really, really heavy decision you need to think carefully about, what do you make of the laws that are being passed in Mississippi and Texas, and is in the Supreme court yesterday, the news is full of this stuff.

What do your voters say about these things?

Diane: I think what people worry about on either side is a slippery slope. If you're pro-choice, if you believe that a woman should have control over her own body, that doesn't necessarily mean you feel that it's okay for a woman to have an abortion when she's five months pregnant, but a law that says that five months is the cutting off point, feels like a slippery slope.

It's like, well, now it's in five, but soon it'll be four and a half and then it'll be four. And all of a sudden it'll be totally eliminated. So people worry that a slippery slope, if you give in on the extreme, something else, bad could happen in the next round. And I think, you know, that's what affects people the most.

But I agree with you. I mean, of all of the issues out there, you know there's some conversation to be had about abortion. There's probably more common ground than we think. You know, most people told me that they were not. for abortions in the third trimester with the exception of life of the mother, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean, you could kind of get into that, but it's very, very difficult territory.

Arjun: To pull it back a little bit, just on a more uplifting note. What I thought was really interesting is that your book is you finished going over the issues. You've talked about problems in our government. And then you end with this really fascinating insight about this group you call the New Independents. Talk to us a little bit about this because it seems like it's very, very important to the future of, of what people want in this country. And frankly, what's going to happen in 2022 and 2024. Tell us about this finding of yours.

Diane: Sure. I wrote a lot of articles about independents over the years; they're not all in the book. You know what people always ask me. Did you have voters who really liked Trump in 2016 and then switched to Biden? Sure. Do you have voters who liked Hillary in 2016 and then switched to Trump? Not so much, but the biggest shift I saw was a shift, a shift from identifying with a political party to saying I'm an independent.

I will tell you Arjun, I hear it's outrageously expensive and complicated to create a new political party. But if that were not the case, the time is really ripe for a third political party. Most people are not only feeling like they're more independent. They're kind of fed up with their current policy, with their current party. And they feel like their party is getting too radical, no matter whether they're Democrats or Republicans.

So Yeah, the time is really ripe for that. I mean, obviously you wouldn't know it because of what's going on in Congress. We got all kinds of issues related to , why it looks like the political parties are really moving to the extremes rather than moving towards the center. But I, I hear it time and time again from people. Those guys are crazy. I am fed up with my party. I feel like I'm moving more to the center.

Dan: Diane. It's like you've been reading my diary. It's it's it really, it really is. You know, one, one last question for you. You, the, the folks you research, they must have read your columns. And at some point must've realized what you were doing. You did their tone about the other side change as they started to learn more through your work. Did they start to demonstrate the sort of listening you advocate?

Diane: Not really only because I wasn't really asking them to understand the other side. I mean, sometimes I would send them my columns. Sometimes I would say, wow, look at this, isn't this amazing. I'm really surprised that all of you would say X on gun control or whatever. But I didn't go through an exercise where I asked them to actually have conversations with each other.

There's always some issue that comes up. The big issue right now that I've heard from a lot of voters on, I've actually taken the panel down formally, but everybody's still writing to me because it's like, Diane, I still have to write to you because nobody else listens to me. Like my wife doesn't listen to me. My boss doesn't listen to me. My kids don't listen to me. So I'm still going to tell you what I think. So I actually am still in touch with a lot of people.

A lot of people are worried about cultural issues right now. I don't know if you two, or if your if your listeners have heard about this, but you know, last Christmas we canceled that old Christmas song, "Baby It's Cold Outside". And because it was a song that suggested sexual aggression. And yet the number one song in the nation, for over two months and Grammy award winner for best hip hop song was "Wet Ass Pussy". So there's a whole thing about let's look at the lyrics to Baby It's Cold Outside. Let's look at the lyrics to Wet Ass Pussy. And if you had to guess which one would be canceled, you would be wrong.

Now I've had the two hour conversation with my daughter it's to understand this dynamic. But the point is that this issue divides people . And it's fundamental to the perception of what's going on.

So yeah, you know, you know, maybe we could agree on that immigration policy, but you know, those Democrats, they think it's okay to get one of those songs, that award, and to cancel the other, like, they're crazy. They're crazy. And they're getting worse every day because those are the messages that we're receiving.

So but my whole last chapter of the book is all about what we need to do about this. And I do think it starts with changing the way that we have conversations with each other. You know, when somebody says to you, I think that the November, 2020 election was fraudulent, what do we do? You know, we send them videos and we send them articles and we send them our favorite statistic, which is 50 out of 51 cases were thrown out by judges in the courts where there were claims of fraud.

Guess what? The 35 million people who believe there was voter fraud. They've seen things read about that 50 out of 51 and it doesn't change their mind. So what you have to do is to say you believe that the election was fraudulent. Tell me more. Tell me more. Why do you feel that way? What do you read? What's going on? Et cetera, et cetera.

It is an illuminating thing to shut up, listen, and try to walk in other people's shoes. I see it happening all the time. And if you do that with somebody who believes there was voter fraud, there are two things that happen. One is you learn something about what is really behind that issue. And number two, you increase the chances that you're going to create a conversation in which that person also wants to know what you think.

Arjun: Fabulous. That's probably good advice for life in general I suspect. My wife is listening to this afterwards. She's like, you should just do that a lot more with everything that happens in the

Diane: Listening is very underrated relationship, strategy, marketing strategy, sales strategy, or whatever. We're all good at talking, but it's not always the way to win the argument.

Arjun: I agree. And, and certainly reading your book felt like we were in those conversations, listening to those 500 people that you spoke with. Fascinating, fascinating book. I strongly recommend folks that are listening Pick up a copy on Amazon. It's beautiful. It's it's a quick read. Leave a review for Diane as well. It's it's so good.

If more people read this we would be better off. We really would. Because we would not hate the other side so much. What I love about your research is you never asked anyone to change their minds. You didn't ask them to even listen to the other side. You just wanted to understand them better. And by doing that, we came off with actually, that's not so crazy at all. I kind of agree with some of that. That's beautiful. That's enough progress. That would get us from a much, much better place than where we are now.

Diane: Oh, thank you. That's very touching. And that's why you did work

Arjun: Indeed. well, thank you so much. Diane.

We're at the top of the hour. Dan, was there anything else you wanted to also add before?

Dan: No, no, not at all. I think Diane, I think you summed it up perfectly at the end there. And again, I would only offer my own full-throated endorsement to the book as well. Whether you take 48 hours or

Diane: whereas you can skim

Dan: you could skim

Diane: You can skip that chapter about how Patriots fans are kind of voters,

Dan: forget that. It's still a very, very controversial Yeah. So you could skip that part.

Arjun: Well, Thank you so much for taking the time to Chat Diane. And yeah, I hope everyone listening to this found this conversation illuminating and we're going to have more, in fact, as a little sneak peek Diane's point about this is the time for a third party potentially is a very, very interesting point. Something that Dan and I have been talking about. So we have some interesting guests that we're going to try to get on the show to talk about that.

Diane: Oh, good. I will have to listen to that.

Arjun: Yeah. So lots of things out of your conversation, actually that will tee up future guests. But thanks again, Diane, have a wonderful, wonderful day and talk to you soon.

Dan: Thanks Diane.