Beat | Six Americans doing the unexpected on Election Day

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Mónica Guzmán:

This season, we are proud to be partnering with two fantastic media organizations to help us reach more listeners like you. KUOW is Seattle’s NPR news station, and Deseret News is a multi-platform newspaper out of Salt Lake City. Help us by helping them. Learn how at KUOW.org/brave or Deseret.com/subscribe.

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Hey y’all and welcome to one week ‘til the election. Yep, yep. Just one week. So, does that freak you out?

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Are you largely fine? Wondering how things are gonna turn out? Are you trying not to think about it too much so you can go about your day? Or, are you trying to think about it, so you stay informed and alert, or just try to make an impact in the final stretch?

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Participate. That’s one of the big ways we citizen in America, according to Baratunde Thurston, a prior guest on this podcast, who uses the word citizen as a verb, as an action, not just a status. And there are so many ways to participate and make an impact on this election, beyond just casting that vote.

There’s people making phone calls, writing postcards, trying to get likely voters to become real voters. In the direction they prefer, of course. And especially in those crucial swing states. Just about all the ways people participate in the run-ups to elections tend to be in service of a particular campaign.

Which makes sense. These are the crucial debates at the crucial times. But! There is one way people are going to participate on November 5th that has everything to do with the challenge of this moment and nothing to do with a single electoral campaign. And for this week’s (heartbeat sfx) beat episode we are going to a red state, a blue state, and a swing state to hear all about it

Roger Haynes:

Really, I think it’s just showing people even though this may or may not work, we’re going to go the distance and we’re not stopping.

Mónica:

That was Roger Haynes, one of hundreds of people across the country who is going to do something pretty wild on election day. They’re going to pair up with someone on the other side of the political divide, head to their local polling place, and show their fellow voters that no matter who we’re voting for, or who will win, we can and must hold this union together. Roger and his paired political opposite, Dorsey Cartwright, live in Austin, Texas. When we asked Dorsey why she wanted to do this, she thought back to something she heard before the 2020 election through another non-profit she’s involved with, No Labels.

Dorsey Cartwright:

And one of the senators, the Republican senator, I think one of the No Labels members had said something about why is there so much, you know fighting and name calling and everything in the houses, you need to be more civil. And he said, that’s very true. And if the public would be more civil with one another, you would see that reflected in the houses. And that just went, that’s a simple thing, but it just went through me.

Mónica:

Roger, the red to Dorsey’s blue, explains his involvement like this. Oh, by the way, the voice you’ll hear right after his is Richard Davies. He’s the host of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and for this episode, an honorary correspondent for A Braver Way.

Thank you, Richard.

Roger:

No matter who wins, someone loses. And in politics, this is my thoughts, we used to talk about breaking glass in the military, someone has to clean it up, and it’s going to be us. And so we really do need to do something to slow down the anger, the rancor, and really get back to having conversations.

Richard Davies:

Where are you going to do this? Are you going to sit behind a table outside a polling station? Where?

Dorsey:

Roger has been so great. He found he talked to people until he found a place in Austin that has a diversity of voters. It’s a church, and you have to be 100 yards away from the polling place.

Mónica:

Small correction here. In Texas it’s actually 100 feet, not a 100 yards. So they’ll be across the street, as opposed to a football field length away.

Dorsey:

But the point being is, we’ll have our color zone. They’ll have a blue cap like Roger’s red. And, but we also have, we’re going to have two signs. And one of them says something about, “one of us is red, one of us is blue, but we’re Americans through and through”, which on one hand is hokey but it’s like a chant.

Roger:

I’m really excited about it. I’m hopeful, hope is not a strategy. It gives us a little bit of that encouragement about the future and that’s really, why this is so important. It’s a beta test. It’s new, like Dorsey said, but what’s really cool about it is that we’re putting ourselves out there. We’re growing.

Mónica:

Dorsey and Roger are in the red state of Texas. Trek northwest to the blue state of Washington on Election Day and you will find another duo standing against the current. Don Goldberg and Elizabeth Doll.

Don Goldberg:

I’ve been in my little blue bubble, especially in Seattle, Washington. And I didn’t think it was fair to myself. So, I wanted to reach out. The first thing I did was I went to the Braver Angels convention.

Mónica:

That convention brought 700 people to Kenosha, Wisconsin. A group that was evenly split between liberals and conservatives. Don got to know a lot of people who disagree with his politics. And his view of those people changed.

Don:

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The other is not necessarily the enemy. They just happen to be another side. And maybe if you consider that other side, you can, in my case, be more literally liberal, accepting all points of view. (Ferry boat horn) I’m sorry. Is that the ferry boat?

Elizabeth Doll:

Yeah. Apologies. I’ll mute myself.

Richard:

That was the ferry boat. How exciting.

Mónica:

Elizabeth, as you can hear. Lives across the water from Seattle.

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Elizabeth:

Yes, and I live across the street from the ferry, so that was, believe it or not, with all of my windows closed, that is still how loud the ferry horn is.

Mónica:

Elizabeth is conservative and grew up in a more rural part of Washington state.

Elizabeth:

I became concerned that if we weren’t talking to each other and we couldn’t understand each other because of politics, then we definitely wouldn’t be able to recognize each other’s needs or help each other in a crisis. And in rural places, it’s not the government that you rely on for help in a crisis. It’s your neighbors.

Mónica:

So come Election Day, Don, a liberal voter from Seattle, and Elizabeth, a conservative voter from rural Kitsap County, will be stationed outside the elections office and ballot drop off location in Renton, Washington.

They’ll be sharing their political leanings and this shared commitment on a day you would least expect it.

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From there, we’ll head south to–dun-dun-dun!!–, one of the seven swing states that could determine the course of this election.

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Martin Hunke and Tarleton Ferrin are in Arizona, both in the Tucson area.

Martin, the liberal in this pair, moved to the US from Germany in 1993. He lived in California for a couple decades before settling down in the Grand Canyon state.

Martin Hunke:

We moved to Arizona and I love the open landscape, the cacti, the weather. Having blue sky more than 300 days a year. I love that.

Mónica:

Why did Martin sign up to stand alongside a political opposite at a polling place on election day?

Martin:

Well for me, it is to take a stance against what some politicians seem to be doing nowadays. They want to, they seem to be pitching us against each other. And using terminology that I haven’t heard in this country before, like calling the other side, like the enemy from within and normalizing name calling, dehumanizing the other. And I find that deeply frightening. There’s not much I can do as a just regular citizen against that, but this is an opportunity to take a public stance against it.

Mónica:

Tarleton, the conservative in this pair, grew up in rural Arizona before moving to Tucson as an adult.

Tarleton Ferrin:

Coming to school here, working here, has given me an opportunity to take a lot of the views that I had in my childhood and compare them kind of, in a more blue environment. And so that’s given me a lot of chance to think a little deeply about, you know, why I view things the way I do and compare and contrast different approaches to politics, if you will.

Mónica:

Now, in case you’re getting the impression that Martin, Tarleton, Elizabeth, Don, Dorsey, Roger and the hundreds of others doing this are just going to be waltzing through this election like everything’s fine.

Martin:

I feel nervous. And I didn’t used to feel like this. To me, in the past, it was more like the excitement like of a, let’s say, a football game, and I want my team to win, but if the other team wins, it’s not the end of the world. And this time I feel differently, not necessarily that it’s going to be the end of the world, but this is not a normal election for me, and I’m worried that we are down on a path from which it will be very difficult to return.

Mónica:

And here’s Tarlton.

Tarleton:

I feel like in Arizona this year, we’ve had a never-ending summer. It has just been brutally hot. And we finally started to feel a touch of relief from that heat. And it’s been very welcoming in that sense. And, to me, election day is like that. It’s like when you hit that hottest day of summer and you’re really just hoping things are going to start to cool down. It’s a climax of sorts.

But I think regardless about how we feel about our options and our votes and their eventual outcomes, there is something really cool about having so many different people with so much different life experience weighing in at the box and making their voices heard at the same moment of history and potentially changing it.

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Mónica:

So this election day, if you head to the polls and happen to see an unlikely pair hanging out nearby, maybe wearing a red shirt and a blue shirt, and holding up a banner, go up and say hi. Shake the hand of your political other if you dare. Because hey, it’s gonna be a weird day, maybe kind of a scary one.

But this is what we do. We disagree, we vote, and no matter what, we keep going.

Roger:

We really just want to be open in case anyone wants to come up and chat about it. You know, if people. are feeling anxious or people are surprised at the different sort of message that we’re offering. To know that there are people like us in our community that are willing to talk and maybe even have some of those harder conversations, willing to have a little bit of that courage to step out of our own little area and really try to listen to each other.

Dorsey:

I have been a keyboard, I have been, I am a keyboard warrior. But it’s time to get out. You have to get out on the streets. You’ve got to be a citizen activist. And so this is really for me, a, an interesting, possibly fun way of getting out on the street.

Mónica:

If you want to know for yourself what it will be like to stand with someone from across the political divide at the polls on election day, 2024, go to braverangels.org/electionday to learn more about this citizen action, and maybe even sign up.

We will be back next week, one day earlier than normal on Monday with an episode that we’ll look back over one year of tips, tools, and insights on this podcast to help equip you for the big day, November 5th.

Whatever comes, I hope you never stop participating in and shaping this beautiful, messy Republic of ours. No matter the outcome. No matter what.

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Thank you all so much for joining us for this beat episode of A Braver Way. A Braver Way is produced by Braver Angels and distributed in partnership with KUOW and Deseret News. We get financial support from the MJ Murdoch Charitable Trust and Reclaim Curiosity, and count USAFacts as a proud sponsor.

Our senior producer and editor is David Albright. Our producer is Jessica Jones. Our theme music is by the fantastic, number one, billboard, bluegrass charting, hip hop band, Gangsta Grass. A special thanks to Ben Caron, Don Goldberg, Gabbi Timmis, Katelyn Annes, and Emily Provance. I’m your host and guide across the divide, Mónica Guzmán.

If you want to share your story with us, please do. You can always reach us at abraverway@braverangels.org or join our text line by texting the word brave to 206- 926-9955. Take heart, everyone. Till next time.

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