Reply #36: My success story dealing with a Republican

[GuvWurld]

The Voter Confidence Committee recently conducted a town hall forum in Eureka, CA under the sponsorship of two of our City Councilmembers. The topic was Ranked Choice Voting. After the event, we divided up the names of the people who had attended and we called everyone to thank them for coming, to hear their feedback, and to invite their participation in our ongoing election reform efforts. This was just standard phone banking.

Well I had the good fortune of calling K.M., Executive Director of the local Republican Party. While opposed to RCV, he was pleased at the respect I showed him by calling to listen to his point of view. Our conversation went so well, in fact, I was able to get him to agree to meet me for coffee. That meeting went so well that he has invited me to speak to his whole group. The date and time have not yet been set but I'll report back afterward.

What did I do right? Well, aside from making sure that he always felt respected, I zoomed in on his traditional pathological hypocrisy by selectively responding only to things I knew I could show him were in direct contradiction to other things I knew he believed. My aim was to trigger his sense of cognitive dissonance, the same one that we all find so maddening and debilitating. We don't want to come out at such people with our "facts" so much as use their own facts against them. We have to show them where they are lying to themselves, really a challenge we face even with people on our side - an argument I've made many times, including how calling for a re-count of a sham "election" makes no sense when the initial count is known to be bogus.

The most amazing thing I kept thinking about after meeting with K.M. was how he kept saying I made sense, I was reasonable and calm, and I wasn't attacking anybody. I had no idea, but he claims that he is routinely harassed, spat on, and worse. I found myself wanting not only to sympathize and empathize, but to somehow show him that I could contribute to protecting him from this. My way of doing this, I told him, was building a bridge with the Republicans on goals we could share (mind you, I'm neither Dem nor Rep and think partisanship is treason). Ultimately he accepted that I am interested in pursuing non-partisan systemic reforms that create a basis for confidence in election results and ensure conclusive outcomes (see the Voter Confidence Resolution). I know that anything I want to achieve will be more likely to occur with him on my side. How am I doing at winning him over?