Before You Ask Someone How They’re Voting…

Election season has a way of making us very interested in how other people are going to vote. Sometimes we ask directly: “Who are you voting for?” Other times we are a little more subtle:

• “What do you think of this candidate?”
• “Can you believe what they said?”
• “Are you still supporting them?”

Those questions can lead to interesting conversations. But often they don’t. The moment we ask someone which candidate they support, we may unintentionally hand them a whole political identity. Once they tell us, it becomes very easy to fill in the rest ourselves. We assume we know what they believe, why they believe it, what information they have been listening to—and sometimes even what kind of person they are. That leaves surprisingly little room for curiosity.

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What if we started somewhere else?

Before asking someone who they are voting for, try asking what matters to them. Questions like these do something that “Who are you voting for?” often does not. They give us a glimpse of the path someone took to get where they are. And those paths can be complicated. Two people can support the same candidate for entirely different reasons. Two people can worry about the same problem and arrive at completely different solutions. Someone can dislike the candidate they plan to vote for. Someone can feel politically homeless. And someone can be undecided not because they haven’t been paying attention, but because they have. Recent Pew research found that more Americans now hold unfavorable views of both major political parties than did several years ago. That alone should remind us that the familiar red-versus-blue picture does not capture everybody very well.

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There is another reason I like beginning with experience, concern and hope: It changes what our job is in the conversation. I may hear something I expected, but I may also hear something surprising. And surprise is useful. Surprise means the person in front of us has become a little harder to reduce to a category. That does not mean we have to agree with them. These simply mean we are allowing another person to be more complicated than our assumptions about them.

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And then there are the facts

There is another temptation during election season that is worth noticing. When someone tells us something we believe is wrong, we often feel an immediate urge to correct it. Sometimes correction matters. Facts matter. But before jumping in, it can be useful to understand what the fact means to the other person. Instead of immediately countering, we might wonder: Those questions can tell us far more than a rapid exchange of competing facts.

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We have a lot of political conversation ahead of us over the next several weeks. Some of it will be loud. Some of it will be angry. Some of it will be designed to make us afraid of one another. We do not have to participate in every conversation that way. The next time you find yourself wondering how someone is going to vote, try waiting just a little longer before asking.

• Ask what they care about.
• Ask what they fear.
• Ask what they hope for.
• Ask what they are trying to understand.

You may eventually learn who they are voting for. But by then, you may know something much more interesting about them.