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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We always hear how polarized our country is, but there may be more "Hidden Common Ground" than many people realize. A project called "Hidden Common Ground" has been doing some Public Opinion Research and come up with some areas of pretty widespread agreement on issues ranging from police reform, to regulating the internet. Let's explore the middle of this political and cultural Venn diagram, the parts that overlap.

With us now are David Schleifer, Director of Research at Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public opinion research organization, and Gerard Robinson, USA Today opinion contributor, AEI that's American Enterprise Institute think tank scholar and a former secretary of education in Virginia and Florida education commissioner. Together, USA Today and Public Agenda have worked on a report on America's "Hidden Common Ground" focused on overcoming divisiveness in American public life. I am on an advisory board that is met several times to discuss their work. Hi, David. Hi, Gerard. Welcome to WNYC.

David Schleifer: Hi, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Do we have both of you?

Gerard Robinson: Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: David, why don't we start with you. What is this project? Tell our listeners, this project that Public Agenda and USA Today have launched and why?

David Schleifer: Sure. Public Agenda, we're a nonpartisan research and public engagement organization. We launched the Hidden Common Ground initiative with USA Today because we felt like there was a narrative of hopeless division that seemed self-perpetuating.

We initiated this program of research, journalism, and engagement, to identify where there is actually agreement between Americans along the political spectrum. Also to understand where there's genuine disagreement, and then to work with the journalists at USA Today, and we also have a public media partner America amplified to raise the visibility of that common ground that Americans share. We also have some public engagement activities tied to the findings with several partner organizations that are organizing opportunities for people to actually have conversations across political differences.

Brian Lehrer: We'll get into some of these interesting findings in a minute, but Gerard, just so people can get to know you and your role a little bit. Where do you come into this as a former state education commissioner in two different American states, and what's important to you here?

Gerard Robinson: What's important to me is the fact that we're going to real people and asking them questions about divisiveness, about race, and about steps forward.  

What I like about the report is that not only do they talk to people on the left and the right, but the questions they ask, make a lot of sense to me.

In previous roles in state government, but also in my current role as vice president for education at Advanced Basic Culture Foundation in Charlottesville, Virginia, we believe that listening to people makes a lot of sense. From the report, we're hearing hopefulness, we're hearing a way forward. We're not denying that there are challenges, absolutely, but the people are basically telling us that we lack a public vocabulary and national leadership necessary to address our problems. In that void, the people themselves, or "We the People," decided that we should actually tell ourselves what to do. For that reason, I want to get involved with the project.

Brian Lehrer: By the way, David, people ask, why is unity worthwhile? I know more than a few people who roll their eyeballs at President Biden when he first got elected and talked about how unity was going to be the goal. A lot of people like it for obvious reasons and Trump was so purposely divisive, but people might say, why should I care about that, rather than progress on issues like towards social justice, which can be very disunifying, have a big backlash, like the civil rights laws, which have driven white America into the arms of the Republican Party in presidential elections, ever since they were passed in the 1960s. Talk about why unity itself is a goal?

David Schleifer: Sure. I think what's important to understand is that, when we talk about partisan divisiveness in this research and then the Hidden Common Ground Initiative overall, we're not talking about people needing to agree on everything. We're really talking about there being space for healthy and productive disagreement that doesn't necessarily degenerate into partisan scoring a point or the type of partisan disagreement that actually makes it impossible to recognize where people may have shared goals and shared values.

I don't think the goal is unity for unity's sake or agreement on absolutely everything. I think the idea is, or the question really is how can we have a civic and political space that actually allows people to disagree in productive healthy ways and find consensus, but not necessarily be out to get each other. I think there's a real difference there versus just agreeing on everything, which is never going to happen. That's the nature of a democracy.

Brian Lehrer: Gerard, do you want to add anything to that?

Gerard Robinson: We could have a unity of purpose, and have multiple pathways to get there. Let's take education, for example, I think we're unified in our purpose to make sure that students are literate, in both English language, arts, and mathematics. We're unified in our purpose, to make sure that we can provide students with not only quality teachers and an education, but also multiple pathways of learning, be it public school, private school, or hybrid.

We have a unified purpose to say that the children today are going to basically become the leaders of tomorrow. If we don't equip them with a set of moral, economic, and social values that are important, we're going to be in trouble. That's a  

unifying aspect of purpose, and yes, there are multiple pathways to get there, including the role that public policy and political parties play in it.

Brian Lehrer: To follow up on the education example, and because you have such deep experience in that field, if one side says, "You know, we need universal public education and smaller class sizes, and that's the way to get there," and another side says, "No, we need a voucher system so that individuals have choice and private options will spring up to serve families better than the monopoly public schools do," and they can agree, but they agree on the basic goal, as you stated that everybody wants to get their kids educated, then what good is the unity on that goal?

Gerard Robinson: You're focused on the unity of method, and I'm focused on the unity of goal. The goal is to get a great education, then there are multiple ways of getting there. Take, for example, you mentioned vouchers, long before Milwaukee became the first urban system with a publicly funded voucher program, we already had a voucher program in the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Religious schools, since the 70s, have used public money or receive public money to actually support the work they did with Title 1 students, and there's also public money for busing. We've had that for a while, where I think the divisiveness comes forward is when we say, "Private schools are better than public schools, therefore, we need vouchers." I'm surely not saying that.

There are also others who say, "Public schools are so horrible because there's only one option in public schools." That also is not true. We have magnet schools, we have exam schools, we have charter schools. The purpose is still there. It's just that we have to find ways to do it. Guess what, parents are speaking with their feet, and many of them [inaudible 00:08:57] have interest in the public school, have them in public schools--

Brian Lehrer: All right, and your phone is breaking up a little bit, so we're going to jump in and invite our listeners to call in. Listeners, in your experience, where have you found "Hidden Common Ground" between you and your friends and relatives from what you would consider the other political side or the other political party? Where do you find "Hidden Common Ground" in our politics? Or what questions would you like to ask our guests from the Hidden Common Ground Project of the group Public Agenda, which is the polling company, public opinion research, and USA Today? 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280.

David, to go down some of this research, it finds that there are multiple policy areas where you found both sides agree more than the public debate in politics or the media might indicate, like raising the minimum wage, investing in infrastructure to create jobs, creating a pathway to citizenship for a lot of the undocumented people here. You want to take one of those and describe where the "Hidden Common Ground" maybe that's hidden from view if people just watch Fox News and MSNBC?

David Schleifer: Sure. Before I dive into one of those, there's an important point that I want to make, which is that I think what we found across a lot of this research that

we've been doing over the past 18 months is that there's a lot of agreement on policy goals, and even some agreement on actual policy. I think that where there may be more disagreement or animosity is at that affective level between parties. I think it's important to recognize the difference between the substantive agreement that we found a lot of partisan on all of our policy issues, and that partisan animosity, which I think can coexist.

Brian Lehrer: Let me amplify that just a little bit and tell listeners that one of the findings from your most recent survey is that 14% of people reported serious arguments with family or friends as a result of the partisanship. That's a lot of people having serious arguments with family or friends, and nearly 20% reporting depression, sadness, or anxiety around this. At very least, you found that people are united in disliking the divisiveness, right?

David Schleifer: Right. The other thing that people are united is in seeing divisiveness as a problem that comes from the top down. I think that's another really important thing to understand about divisiveness is that there really is a difference between what happens at the leadership level among political leaders, and what happens among ordinary people.

I don't want to downplay the divisiveness that does exist among ordinary people, but I think it's a mistake to assume that politicians and the way they talk to each other is a perfect reflection of their constituents. Actually, that was one of the pieces of common ground we found in this research is a lot of agreement across the political spectrum that divisiveness is really driven from the top-down, it's not really a bottom-up phenomenon.

Brian Lehrer: Give us a great example of a policy area where there is "Hidden Common Ground" more common ground than a lot of our listeners might realize.

David Schleifer: Right. One of them is healthcare. On healthcare, we found substantial agreement across the political spectrum on the goals that people want for health care, starting with affordability, making sure that people with pre-existing conditions get coverage, making sure Long-term Care is covered. You see that agreement on the substantive goals, where we do see people start to break apart is on how to achieve those goals. When we did that piece of research, which I'll say was before the pandemic, a Medicare for all type of plan was popular with Democrats, not so popular with Republicans.

The thing that we did was we dug a little further to try to understand what are the concerns that people have about those different plans. What we found is that it really comes down to, for healthcare, in particular, it seemed that Democrats were more comfortable with tax increases, more comfortable with a larger role for the federal government than Republicans are. Republicans place to higher value on consumer choice.

Once you have a picture of where those areas of agreement and disagreement actually are, to me, that means you can actually start to design a policy that meets some goals, maybe doesn't mean every goal, that tries to address some of the

concerns that people have on either side. I think it gives you a blueprint for moving forward that doesn't have to be locked into a debate that's marked by a hard polarization between the two sides.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Wade in Point Pleasant, you're on WNYC. Since he's on the beach, I guess, you can wade in Point Pleasant, but Wade, you're on WNYC.

Wade: Okay, thanks so much for taking my call. In my experience, I think one problem here is that when people make politics their purpose, they actually can get more fulfillment out of just the disagreement between people and being part of a team, rather than actually looking for solutions. Rationally we expect, we hope that people will be looking for a solution, but emotionally, a lot of people might gain their satisfaction just from disagreeing or being a part of that team, and that I think perpetuates this partisan divide.

Brian Lehrer: Gerard, would you like to comment on that?

Gerard Robinson: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that study is we identify that 71% of Americans believe we have more things in common than we do not. That went across the board for Democrats, 65% of Republicans, but also for race. What the caller mentioned is something about party and identity. We happen to live in a time where identity politics are sometimes either associated with your race, at times with your religion, or your zip code.

Reading this, made me realize that yes, we've got challenges in place, but people at the local level aren't walking across zip codes, walking across racial lines, and walking across faith-based lines to say, "We want to see something different." I think what's taking place in the last 12 months relates to criminal justice reform is an example of people moving beyond policy, politics, partisanship, to do something radically different that 25 years ago we would have thought impossible.

Brian Lehrer: I want listeners, and Wade, thank you for your call, to know a little bit about your op-ed, about some of this in USA Today, Gerard. You wrote, for example, "See the problem is the enemy rather than making a specific group of people the problem," and you use the January 6th Capitol Riot as an example, writing, "The problem was the loss of life, destruction of property, and the psychological threat, not the GOP." Would you amplify on that?

Gerard Robinson: Sure. Let's take the Capitol Hill Riot of January 6th, the rioters who were involved were primarily white, male, and supporters of Donald Trump based upon available information. It's safe to assume that they're Republicans, or at least not Democrats. As you said, the problem was the loss of life and the destruction of property, but also the psychological threat that this riot calls to duly elected members of Congress and the American public. The enemy is the violence, not the GOP, and yet when you hear or listen to even today, conversations about it, the problem is white men or it's the GOP.

When respondents were given an opportunity to answer, they basically said, nearly

two-thirds, that, "Those who were involved in a riot do not represent the majority of the Republican Party." They don't think that the enemy include white conservative men, or the red party writ large. That was important to hear because they were separating actions of people from an entire party, and 74 million who took a vote for Trump.

Brian Lehrer: Jim and Spring Lake, you're on WNYC. Hi, Jim.

Jim: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I had a question for your guests about the climate crisis, and if there was any crossover along partisan lines. What I found-- I ran for Congress in New Jersey's 4th District back in 2018, and if I talked about the climate crisis, I certainly would get Democrats, progressives, independent progressives on board with that, but maybe not Republicans. When I framed it about conservation, protecting our national resources, from the beaches to the bays, to the pinelands, to the wetlands, to the banks of the Delaware, it seemed to resonate across those partisan lines.

I hate to give credit to the machiavellian wordsmith for the GOP, Frank Luntz, nobody talks about those words that work. It's part of the problem that we have on these is that we're not packaging what we want to talk about in messaging that just resonates with people across the board.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much, Jim. Sure enough, Jim, you'll be interested to know and David, maybe you can amplify on this, I know that one of the Hidden Common Ground papers is called America's Hidden Common Ground on Climate Change that came out last year.

David Schleifer: Right. We did find a fair amount of agreement on some of the approach-- That was an interesting one because I feel like we found stronger agreement on some of the approaches to addressing climate change than we did on the overall goal of reducing the effects of climate change. We still found 55% of Republicans agree on the importance of reducing the effects of climate change. That agreement was stronger on Independents and Democrats but interestingly, when we got into the specifics of policies like modernizing the electric grid, energy efficiency standards, we actually saw stronger support for some of those more concrete measures.

I do think to the caller's point, sometimes-- Often, I think the words matter and I think sort of identifying the values that people agree on, but also identifying the shared goals. Energy efficiency may have a certain appeal that fighting climate change doesn't as a phrase. I think it's important to look for those places to capitalize. You could think of it as wordsmithing, but I also think that really substantively it is a way to make progress by sort of identifying where do we actually have room for a conversation? Where can we actually move things forward?

Brian Lehrer: Looking at some of the numbers in that paper, which I have in front of me, most Republicans, 70% as well as Democrats, 83% and Independents, 81%. There's big support across the board. Support modernizing the US electrical grid to reduce waste in energy production and distribution. While 80% of Democrats support  

the US government financially assisting US cities and States to fight climate change. Just half of Republicans say the same thing. There's an example of where it seems like people do agree on the goal but people don't agree on the means, but maybe there is something there to build on with respect to agreeing on the goal. Justin, in Brownsville in WNYC. Hi Justin

Justin: Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. Good morning to your guests The first caller, I saw was like a very intelligent man and he framed it, I'm thinking in line with him and he frame it very perfect. My question is when Mitch McConnell said he going to do everything in his power for Obama to fail and as America isn't it we are too reluctant to call it what it is when America says things that is radical. That we're willing to call other countries if they do it, or if they frame things in the same way we do it without thought. We seems to sugarcoat America's behavior because when you have a leader of the free world make a speech like that, it is very dangerous.

I'm going to target the Republican party here. What took place on January 6th is not normal behavior. This is what America used to demonize other countries for, this behavior. It is written right there that these people does not care about policy, what they care about is identity. I think the first caller is right in terms of the Republican party does not have to make any policy success. All they have to do is tell the other side that, "We are not giving you this." We have a set of people who is already radicalized.

Brian Lehrer: Justin, I'm going to leave it there because we're running out of time in the segment, but we always appreciate your calls. Keep calling us. Gerard, I'll give you the last word in this segment and I will add that to Justin's point, two stories, just breaking during the show in the last hour. The AP reports, "Senate GOP, later Mitch McConnell opposes bill to form January 6th commission, dimming prospects for a new probe of insurrection."

They may not have that 9/11 style commission look into what happened on January 6th at all, because the Republicans oppose it, and also per the AP, "Texas governor, Greg Abbott signs, a law banning abortions after detection of a fetal heartbeat as early as six weeks." We certainly haven't solved the vice of deaths in this country during the show today. Give Justin and everybody the last word as we run out of time for this conversation,

David Schleifer: There's no one Republican party voice that represents everyone who's a part of the Republican movement. What took place again on Capitol Hill was a riot and a tragedy. The reality is, Republicans have said things to stop or want to stop Obama when he was in office. In fact, Rush Limbaugh said he hopes he fails. The Democrats have done the same thing when President Trump was getting into office.

Those are Washington DC politics, and they matter, and what people say matters a lot. The question is what do we, the people at the local level, how do we interpret it? What do we call reality? What do we call rhetoric but more importantly, how do

behave amongst each other? That is where we have to make the big decisions and the Hidden Common Ground Project is moving us in the right direction.

Brian Lehrer: We leave it there for today with David Schleifer, director of research at Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public opinion research organization, and Gerard Robinson the USA Today opinion contributor, American Enterprise Institute scholar, and former secretary of education in Virginia and Florida education commissioner. Thank you both so much for having this conversation on America's hidden common ground.

David Schleifer: Thank you.

Gerard Robinson: Thank you,

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lira and WNYC motor com.

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