Crossroads: A Conversation With America

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Welcome to this PBS News Special, Crossroads: A Conversation with America. Good evening, I’m Judy Woodruff. Tonight we are in Milwaukee and we are joined by more than 50 Wisconsin residents from across the political spectrum to hear what’s on their minds at this moment, just six weeks before this highly contentious presidential election. Our focus is on how deeply divided we find ourselves as Americans, families, neighbors, co-workers.

How divided do you think Americans are today?

I know they’re divided nationally.

I feel like it is very bad right now.

I think the divisions have gotten much worse in my lifetime.

And it’s hard to not be divided when a lot of people’s identities are under attack.

For the past year and a half, I’ve traveled the United States for the PBS NewsHour for my reporting series, America at a Crossroads, talking with people across the political spectrum about how they see the country.

There’s so much divisiveness in this country right now.

It does get heated. We have big fights

The people just felt like we’ve always been left behind, so why is it going to be different Now?

I’ve spoken with experts who’ve been documenting rising partisan hostility. Now, in the home stretch of the 2024 election, when so many of these divisions are cast in sharp relief-

We will make America great again.

We are not going back.

… we are in the critical swing state of Wisconsin to listen to Americans, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives, and liberals, and folks in the middle, urban, suburban, and rural, to ask how they see these divisions in their own lives.

Some clients found out which way I lean and stopped coming.

I’ve got family members on all sides of the political spectrum. There are times that gets tense.

I’ve also lost quite a few friends because we don’t agree on a lot of issues.

I don’t know how many people know that I support Trump.

How these divisions are affecting the serious issues we face as a country.

The price of prescription drugs is skyrocketing. The difficulty with insurance is getting worse and worse. The housing market is getting worse.

We’ve never had this many immigrants come over that are unvetted. That’s the issue.

It’s very easy to have an opinion about abortion when you’ve never experienced any difficulty like that in your life.

How they’re affecting the ways we interact with one another.

We used to agree to disagree, and it was fun and robust to talk about the differences.

These big grandstanding arguments that people have with each other don’t change each other’s mind.

And I think right now, America’s in that space where everybody’s angry about something and we’re not getting anything done.

So many Americans feel stuck, frustrated, and even afraid for our future.

No matter what the other side says. Our first instinct is to say no.

When you have a divided country, an happy people, and almost no solution for some people, it can feel like the end of the world.

The United States’ biggest threat is within, not from another country. It’s almost like people sometimes talk about a civil war now.

People are getting to the point where they’re so fed up, they’re like, “We have to do something now.” And with as many guns as in America, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be peaceful.

This evening from downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at Best Place at the Historic Pabst Brewery, this is Crossroads: A Conversation with America.

(04:02)
Joining us here tonight are three special guests. People who have spent a lot of time thinking about the things that we’re going to be talking about tonight. They are retired US Navy commander and writer, Theodore Johnson, University of Wisconsin Political Science Professor Katherine Cramer, and Wisconsin native and long-time conservative commentator, Charlie Sykes. Welcome to each one of you. Thank you so much for being here tonight.

(04:34)
Now, the most recent PBS News and Marist Poll shows almost 8 out of 10 Americans say they believe we are mostly or completely divided about the issues facing our country. Kathy Cramer, let me start with you. You have spent years studying these divisions, including how they’ve played out here in Wisconsin. Is this what you see?

I do. I think the one thing that Americans seem to agree on right now is that we are deeply divided. So we see that here in Wisconsin. We see divisions in terms of what people want to see in terms of the outcome of this election, and we see it around the country.

And Ted Johnson, what do you see from your work in terms of what’s behind this division?

I’ll tell you, we have a politics where compromise is a bad word. And so in our party system, you are forced to put on a hat of a team and hate the other side. And democracies require that we deliberate, and hyper-polarized democracies are incapable of deliberating in a way that’s conducive to a civil society. So the division is not just about politics, it’s along racial lines, it’s along nation of origin, class, rural, urban. You pick one, we have politics that will find a way to weaponize anything that’s different among us and then turn us against one another out of expedience or in hopes of winning elections.

Charlie Sykes, you’ve been such a close observer of politics here in the State of Wisconsin and around the country. A lot of people say it’s worse now than they ever remember it being. How do you see that?

Well, I think it is. And that’s part of the irony, as you were asking the question, I was thinking about the divisions in Wisconsin. We’ve had significant political divisions here. In many ways, I think we were much more divided than the rest of the country a few years ago, but the rest of the country has caught up with us. But Wisconsinites are not divided on everything. I mean, we’re not divided on the Green Bay Packers, we’re not divided on how we feel about beer, there’s no division about how we feel about Illinois. But when you begin talking about politics, suddenly there is this tremendous cognitive dissonance, and it has become bitter. And I think part of it is that we don’t just disagree on policy, that we regard it as a commentary on the person’s character, that, “I don’t just disagree with you about taxes. If I disagree with you on this, you’re a bad person. You are evil, you’re dangerous. And I’m being told over, and over, and over again to fear you and to dislike you.”

And it sounds like you’re all saying this is something that’s grown worse in this particular election cycle in the last several years. So now I want to bring in our audience and start with Penny Pietruszynski.

Yes, you said it good.

Hello, Penny. You are a nursing assistant.

Yes.

You live in West Bend, Wisconsin.

Yes.

You’re a Republican. How have you felt these divisions in your own life?

With family, I have family members that want to throw the racist card at me. And I want to let people know, as a Trump supporter, I am not racist, and I don’t believe that Trump is either. I believe that the media has tried to divide us. I think it stems and blames… I blame the media for most of the rhetoric that has been thrown at us, and they’re teaching everybody to hate one another, and that’s not the case.

And you’re seeing it, you said, in your family?

Yes.

Neighbors, coworkers?

No, just with family members on my dad’s side. They all lean towards the Democratic views, and we just don’t share those views with abortion, and immigration, and different things like that.

And we want to talk about some of that tonight. So Thanksgiving dinner is difficult?

Yeah, yeah. We mainly don’t get together on that side. Me and my dad still do, but I don’t see all the other ones as of the last few years, so yeah.

Sounds tough.

Yeah.

Yeah. Grant Hagen, you’re with us. Hello, Grant. You are a veteran and you’re a retired cabinet installer. You’re a Democrat. You told us that you feel these divisions that we’ve just heard from Penny, but you feel them from another perspective. Tell us about that.

It’s partially a family situation, friends, just a general feeling that there’s animosity where it doesn’t need to be there. Misunderstandings abound. Too many people have a narrow stream of information, and I feel a broadened bombardment of information would be much more beneficial to everybody. If you’re not listening to your neighbor, if you don’t talk to your neighbor, you’re not going to know what he’s thinking. But you also have to have an engagement that’s civil. You can’t be screaming and yelling stuff at each other, that doesn’t do any good.

Are you saying that narrow band of information is only applying to the other side? You’re a Democrat.

I am a Democrat. So some of that is going towards, I don’t want to mention any Fox News names, but when you’ve been sued for $750 million, and you admit that you lied, and that your presenters have all lied, that’s one of those things that makes me think, “Maybe you should try somebody else and see what they have to say.”

Well, let me, on that point, I want to come back to Penny. We hear Grant saying that he thinks people who have a different view from him are not getting the whole story, that it’s just too narrow. What would you say to that?

I think we think the same thing. It goes right back, that we believe that the media is telling just one side. And I’ve been to many of Donald Trump’s rallies, and I hear it from his mouth, and I’ll hear a little bit on TV and it’ll be totally turned around.

In the news coverage?

Right, in the news coverage. And I wanted to add too, for the first couple of years that Trump was running, we were actually afraid for our lives, to be able to put signs out in front of our house.

Well, let me bring in Antoine Carter. Antoine, you work for a nonprofit here, you’re a Democrat. When you hear someone like Penny saying she feels disrespected by the other side, and she feels that your side isn’t getting the whole story. What does that make you think?

I think personally I am in fear of my life all the time, as a Black man. And I think the issue I see is that when people in these conversations talk about race, it’s never necessarily viewed with respect. And so thinking that a immigrant is trying to take my job as a college-educated Black man, I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that to relate to me is to be a felon because I am not a felon.

And when you refer to people talking about felons in the United States or coming across the border, you’re referring to comments by former President Trump. Is that what you’re-

Yeah. Yeah. As a Black man, the only thing that he tries to identify with is my struggle, not me being a parent, not me being a person trying to work, and pay bills, and buy a home, and things like that. He is trying to lean in the fact that he assumes that Black people are felons, that he assumes that minorities operate in a deficit. And because of that, he rubs me the wrong way.

I want to bring in, at this point, two of our guests from Green Bay. You are Jon and Liz McKinney. Jon, you are the manager at a construction company. You’re Republican, but you’ve told us you do not plan to vote, and you don’t support former President Trump. Your wife, Liz, you do support former President Trump. So my question to both of you is, how do you manage this in your marriage? Jon?

When it comes to managing political differences in our household, it is not difficult. I love my wife because she’s intelligent, she’s educated, and she’s thoughtful. I know that if she makes a decision about something, she’s not coming by that decision lightly, so I respect her decision. I think she respects most of mine. But as a nation, we’re so much bigger than one vote for one political candidate. So my wife may be voting for Trump, I made the decision that I’m not voting for either candidate, but I respect her decision.

Liz McKinney, do you ever try to change his mind? Can you even talk about politics?

We can certainly talk about it. I think one of the biggest misconceptions people have about people like me is that we can’t talk about issues or that we can’t get along with people that we don’t agree with. I work at a company that’s headquartered in Atlanta, so I have friends that come from all over the different parts of the United States [inaudible 00:14:56]-

Work for Koch Industries, is that right?

Yes. And they have all different race and credos, and I think our

Our differences help us get to a better outcome.

Thank you. Thank you both. Thank you all. I want to turn to our panel now and turn to Kathy Kramer. Kathy, we’re hearing that these are painful divisions. How has it gotten to be so painful? Charlie addressed this earlier and so did Ted, but what would you say about that?

I think one thing that’s going on for all of us is, whether or not you pay a lot of attention to politics, our political divisions are mapping onto so many other divisions in our lives, whether we’re talking about race or sometimes gender, region, where we live. That’s part of it. It’s painful because, when someone criticizes your political team, oftentimes we take it as criticism of so many other parts of who we are.

(15:58)
It’s painful here in Wisconsin because our divisions have been building for a long time. This is not this election. It’s not even 2016, right? But back in 2012, we ran a survey at UW Madison that found that one in three Wisconsinites had stopped talking to someone they cared about because of politics.

That long ago.

Yeah. We’ve been feeling these divisions for some time.

Wow. It goes back. The next thing we want to do now is drill down a little and we want to look at how people are divided on specific issues.

The one issue that should be addressed and looked at the hardest, I think the economy is the one that hurts people the most.

Out of all of the generations in my family, I am one of the people who are making the most in my age range and I am still living paycheck to paycheck.

Prices are higher. You can’t deny that.

You can’t say our current government didn’t play a part in that.

Family planning services and abortion services are extremely, extremely important, not only to me, but the women in my life and in my circle.

When I had a pregnancy crisis of my own, hearing the political noise, knowing that my options were limited because of politics, made it so much harder.

In my faith, we support life. It’s the last resort to take it and snuff it out.

Immigration is the one that’s the most emotionally charged viewpoint that’s getting pounded over and over again on the campaign trail.

It worries me in terms of what life would look like for a lot of people, whether it’s people that will be hurt by an immigration policy that might tear their family apart.

Blaming immigrants for the woes of the country is very easy to a group that has no rights and no ability to defend themselves.

I don’t think anybody is saying that immigrants should not come to our country. I just think they should be vetted.

My parents both immigrated here. Legally. We have laws. We need to enforce them and live by them.

On the last issue that we raised there, immigration, we have some data to share. Illegal border crossings into the United States have soared in recent years, hitting an all-time high of about 2.5 million encounters with unlawful migrants at the southern border in 2023, including some who came more than once, but the number of encounters has dropped dramatically this year.

(18:37)
Cheryl Rebholz. Hello. We’re glad you’re here. We just heard from you in that tape. You are the daughter of immigrants. You own a shooting range and you own a beauty salon in Mequon, Wisconsin. You’re a Republican. Why has immigration become such a critical issue for you?

My grandmother, my mother’s side, immigrated from Mexico. My grandmother, when she got here, learned English and assimilated. She said she kissed the ground she lived on and she would never return because it afforded her all kinds of possibilities.

(19:12)
On the other side of my family, immigrated from Poland and what brought them together was New York. And so, from both sides of my family, we’re a blended family and they’ve taught me about American exceptionalism, pride to exercise our educational system and to appreciate our US constitution, which in Mexico, they don’t have that great document, and to respect and… Because it’s reversed. We can’t go and enter other countries like they’re entering ours and we have to embrace and enforce the laws. Otherwise, we have civil chaos and we’re all feeling it in every single state.

We can tell you feel strongly about this. I want to bring in now Antonio Alcazar, right back here. I think there you are. You own a small business. You are an immigrant yourself. You came as a child of parents who arrived here without documentation. They still don’t have documentation. You cannot vote and you have a different view on all this. Tell us about your thoughts.

I want to push back a little bit. Here, I feel like it’s important to note that, when you’re fleeing a country, you’re fleeing out of necessity. And this country is absolutely, without a doubt, the most prosperous nation on the planet. And the people who are leaving are leaving in order to find stability and safety and work for their family. My family specifically did exactly that. They left an impoverished zone and it’s an area that I wouldn’t have had any amount of resources or prospects or options.

(20:57)
And yet now, I’m a successful business owner. And that is something that’s come through a lot of struggle, especially being undocumented, until 2012 when President Obama passed a deferred action for childhood arrivals. I hate this idea that that there’s crime and gangs coming over. There’s crime and gangs all over the world, but the people who are fleeing their country are fleeing for good reasons, generally.

Thank you, Antonio. I want to come now to Amy Tutenberg. Amy, you work as a medical interpreter, you’re a Republican, you also have strong views about the border.

I believe that those who believe in open borders are using our neighbors from the southern border to bring them here in a situation where they will not be given any rights or visas. They do not require companies to provide them with visas, so that they can use them to lower the wages of workers in this country. I believe that they are really just using them to exploit people and to undermine American workers rights and pitting us against each other.

(22:06)
And it is wrong that someone should live here for 20 years and not be able to vote. I do not believe that the Democratic Party has any intention… They say a path to citizenship. I believe that they bring people here with that idea. What if we had brought slaves here, back in the day, saying, “Yeah, but we’re providing them a path to freedom. Let me use them first and then never really fulfill that.” I believe in hospitality, if you’re going to bring people here, you either give them a visa to be here legally or they don’t come here.

Do I hear you saying that you think the system, the government, doesn’t treat immigrants… First of all, you’re saying the borders need to be tighter, that’s what you’re saying?

Correct. Absolutely.

And you’re also saying that our system of immigration is not treating immigrants the way it should. Do I hear you correctly?

Correct, correct. It’s very simple. If you are going to let people come here, you either give them a visa or the rights to be here, so they can do things legally, or you don’t. There’s no in between, and that’s what they’re allowing.

Let me come back to you Antonio. Hearing that, do you think the system did you wrong?

No. Yeah, I think she’s 100% right. We’re on opposite ends of the political divide, but she’s right. Immigrants are used, largely, as a slave labor force. There’s an enormous amount of people that work with no rights, no ability to say anything because, if they say something, they could get into trouble. And so, they just have to take what they’re given and oftentimes they are abused or oppressed or not paid and they can’t do anything about it. And yet we maintain that system. I don’t believe that immigrants are anything more than a political talking point, and we actually need them in order to do the slave labor of the country.

Thank you. Such a big subject. Ted Johnson, you have written a lot about, speaking of immigration, our country’s changing demographics. How does that play into the polarization, the division that we’re here talking about tonight?

Yeah, this is such a complex issue. There’s a policy conversation around immigration that’s very important and I think we’re getting at some of that. And then there are the people in the middle while the policy conversation happens. Policy, do we need more border agents? Do we need more intelligence? Do we need partnerships and a border wall, et cetera? Those are policy conversations. Should there be an easier path to immigration or a more difficult one? One that’s vetted more? Policy conversations.

(24:39)
But the people waiting for these deliberations to happen are left in the lurch. If you’re a Haitian immigrant in Ohio right now, waiting for Congress to do something, you can’t go to school. Bomb threats are being called in because, on a debate stage, one of the candidates, Donald Trump, said that black people in Ohio, black migrants, are eating cats and dogs. That’s not a policy conversation. The policy conversation becomes secondary.

(25:03)
And so, what we’re finding, what we’re seeing, is that the cultural conversation about who America is and who we should be and who we allow in has dominated the policy conversation about the best way to create a path to citizenship. And frankly, it’s advantageous in a partisan sense, but it is destructive for what this kind of talk can cause in America.

Another divisive topic that’s getting so much attention right now is, of course, abortion. Following the 2022 Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, that issue was returned to the states, as all of you know. And right now, 14 states ban abortion altogether. It is a national divide, it is reflected here in Wisconsin.

(25:50)
Emily Schultz, you are a mom working part-time at a nonprofit. You’re a Democrat and you told us you had a very personal experience with a pregnancy that you lost a few years ago. Can you share some of that with us?

Yeah. My husband and I wanted desperately to be parents the minute we were married, and we had a complicated journey to getting there. And we were blessed with twins in 2016. And, in 2021, we found ourselves pregnant again. A very deeply wanted, blessed pregnancy. And at our scan, at 18 and a half weeks, we found out we had the first of many medical complications for both me and our child, and we also immediately found, as we were processing that, that most of our options were very limited. Not by our wishes, not by our doctors or their recommendations, but by politicians who, in my opinion, are grandstanding and making TV and sound bites and not thinking about the people who their policies affect.

These are politicians here in the state of Wisconsin,

In the state of Wisconsin and around the country, and we soon found out that our son wouldn’t survive. And I had to walk around, for two weeks, knowing I had a baby that I could feel kicking inside me who would never survive birth, who would never get to come home with me, and I couldn’t be induced into labor because it would be considered termination. I had medical professionals look at me and say, there’s nothing we can do. If you want to go terminate, you can terminate, but we can’t do it here. You can’t do it in the neighboring state. You’re too late. You’d have to fly across the country to get care. And to take a moment that was so emotional in my life, in our life, in our family’s life… It’s so easy to look at abortion and say, I’m pro-life, or I’m pro-choice, like it’s a team sport. And the reality is there’s a million shades of gray in between and there’s a million medical procedures and treatments that fall in that gray zone in between.

Such a painful experience and we thank you so much for sharing it with us. I want to come to Mark Holland, having heard from you, Emily. Mark, you are a truck dispatcher and a Republican. In your case, you and your wife had an experience with IVF and you came away with a different view of abortion. Explain.

I think that Republicans and Democrats are actually closer than we think about this issue. We went through IVF as well. That’s how we have our son, through IVF, and it was a long, arduous journey. We had been trying for 10 years before that. And it is painful. As far as abortion, I do believe that some people use it as an oops kind of thing. Oh, we got pregnant. Oops. Let’s get an abortion. That’s the issue I have with it. The responsibility part, the part that, “the baby’s in the third trimester, let’s go ahead and get an abortion.”

(29:26)
That to me is a problem, as opposed to the areas where if a woman is raped or if there’s the danger of the mother or if there’s something like… Then I would say yes, it would be okay. Even like she had mentioned, an area where you have to carry a baby that you know is not going to make it, you should be able to have an abortion in that case. That’s what my views are.

And we know late term abortions, very rare. Having said that, I want to ask

Ask the two of you. Can you see from your position on abortion and your, both of your position are reproductive rights, can you see common ground somewhere between the two of you?

I think there’s a lot of common ground in between parents who desperately want to have children, and that’s where the political conversation to me makes so much noise that’s unnecessary. There’s sound bites and there’s making the headlines and all sorts of things that become more important than making good policy that takes care of people in very vulnerable and sometimes very desperate situations.

Thank you. Thank you to you and to Mark. Charlie Sykes, as someone who’s watched this issue among others, but this has been a tough issue across the country and here in Wisconsin for some time, tell me what you’re thinking after hearing this.

Now on abortion, and I say this as somebody who comes from the pro-life community, what has happened has been a tragedy for women, but also I think for the pro-life movement because instead of coming up with reasonable common ground solutions, what we’ve done is we’ve had people who decided to exploit it, passing laws that are performative and draconian without having thought it through. The pro-life movement had 50 years to come up with a pro-life policy, a pro-baby, pro-family policies. And they didn’t do it. They were the dog that caught the car. And I think that you’re seeing this playing out as a tragedy.

(31:43)
People of goodwill, I think could work out compromises as they have through much of the rest of the world. But I think we have political class that isn’t interested in coming up with common sense, common ground solutions. They want us to be at each other’s throat. They want an issue. They want us to fear and dislike one another.

And do you think that’s on both sides?

No, I think we… Look, politicians will always look for their advantage. But what’s happening now, we have to understand when we talk about the toxicity of American politics, and I say this as somebody that has been a conservative for decades, what Donald Trump is doing with his rhetoric and the extremism does not represent the people in this room because I’m guessing the people in this room would be able to go out and have a beer together. But this is not what the rhetoric of this presidential campaign is about.

And that’s what we want to try to pursue with as many of you as possible. And right now, the other issue we want to get to is the economy. Despite the fact that the overall economy is in strong shape, low unemployment rate, stock market hitting record highs this year, inflation is easing, wages are rising, many Americans say they still feel the higher cost of living since the COVID-19 pandemic. Camille Mays. You live here in Milwaukee. You’re a community organizer. You’re a Democrat. What does the economy look like to you?

A lot of people are struggling now, a lot of people who weren’t struggling before. I’m hearing a lot of people talk about the mortgage going up, just regular conversations about the groceries. We kid about how high the groceries are and a trip to the grocery store. And I’ve been finding a lot of people cutting back on things. A lot of people aren’t able to do some of the things that they used to could do because of these rising costs. And we’re just wondering when is it going to change? Why are the groceries so high? And they had went down for a while, but things are back up and it’s ridiculous.

Do you blame one party or one administration?

I don’t really know what the answer is. I know, again, it’s just a tactic used to divide everybody, blaming one party or the other.

Jim Blumel, you’re here somewhere. Where are you? Right there? You live in Greenfield, Wisconsin. You own a landscaping business. You’re a Republican. How does the economy feel to you?

Well, it’s two different types of economies that we got going on. We have a huge labor shortage, and you can say that the unemployment rate is low, but the amount of people in the employment pool has dropped dramatically since COVID. And a lot of that is because you give them free money for long enough, they find ways that they don’t need to go to work anymore or that they’re going to stay home just because it’s easier and they’re getting the check already.

Who do you blame, administration? Where do you see the fault lies here?

Well, there’s a billboard in Milwaukee, downtown Milwaukee that you drive past and it tells you that the national debt is upwards of $104,000 per person and there is no stopping it. Look at the price of a car these days. I can’t afford a car. I used to be able to afford a car. I can’t afford a car now. There’s no way to go buy a new car like that. When you have the president standing in the picket line telling these guys, they deserve a 40% increase in pay, what do you think that does to the price of a car? What do you think that does to health insurance? What do you think that does to everything that touches any aspect of the economy?

You’re referring to President Biden?

Correct.

Thank you. I want to turn to Tiffany Koehler. I think you’re here. Tiffany, hello. You live in Slinger, Wisconsin. You are an army veteran. Do you think one party or another is more responsible for what we see right now in this economy?

Personally, I do not think that one party over another party is responsible. We are rebounding from a global pandemic. I think our country has done pretty well in recovering, and I think we should give ourselves credit. Again, politicians will use this as a wedge issue because no one likes to pay anymore for anything when you go to the store. And I’m not trying to say that it hasn’t been tough at times. Of course it has, but I don’t trust a president who wants to return to the Oval Office, who’s filed bankruptcy six times. I just think he’s a poor excuse of someone… He can’t even run his own economy, his personal, and it starts at home.

And I just want to point out, you told us you voted Republican and Democratic. You voted in both parties over time.

Yes, I have.

Kathy Cramer, I want to come to you. We’re hearing some pretty tough stories from your Wisconsin neighbors. How is this… People are agreeing, the economy’s not in great shape. So is this having an effect on our division?

Yeah. Well, it’s interesting that it is a kind of common ground where so many all of you just spoke and lots of people in Wisconsin and around the country have this feeling like this economy was not built for me. This economy is not built for people like me. We talk about how well the economy is doing, but we talk about the stock market and GDP. That’s not my daily life.

(37:36)
So I’m seeing actually a lot of common ground here as opposed to divisiveness because I think one thing that I hear a lot from Wisconsinites and people around the country is just this basic level of wanting just to not have to worry so much about basic things like housing, groceries, and just the basic things we all need in order to have a good life.

So the data’s better, the statistics are better, but people aren’t feeling it clearly. What we’ve been asking people around the country for the last year and a half is how do we move forward given these divides? What is it going to take?

I would absolutely like to see more compromise in our politics.

Our political leaders need to do what’s best for the country, not what’s best for the political party.

It has to start with changing the tone and changing how we campaign against one another.

If we all take a little bit more humility in our approaches to these issues and a little less hardened tribalism, I feel like we could find a lot more common ground.

I do worry about not being able to get these divisions under control. And can it get worse? Sure, it can.

You’ll see more fighting among your neighbors. You’ll see more vilification for people who aren’t in charge. You’ll see a divide that will create struggle in ways that we haven’t experienced yet.

So based on what we just heard, it’s clear that a number of you are worried that we’re not going to be able to get this division under control. I just want to say in our recent poll, most Americans said they want to see an effort at compromise.

(39:26)
So first, raise your hand if you think it’s more important to seek compromise to seek common ground. Raise your hand. That’s a lot of hands. Okay. And then how many of you think it’s more important to stand your ground, stand on that principle that you believe in? Okay.

Depends on what principle.

It depends on the principle. I do see some hands. Sydney Lee, we’ve seen you in our videos tonight. You live here in Milwaukee. I talked to you last year. You worked for several liberal causes. You’re a Democrat. Do you think compromise is possible?

I do think compromise is possible if both sides are coming from a genuine place of wanting to get to a common ground. You have to have both sides listening and not just listening to be heard, but listening to understand and listening to connect in a way that has empathy along with policy. I think if you don’t have both of those things connecting, then you’re never going to get to a common ground. I feel like that’s where a lot of our miscommunication comes from. But when you can find empathy and listening with the need to want to understand, then I think we can get somewhere.

Gary Bluemel. Hello. You live in Waterford. You’re a retired electrical engineer. You’re a Republican. You’re planning to vote for Donald Trump. Our most recent poll found that more than eight in 10 Americans say the country is so divided that they think there’s a serious threat to the future of our democracy. Does that ring true to you as it’s something that worries you?

It definitely worries me. I think we’re very divided. People are digging in. If we keep going with this, it’s getting worse every year. It’s the lesser of two evils who you’re voting for. Something’s got to change. And the root cause, I believe, is the partisan primaries. Most people are elected in the primaries in which only half the people vote for that party. They’re elected by their side, by their party, not necessarily by the general public, so they’re elected by one side or the other. So it’s either we elect an extreme right or extreme left, and then we put them in a room together and say, okay, you two get along now. And it’s like, well, but they were elected with the context that they’re not going to give in to the other side. So we’re asking for failure.

Do you think that’s what’s happened in this… Of course, Kamala Harris is a new nominee of the Democratic Party. She’s not the incumbent. But do you think that’s led to the candidates that we have, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris?

I believe so, not just in the presidential election, but all of the elections and all the Congress and the Senate and the House. People, if you’re a moderate Republican or Democrat, you’re eliminated in the primary election. So all we have in Congress are extreme left and extreme right, putting them together to get along, that they’re elected saying they’re not going to get along, they’re not going to cooperate, not compromise.

Sitting right next to you, and I’m going to ask you to stand, is Ryn Botsford. Is that right?

Yes.

You [inaudible 00:42:29] here in Milwaukee. You live here in Milwaukee, and I saw you raise your hand a minute ago. We need to, thank you, share the mic. I saw you raise your hand when I asked, who thinks we need to stand on principle? Why did you say that?

I do think that we need to stand on principle because if a person looks at me as a I’m a gay person, I have a son, I have a wife, and I cannot compromise with somebody says that my child would be better not with my wife and I, but in a foster system or with a mom and a dad. I cannot compromise with that person. I am a teacher. My wife is a nurse. Our son is perfect. And I cannot compromise with somebody who sees me as a human being that is better off dead than alive and present and raising my family. And if you cannot look at me and see that I am a human being with worth, then I cannot compromise.

Does anyone here want to respond to what Ryn just said? I’m going to open it up. Is there anybody here who… Yes. I’m going to give you the microphone.

So certainly I understand where she’s coming from in regards to the fact-

This is Jim Blumel.

Jim Blumel. I understand where she’s coming from. He’s coming from… I’m sorry.

They.

Where they are coming from, but I think we’re closer than what you’re talking about. Nobody’s looking to kill you, or I shouldn’t say nobody. I should say 99% of the people are not looking to kill you. 99% of the people don’t care what you live your life like. 99% of the people are happy that you have a child and you’re raising a child in a good environment and giving that child a good education and actually making him a privileged child in that he has a good relationship, a loving relationship that he’s in. That’s the privilege that we really talk about.

(44:38)
What I disagree with is that I don’t want to have a drag show at my kid’s grade school. I don’t want to have a drag show at the library, and I don’t want my children, my girls competing against someone that is changed over from a male to a female. I have a major problem with that. That’s where I am not willing to compromise.

But is all the rest of this stuff… You go on, live your life. You be you. I’ll be me.

All right. I’m going to come back to Ryn for a comment before we move on.

I understand that 99% of this room don’t want me dead. The 1% of you who do, I guess we’ll talk about that later, but there are policies being made that affect trans youth. I have not heard or read about any drag schools and elementary schools. I would love to see evidence of that. Drag shows in libraries… I believe that if you don’t want your child to see a drag queen in a library, go to a different library. You have every right to take your child to a different library that is not doing drag shows the same way that if I were to take my child to a drag show, it’s fine. I also think that there are a lot fewer incidents with drag queens being aggressors than then not drag queens being aggressors. And then with the trans people in sports, if you’re transitioning male to female, you have to make sure that you are under a certain level of testosterone to participate in those high-level sports.

It’s a complicated subject.

It’s so complicated.

I want to turn to Kweku TeAngelo Cargile. I believe that’s you raising your hand back there. You are here in Milwaukee, work in the tech industry. You’re a Democrat. You too have told us you’re worried about what happens if we don’t come together. Explain.

I think we have examples of how our politicians can push communities to act out in violent ways, that if a politician wouldn’t have said something, it would not have occurred. I think January 6th is a great example, I think of what our previous president said about people eating cats and dogs and now people being hurt or impacted by things that our previous president shared. I think I have very clear implications of what could occur, and I think we are all worried about that.

And we’ve already seen [inaudible 00:47:38].

Right. We’ve already seen it, and I think we are all worried that the height of how far that could go.

Want to quickly hear from Martin Moldenhauer sitting right next to you, Martin, you’re a retired college professor. You told us you’re conservative. How worried are you about the consequences here?

Well, I have 10 grandchildren, Jim. I don’t have 11, and I don’t think I have another one on the way, but I’m concerned about those children in that generation. Here in Milwaukee, I have some Milwaukee police friends and they’ve told me we’re about 200 police officers down from what we should be. So yes, I do see a future that could be poor. It could be related to the election. If people of faith were staunch to their beliefs, I think all of this would be less of a problem.

Thank you. And I want to come now to Beth Bauer. Where are you, Beth? You are right here. I knew you were in this vicinity. Retired businesswoman, live here in Mequon, Wisconsin. You’re a Democrat. You’re involved with this bridging group across the country called Braver Angels. That means you must believe that a civil, more respectful kind of set of relationships is possible. What gives you that belief?

Braver Angels is the largest organization in the country that really works toward bringing both sides together. We get them in groups, and we ask them, what do you think about an issue? And they may have differences about issues, but you know what? We do find they have more in common than they have differences. And that if we let the people stand up rather than our parties, we really can come together. But it’s going to take all of us in this room to really stand up and say, “Let’s work on how we can find common ground because we really can.”

Beth Bauer, thank you. Listening to Beth, listening to all of you in every part of this room, I want to come back now finally to our panel and ask you, do you come away more hopeful, Ted, after hearing this, or more concerned about the direction we’re headed?

I tell you, I came in the room hopeful. I buy stock in America every day. I come from a tradition of optimism. The black church, if you are raised in this tradition, you recognize that struggle is not the end of the story as much as it may seem impossible to overcome. So I am as hopeful in this country in this moment as I was when I walked in. Nothing that’s been said in this room has made me think maybe we’ve lost our way except the choices we have when we go on Election Day, not this particular Election Day, but Election Days period, at the local, state and federal level.

(50:51)
As has been mentioned, a lot of times the views that we have are not as polarized as the politics that we get. And so until we’re able to perform a system that can more accurately capture the voice of Americans and then channel that energy into responsive policies to the public that incorporates different views and then finds compromise so we can at least fight another day and live peacefully while we do so, until that happens, we’re going to continue having these kinds of conversations because the end result of our participation in our democracy has not resulted in the kind of country that we want. But I’m not down on America. I’m not low on it because of the very sentiments we’ve heard in the room.

Kathy, what about you? Do you come away more hopeful or something else?

Kind of like Ted. I’m similarly hopeful. I came in hopeful, but I have to say, I sense in this room a lot of people on their best behavior tonight, and I think we all… I mean, folks agreed to come because they have strong opinions, and I think we’re all going to go home and talk in a little bit stronger language about what we feel. And so it worries me, and yet it gives me hope because we can be in the same room and get along. And I think that’s a really important quality, how to know how share the same space with other people and listen to what they’re saying and to be direct when you can about what it is you’re feeling. And we need it in our political realm. We need it in our leaders. As many of you have said that we can do it. We have to demand it from the people we’re putting into office.

Charlie Sykes, What about you? More hopeful or…

I am not an optimist, but I am hopeful. And optimism and hope are not the same thing, which we don’t have time to get into. It really does strike me, and I agree with Kathy, this has been an interesting dialogue. I’m not sure that it’s real life in the sense that people are willing to engage in this particular format, but the thing that is absent, I think in so much of our political dialogue, and I was struck by a comment of one of the panelists earlier, that if you have an assumption of goodwill, you can disagree about just about anything. So I think this is the key thing and what we lack in our politics. And one of the panelists also made just an excellent point about the way our political system is structured with the hyper-partisan gerrymandering. The reality is that in our political system, we don’t have to have these cross ideological conversations.

(53:42)
Liberals do not have to talk to conservatives. Conservatives do not have to talk to liberals. You don’t have that. So what happens is that you have these perpetual outrage machines, and those are the only things that drive the debate. So again, I’m not optimistic because I think we’re going through some very, very difficult times, but we’ve been through way more difficult times. People remember this is a country that actually did have a civil war, but it also had a president who appealed to the better angels of our nature. We can be torn apart, but if we appeal to the better angels of our nature, we can heal. But if we have a president or political leaders who tell us that we need to fight with one another, that we need to eliminate one another, then that’s going to be very difficult.

Thank you so much, all three of you. Thank you. This country we love so much has been through painful divisions, yes, in the past, just as we are today. It’s a strength that we air our disagreements in public. Our hope at PBS News is that by talking openly about our differences, we might understand better where the other is coming from, and that through that, find ways to resolve some of the biggest challenges we face as Americans. I want to thank our wonderful audience tonight for joining us here. You’re all amazing. I want to again thank our panelists for your help, for your contributions. You’ve all been spectacular. We’ve got lots more to talk about, so we’re going to keep this conversation going a bit online. So please go to pbs.org/newshour and to our YouTube page for more. For everyone at PBS News, I’m Judy Woodruff. Thank you and good night.

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