How To Avoid Talking About Politics This Thanksgiving

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Speaker 3 That all sounds very lovely.

Speaker 6 I will say.

Speaker 4 I think hearing a rocket at 6:30 in the morning would give me a heart attack.

Speaker 6 Yeah, that's definitely true.

Speaker 7 But this sounded quite beautiful, and she did a really good job with that. And it sounds like a fun place to be.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I want to learn more about this feast. Sounds very interesting.

Speaker 3 All right. Hey there.

Speaker 4 It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez.
I cover politics.

Speaker 6 I'm Elena Moore. I also cover politics.

Speaker 7 And I'm Domenico Montanero, senior political editor and correspondent.

Speaker 4 And today on the show, we're going to be talking about

Speaker 4 politics. A lot of you are preparing to spend Thanksgiving with your in-laws or your extended family, your friends.

Speaker 4 And you may be wondering, how do I avoid arguments about politics at a time when Americans are more divided than ever? Well, today on the show, we're going to weigh in.

Speaker 4 Dominico, I want to start with you because we actually have some polling that kind of like gets around this.

Speaker 4 There was a recent NPR PBS News Mayor's poll, and it turns out Republicans and Democrats describe people in the other political party as closed-minded and dishonest when talking about politics, which is kind of charged.

Speaker 4 I mean, how big is this divide that we're talking about here?

Speaker 7 Well, I mean, when you have more than eight and ten in

Speaker 7 each party saying that the other side is closed-minded when talking about politics, I'd say the divide is pretty big.

Speaker 7 But at the same time, it's interesting because everyone then winds up getting together and having to kind of have this kind of awkward moment where they feel like, uh-oh, how am I going to either talk about this, avoid talking about this, suppress feelings or not?

Speaker 7 And I mean, there's a ton of reasons for why we've gotten to this point in the country.

Speaker 4 Yeah. Elena, you actually spoke to folks about this divide.
I mean, what did you hear?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I called up a bunch of respondents who took part in our most recent poll to ask them about this question and get some more kind of personal understanding of where they're coming from when they say that the other side folks are dishonest or not open-minded.

Speaker 6 And really, I heard from Democrats and Republicans a very similar message, which was things are harder to talk about these days.

Speaker 6 And I had people tell me that they feel judged or they feel like they're not, you know, being heard or on the other side that they don't feel like they can even have a productive conversation anymore.

Speaker 6 I talked to one man in Georgia who called himself kind of the black sheep of his liberal family. He's a Trump voter.

Speaker 6 And he said that there is just kind of a known unspoken rule that we don't talk politics at Thanksgiving or holidays because it'll take away from the holiday and they're not going to get anywhere.

Speaker 6 And that kind of sense of almost like defeatism that I heard of people being like, this is a done deal, that was quite striking.

Speaker 6 I also heard people like a Democratic voter, Teresa Tucker, and Lansing, Michigan, who kind of said that this kind of feeling has gotten stronger over the last few years, the last decade even.

Speaker 8 I think, unfortunately, this administration has has pitted people against each other.

Speaker 8 And, you know, if we would have more conversations, I think we would find we have a lot more in common than we don't.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 That gentleman, like the law and his family is no talking about politics. I think that's a hard one to enforce among most families.
Almost everything is political, right?

Speaker 4 What do you guys do?

Speaker 3 Like when

Speaker 4 a relative or a friend starts to pick up fight about politics?

Speaker 7 You know, it's funny because when we're reporters, so people always seem to want want to pick our brains, but not really pick our brains, more like tell us what should be in our brains.

Speaker 7 And I find that, especially with family, to be incredibly frustrating because, you know, we clearly like have a reason we do this job and we have personal opinions too.

Speaker 7 So that makes it difficult because you don't want anybody to necessarily judge you one way or the other for that.

Speaker 7 So I often will try to not engage generally or trying to figure out who the, you know, if I know if there's an in I have with that person, you know, if it's my brother or sister, or there's like a way to talk about something that we've talked about in the past to try to go to go for that common ground a little bit.

Speaker 7 But mostly I cook usually for Thanksgiving for everybody. So I have a lot of time in the kitchen and I have a lot of time to talk about cooking or I'll talk about sports.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I feel like there's no better tool than the Segway

Speaker 6 and also just like the buffer. And I

Speaker 7 not the one you write on.

Speaker 6 No, I mean, that's definitely a bad tool.

Speaker 6 But I feel like I love a good buffer. Like someone, basically, it reminds me of what I was told when I started

Speaker 6 trying TV hits, where they're like, if you don't know the answer to this question, you're like, that's a great question. You know, by the way, it makes me think of turkey.

Speaker 6 And while we're talking about turkey, and I love a good, I love a good shift. So I feel like as soon as you can kind of move the conversation along, that's kind of also our job.

Speaker 6 I feel like in the field, definitely, as Domenico said, like people will want our opinions or want our

Speaker 6 own response to the same questions we ask. And I'm always like, well, I want to hear from you.
You are the person that we're interested in. And I try to take that forward when I'm in conversations.

Speaker 6 I don't necessarily always feel comfortable and be like, well, tell me why you feel that way, channeling my therapist mother a little bit.

Speaker 7 I think that's called deflection. And that's

Speaker 3 for sure. And that can be useful.

Speaker 4 It's very useful.

Speaker 4 I mean, I will say, like, as a reporter, it's very useful to have the skill of being able to be curious, but sort of dispassionate when you need to, like, turning on that part of your brain and being like, you know, why do you feel that way?

Speaker 4 I'm curious. Like, what in your life has led you to this like opinion? I mean, it works mostly with like.

Speaker 4 I would say like extended family, but it's if it's like a really close family member, it's kind of hard to put the like the emotions of things away.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I think people people have like a big problem, I think bigger problem now in the Trump era of really trying to understand where each other come from.

Speaker 7 You know, I think it was a little bit easier before Trump because during Trump, he's done so many things that have been so divisive in ways where people feel really strongly on one side or the other.

Speaker 7 I mean, it shows up in our polling. You know, 48% of people in our poll strongly disapprove of the job that he's doing, but he has a very strong and dug-in base.

Speaker 7 And, you know, I think there's a lot of people on the left who think that people on the right who voted for Trump, that they believe and espouse all of the things that Trump does and see him as a real threat to democracy and can't imagine that anybody would support that.

Speaker 7 And for, you know, those on the Trump side, they feel like a lot of liberals don't listen. They feel like they will never give Trump the credit for anything.

Speaker 7 They'll like to talk about and because echo what he says about if he cured cancer, they wouldn't even like that, right?

Speaker 7 But I think that there are such passions that have gotten more divided, you know, because of social media, because of the Trump era.

Speaker 7 And it makes it really, really hard when people are siloed with the kinds of information that they take in, where they get that information, and whether or not they can bridge that gap to even understand where someone on the other side might be coming from.

Speaker 6 Aaron Powell, it's like deeper and deeper repercussions of labels, really, because a label inherently, I think, makes a lot of folks feel misunderstood.

Speaker 6 And you can have preconceived ideas of what someone's identity is, what their views are, because because of a label that they subscribe to, like Democrat or Republican.

Speaker 6 And I think, you know, voters that I talk to feel that that can be really misleading sometimes.

Speaker 6 I mean, I talk to Republicans and I've talked to lots of Democrats who call themselves conservative or liberal, but have tons of things to say that are a bit more nuanced on even folks in their own party.

Speaker 6 And I think sometimes people can feel a bit like written off as just one thing or the other when, you know, people are complex and they have lots of different opinions.

Speaker 6 And just because they may have voted for one name doesn't mean they're 100% on board. Sometimes it does.

Speaker 6 But I mean, even among Republicans, Dominico mentioned approval rating of the president right now. Almost nine in 10 Republicans do approve of President Trump's job in office.

Speaker 6 That said, I still talked to Trump supporters who were like, I would like to see him focus more on this issue or this issue.

Speaker 6 And notably, the number one issue that people want to hear him focus on, even if they support him, is the economy.

Speaker 4 Let's take a quick break. More in a moment.

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Speaker 4 And we're back. And we've been talking about navigating Thanksgiving conversations at a time when our partisan divides are deeper than ever.

Speaker 4 And Elena, I want to go back to something you were talking about. I mean, are there any political topics out there that actually most people can agree on?

Speaker 6 Yeah, I mean, I think almost everybody can agree that the price of something in their life is too high, whether that be groceries or healthcare costs or trying to buy a house or rent.

Speaker 6 You know, that's kind of something that's in the front of everybody's mind right now.

Speaker 6 You know, whether we want to talk about it or not, it is kind of a big focus. And that's what we hear from voters really around the country.

Speaker 7 In some respects, politically, yes, there are. I think everything, though, you could argue is politics.
Everything has some involvement, you know, for a policy prescription or some other.

Speaker 7 So I don't know. I mean, I like to think about.

Speaker 7 the people that I'm around and even if they believe what they believe, there's a reason why I choose to, you know, be at a Thanksgiving with them, for example.

Speaker 7 You know, I mean, a lot of times you can, obviously, you can't pick your family, but there are reasons I would focus on or try to focus on the reasons why you like these people.

Speaker 7 And hopefully there's something that you do and you can focus on that.

Speaker 7 But, you know, look, the political topics right now make it really tough.

Speaker 7 I mean, yeah, people think that stuff is, it costs a lot, but then of course you move to the next part of that conversation, which is, yeah, what are you going to do about it?

Speaker 3 Right, right.

Speaker 6 And also they have different folks to blame, different forces to blame for why things are expensive. Which

Speaker 6 I joke about everyone being united on prices and the cost of groceries. Obviously, those are real concerns.

Speaker 6 But it is funny where I'll have a conversation with a Democratic voter and then I'll have a conversation with a Republican voter and they'll really paint a similar picture of their challenges for the upcoming year.

Speaker 6 But they have completely different causes or say they have different causes. And so Dominico's right.
That is a bit of a

Speaker 6 little bit of a landmine right there.

Speaker 3 I know, but a complaint is fun.

Speaker 4 I think like you can

Speaker 3 complain about something you can't control is very uniting.

Speaker 4 It's a good time. I like a complaint fest sometimes.
Can't be all bad.

Speaker 6 A little bit of a festivist preview.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 4 My favorite holiday. I mean, well, let's talk more about like some safe topics

Speaker 4 that are maybe completely not political at all. If someone's like trying to think of like, okay, I need to change this conversation to something safe.
What is usually y'all's go-to?

Speaker 6 How about them Mets?

Speaker 3 Oh, gosh.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we're going to talk about the Brandon Nimmo trade. It's already hard enough.
I'm in a house where almost everyone else is a Yankees fan.

Speaker 6 Oh, sad for you.

Speaker 7 It's been sweet, though, that my daughter, and see, there's that snark again.

Speaker 3 But my

Speaker 7 daughter just became kind of a Mets fan in the past year, which I'm sad for her on that, but it's also sweet. But she was crying because of the Mets trading Brandon Nimmo,

Speaker 7 the longest tenured Met on the team, which I thought was very like sweet. It took me back to my youth.

Speaker 7 And I was like talking to her about times when I was like really sad about something with baseball. And it's just, it's just interesting.

Speaker 7 I think that there is like people have passions about different things, whatever it is. Right.
And I mean, for me, sports seems like an easy place to go because, I mean, number one, my dad is a...

Speaker 7 gym teacher, coach. I grew up playing sports.
Everybody in my household basically is somehow involved or pays attention to it. And it's metrics-based, right?

Speaker 7 Like the sort of New York talk radio culture, as annoying and loud and obnoxious as it is, it's like you yell and scream, but whoever's got the best points based on the best data gets to win.

Speaker 7 And the one who loses, like their feelings don't matter. And there's something like actually

Speaker 7 nice about that because there's something pure about it where you have a chance at the next thing and it doesn't have to do with just your feelings.

Speaker 7 It has to do with, you know, whether or not you make better points or not.

Speaker 6 Yeah, I would say in my house, I mean, obviously we've talked about I'm also a New Yorker go Yankees. We'll see next year.
But I'm in my grandma's house in Baltimore right now.

Speaker 6 And so I am in an Orioles house, which is kind of like, they are kind of like the Mets of the AL East in some ways.

Speaker 6 Amazing team,

Speaker 3 you know, heart-wise.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 6 so sports is one thing, but I think also.

Speaker 3 You're struggling here.

Speaker 7 You're struggling with the grace, I will say.

Speaker 6 I'm sorry. No, it is grace.
Look, I'm friends with

Speaker 6 Mets fans and Orioles fans.

Speaker 4 I got to say, as like a non-sports person, I know you guys both said this. Contentious already.

Speaker 4 Okay, very true.

Speaker 6 But there's a love fight and there's a politics fight for sure.

Speaker 6 But I was going to say one thing that isn't political and may relate to people not living on the Northeast Corridor train line is I am become, in the last few years, really since COVID, a avid reality television watcher.

Speaker 6 And I say say that because I have found it the most uniting thing, maybe ever, in like anything I can talk about, because really anywhere in this country, you can find someone who watched a specific real housewives of Salt Lake City scene that is obsessively incredible and crazy.

Speaker 6 And like, it's like kind of my new conversation starter. I'm like, do you watch any mind-numbing television that you want to talk to me about?

Speaker 7 Except for that person who is really serious about politics, that grandparent, and thinks that watching reality TV is shallow.

Speaker 6 Yeah. Yeah, and then we go back to sports or we talk about the Oscars.

Speaker 4 I mean, bring back hobbies, guys. Like, I have gotten really into knitting and sewing, and I love talking about that.

Speaker 4 And even if the other person's not interested, they're like, kind of like, oh, this is sort of a light topic. My little brother's really into cooking.

Speaker 4 I don't care that much about cooking, but you know, when he talks about something he's cooked, I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting. It kind of gives me ideas for a meal.

Speaker 4 Like, it's light, especially, I mean, we are talking about Thanksgiving here. Talk about the food.
Well, I do wish you guys a very nice, peaceful Thanksgiving. I hope you have a great time.

Speaker 4 I think we'll leave it there for today. I'm Ashley Lopez.
I cover politics.

Speaker 6 I'm Elena Moore.

Speaker 3 I cover politics too.

Speaker 7 And I'm Domenico Montanero, senior political editor and correspondent. And I will say, it's Thanksgiving, so focus on what you're thankful for.

Speaker 3 There's a lot.

Speaker 6 I'm thankful for this pod. Yeah, I'm thankful for you.

Speaker 4 And we're thankful for y'all listening. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.

Speaker 5 This message comes from Vital Farms, who works with small American farms to bring you pastor-raised eggs.

Speaker 5 Farmer Tanner Pace shares why he believes it's important to care for his land and how he hopes to pass the opportunity to farm onto his sons.

Speaker 9 We're paving the way for a future. We only have one earth and we have to make it count.

Speaker 9 Like my boys, I want to see them taking care of the land for them to be able to farm and then generations to come.

Speaker 9 I really enjoy seeing, especially my whole family up there working with me, and to be able to instill the things that my father, mother, and then grandparents instilled in me that I can instill in the boys.

Speaker 9 That's just the most rewarding thing that there could ever be. Vital Farms,

Speaker 9 they're motivated for the well-being of the animals, for the well-being of the land, the whole grand scope of things, they care about it all. You know, and that means a lot to me.

Speaker 5 To learn more about how Vital Farms farmers care for their hens, visit vitalfarms.com.