Three questions I wish pollsters, journalists and canvassers would stop asking...

And three questions all of us can ask each other instead

Top Notes:

This essay is a companion of sorts to one I wrote last month, on what I call The Paradox of Persuasion. Both, in turn, are companions to the Fall Barnraisers Classes, the first of which kicks off tomorrow (I’m excited!). While registration for tomorrow’s class is closed, there are still five other classes (all the same content) that are still open! Register now! It’s free and useful and a pretty darn good way to spend two hours. More details here, and registration here.

All this work (the free courses and essays like this, which honestly aren’t being offered anywhere else) is only possible because of subscriptions and donations. I think a whole lot of us are stuck in political loops that don’t serve us well, and if you value there being a few more spaces that help us get unstuck, I’d love your support.

Here’s the thing about asking questions: It’s the best. Compared to blustery filibustering? Way better. Not even close. I love asking questions, because then I learn things about other people and the worlds that they inhabit. And I like being asked questions, because often that means that another person is interested in getting to know me better. 

BUT…

A lot of questions are lousy! For example!

-What’s your problem?

-Do you know how fast you were going?

-Hello homeowner at [address redacted]. I’m currently buying houses in your area. Would you be open to selling?

Bad questions, all of them. Judgmental, leading, creepily solicitous.  But also low-hanging fruit. We can all agree that questions that seek to scam, sell and generally use others as means to an end are a bummer. 

There’s a whole different genre of questions that I’ve come to dislike almost as much, though. It’s not that they’re incurious. it’s that they’re posed in a way that narrows rather than expands the frame of imagination— both for the person being asked and for the person doing the asking. These questions are ubiquitous in election years. They’re the kind that pollsters ask when they call you at dinnertime. They are go-tos for journalists attempting to get the peoples’ pulse at diners and rallies. As I write this, they’re likely being rattled off by thousands of canvassers off at doorsteps. 

The goal of these questions isn’t actually to know somebody more deeply, nor is it to encourage any introspection on the part of the person being interrogated. It’s to classify, as quickly as possible. Are you on Team Trump or Team Harris? Are you an immigration or an abortion voter? What pre-existing narrative about the American electorate do you reinforce?

I understand why election-adjacent professionals ask these questions. The pollster gets to check off another respondent from their list. The journalist files their story on time. The canvasser gets one step closer to completing their VAN turf. But dammit, we’ve been asking the questions for decades now and all that time we’ve been pretty much stuck in neutral, as far as building a more loving country for all.

Enough set-up, though. Let’s describe this genre of questions. Better yet, let’s show rather than tell. Here are three ubiquitous political questions, along with a few thoughts about why I abhor them so much.

“Why do you support ________ candidate?”

You know how I've spent the last eight years? Listening to Trump voters tell me why they like Trump. Well, not just that. I’ve spent just as long listening to Clinton/Biden/Harris voters tell me why they support the Democratic candidate of the moment, and even longer than that hearing anarchists and communists tell me why they hate the whole system. It’s not that I never learn anything revealing or vulnerable from these mini stump speeches, but it’s rare. And you know why? For the same reason why you aren’t going to get an authentic glimpse of a candidate’s hopes, dreams and fears on a debate stage. Nothing about these questions invite stories or reflection. They trigger our brains to make post facto justifications for a decision that’s already been made. The goal, when faced with this question, is to argue rather than reflect. And you know the thing about arguments? They’re usually pretty boring. Cathartic? Perhaps. Loud? Sure. But do you know what I learn from most arguments? How much I hate arguing.

Here’s an example. This is a video where a fast-talking young liberal guy debates a bunch of conservatives. The first topic of debate? “Is Trump Racist?” Even if you haven’t watched this particular video, I can almost guarantee that you’ve heard all the points before. The only thing I learned from it is that the liberal guy thinks that Trump is racist and the conservative people don’t. I may be more compelled by one side’s arguments than the other, but there’s only so many times I need to hear “well he said ‘fine people on both sides’”/”that clip was edited!”in my lifetime, and I passed that threshold years ago. 

Does this video teach me anything about why this topic matters to them? Do I hear about how racism impacts their lives, or the lives of people who matter to them? Or what they hope happens to build a country that is less racist? No! “Do you think Donald Trump is racist?” is just another way of asking “Why do you oppose or support Donald Trump?” It’s an invitation to bloviate.

As for the title of this video, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” I don’t even know what that means! Like, am I supposed to think the Trump supporters are gonna eat him? Weird!

What are your top three issue areas?

I can imagine a world where this question is more likely to elicit revealing answers, but the problem with asking it in a country like the U.S. in 2024 is that we have such an understandably atrophied sense of what to expect from our government that we just roll through the same limited set of answers. This cycle, it’s usually some combination of “the economy,” “abortion” and “immigration” (perhaps with “Israel/Gaza” thrown in the mix). And these are all important issues, but they’re also revealing of the way political parties and media have already pre-shrunk our collective expectations before we weigh in. 

Here’s what I mean. Let’s take the example of “the economy.” That’s a massive and indiscrete mess of a category because of course it is— save for pandemic-era stimulus checks and perhaps tax cuts, few Americans can name a specific government policy that has had a meaningful difference on their pocketbooks. When people say they are concerned about “the economy,” I learn very little about their circumstances. Yes, I bet they are paying too much for milk and cereal and gas. Me too! But what else? Does their job pay enough? And does it also treat them with dignity? Sure, I bet the housing market is tough in their town, but what about their housing situation is especially precarious? Do they have to live too far from work? What’s that like? And what about health care? And child care? And beyond their individual circumstance— what is tough about “the economy” for others beyond them? Does their city not have enough money to fill potholes or provide adequate public transit? Can their school district not attract teachers because of low salaries? Do they have neighbors turning to crime because there are no good economic options? And what other social dynamics— race, gender, geography— play into that?

“Immigration,” as a topic of discourse, follows a similar pattern, though with a twist. More often than not, when somebody says that “immigration” is a major concern, that’s usually not because an entire family from Central America is now living in their bedroom. It’s a stand-in for a very different statement, namely, “I have a set of needs that I worry my government doesn’t care about, but the only policy that either party is offering to address those needs is cutting off care to new arrivals, so by default I guess that’s my issue.”

Now, it isn’t lost on me that an answer about “immigration” is often an indicator not merely that the respondent has an unstated set of needs, but also that they are particularly susceptible to nativist scapegoating. That’s tragic, of course, but not notable or interesting. We’ve had divide and conquer political rhetoric as long as we’ve been a species. Whenever I encounter reactionary rhetoric in conversation, though, I’m not terribly interested in understanding that person’s justification for “how they could say that.” Instead, i’m motivated to ask a whole different set of questions that might potentially trigger a different way of considering the world, some of which I’ll share in a bit.

Notably, abortion and the war in Gaza are different, more often than not, trigger specific, personal, vulnerable storytelling on the part of so many who name them as their top issues. And that’s telling, because they’re both specific government policies that people can point to having an impact on either their or other people’s lives. Speaking for me personally, the tragedy here is that both of these are both products of specific government decisions that I oppose, but there’s an interesting lesson here. The more that you get people talking about what the U.S. government should do more of and/or stop doing that would directly impact themselves and the people they love, the more we’re actually learning about each other’s needs and vulnerabilities instead of just pattering off campaign talking points at one another. 

Are you better off now than you were five years ago?

Jeez, what a mess of a question. Leading, reductive, manipulative. Gross. The reason you’re hearing it is the same reason that Ronald Reagan asked it in 1980, namely that it's an advantageous question for an opposition party to ask during a time specifically of high inflation, because that’s a very obvious economic cue that all of us remember being better than it is now.

The biggest reason why I hate this question isn’t just because, in my lifetime, I associate it with politicians that never actually make vulnerable people’s lives better. It’s that it asks for a zero sum answer when the question of how our lives have changed over time is tremendously complex and interesting. I DO want to know what about people’s lives feels better or worse than it did one year ago, four years ago and ten years ago. There’s a lot that’s embedded in there— some of it with policy implications, some of it deeply personal, all of it fascinating. You don’t get that by leading people to the answer you already want them to give.

Well that’s one problem with it anyway. The other, like several of the questions we’ve covered, is that it trains the brain to narrow its imaginative aperture to the lowest common denominator. The question is about “you.” Just you. Maybe your nuclear family, if you want to get frisky. It isn’t about your neighbors. It isn’t about your community. It isn’t about what’s made it easier to show up for others and to others meet that in kind. And again, what a bummer, what a missed opportunity. 

The bad news is that those questions (and their ilk) are asked far too often. The good news is that there are better questions. Not better in that they immediately convert people to your side, or that they help you find “common ground” (whatever that is!). No, they’re better in that they actually teach you something about the other person while also, potentially, leaving the other person considering the world and their place in it more deeply than when the conversation started. 

They’re better because they make us more human to each other, is what I’m saying. And I don’t know, friends, shouldn’t that be our goal here?

I shared a few examples of questions like this in The Paradox of Persuasion, but I want to go deeper on a few here, to really parse out what is to be gained from asking and listening in this way.

What does your neighborhood (or city or county or state) need right now? What would make life better here?

You can probably guess what I love about this question based on what I hated most about the other questions. First, it’s collective— it’s asking people to consider not just their experience but that of their neighbors. And rather than constraining the imagination merely to the things that we’re used to having government do for or to us, they trust people to brainstorm what they’d love to see happen proactively. You’re much less likely to hear about what you’re hoping the government doesn’t do for somebody else (“give illegals benefits”) than you are to hear what important proactive needs are currently being met. What a question! I never regret asking it.

Who is the person who has had the biggest positive impact on your community? What have they done that’s so special?

Knowing this information probably won’t help any political party win this particular election cycle. That’s not the why you should ask it! The point is that every community has people like this, people who do the quiet, thankless work of caring for their neighbors, and not only do I want to know who all of these people are (definitely for any long-term organizing I’m doing in a place, but also just generally), but the way people answer this question tells me much more about what they value, what they’re craving, and what showing up for them looks like than asking them to rehash their opinion about Donald Trump. As for when people can’t name somebody who fits this bill? I wish that weren’t the case, of course, but that answer still opens up a whole lot of other questions: Why is it so hard to identify a person like that in their community? If that person existed, what would they be doing? What’s preventing either the questioner or the person being interviewed from being that person?

How does national politics make you feel? Do you feel valued? Ignored? Threatened? Misunderstood? Why?

This election has been accused of being “vibes-based,” which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing. Yes, I’m curious about the material needs of various communities, but I’m also interested in how all this impacts us psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. I want to know how identity plays into that— class and race and gender and sexuality— just as I want to know all the ways that we feel seen/unseen/exhausted/apoplectic/hopeful that feel more unique and individual. I’m interested in what happens when people have to pause and not launch into their stump speech and instead talk about what’s really animating or holding them back every day.  I care about it not because I think it’s a skeleton key to winning elections, but because if we aren’t actually interested in other people (and therefore open to loving other people), I honestly don’t know what motivates us to engage in politics in the first place.

Is this a full list of questions? Of course not! And I always love hearing more. But here’s the broader point. As anybody who has watched the last eight years of media coverage can tell you, it’s not that our fellow Americans are living in interrogative deserts. We are polled all the time. Our nation’s journalists have, by this point, thoroughly scoured the country for “person on the street” scoops— yes in Pennsylvania diners, but also in places without high concentrations of old gruff Trumpy guys. We’re asking each other plenty of questions. At least in a technical sense, whatever it is we’re doing matches that bar. You know, pause for the other person to answer, upspeak at the end of a sentence, that stuff. The problem is that the more we ask the same boring questions, the more we’re training each other to believe that nobody’s actually curious, that nobody’s actually listening, and worst of all, that we don’t matter to one another. I love questions, but only when they’re used for their intended purpose. To bridge. To deepen. To help us imagine something miles beyond where we are today.

End notes:

I’ll have longer updates about my trip to South Dakota for the Festival of Books in Brookings. My parents came over for the event and we road tripped to Doland, their hometown (which readers of The Right Kind of White know plays prominently in the book). Pretty incredible, but there’s a lot I’m still processing.

Speaking of being on the road, WASHINGTON DC. We’ve got a heck of an event for you on October 17th. Check this line-up out and RSVP here.

Also stay tuned for details about another D.C. event, at the Friends Meeting of Washington on October 20th!