Do you avoid chatting about politics? According to new data, you're not alone

[MUSIC PLAYING] EMILY BRIGHT: It's Wednesday, July 5. I hope at some point around this 4th of July holiday you had a chance to sit around a table, sharing food or drink with friends and family. And if you did, did you talk politics? If not, if politics is a subject you avoid as much as possible, you're not alone.

That's according to a new national survey from APM Research Lab, which is a division within Minnesota Public Radio and the American Public Media group. Well, managing editor Craig Helmstetter got to dive into that data from that latest survey, and he's here in studio with me now. Hello, Craig.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Hi, Emily.

EMILY BRIGHT: So I understand that the APM Research Lab has a partnership with something called the Institute for Democracy at Penn State, and you regularly work with them on public opinion surveys called the Mood of the Nation poll. So what are the top takeaways from your latest analysis from that Mood of the Nation poll findings?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah, well, just as you said in the intro, if you were at a barbecue yesterday, you might have been doing something that turns out to be very American according to this survey. And that is, one, you might have been celebrating democracy, and second, you might have been avoiding talking about politics. Yeah, so to get into slightly more detail on this, we, as a part of this survey-- it's a nationally representative survey of 1,000 Americans.

We gave them this statement-- democracy may have problems, but it is the best system of government. And then we asked if people would disagree or agree with that. And it turns out that 3/4 of Americans agree with that statement, including half that strongly agree with that. So a lot of love-- not unanimous, but a lot of love for democracy as a concept.

But then paradoxically, you think democracy, well, that must depend on a lively exchange of marketplace of ideas, where we're good policies, good politicians can float to the top. We must be discussing politics a lot, right? Well, the survey also asked people if they had a tendency to avoid or self-center-- self-censor, excuse me, their discussions about politics, and it turns out that only 16% of us never self-censor. 16% of us say that we can talk politics with anyone and everyone, but the rest of us are hesitant, at least at times.

EMILY BRIGHT: I imagine your survey got into the situations when people felt most or least comfortable talking about politics.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: We did, yeah. We went a little further on that and said, well, OK. So you're having trouble. For those of us who self-censor sometimes, who do we self-censor around? And we asked about coworkers, family members, friends, and even spouses or domestic partners. It turns out that coworkers were the people that we most likely self-censor around followed by family members.

EMILY BRIGHT: And I'm guessing friends, partners, people are more free to talk about their political views.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah, that's right, although, among friends-- and specifically, we asked about close friends, and so I was a little bit surprised to find from this survey that half of us actually self-censor among friends. So we don't-- even among our friends, we don't often-- we often don't have a free and easy discussion of politics. The spouse, as you suspect it, was far less likely, but still, one in eight of us, 13% of us, aren't even able to talk about politics freely and easily with our spouse or domestic partners.

EMILY BRIGHT: Huh, so why do people hold their political thoughts back around certain people?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Well, that is one thing that's great about these Mood of the Nation polls that we do with Penn State, and that is that they have a lot of what we call open-ended questions in the survey. So we have questions like I described earlier, where we present a question with a variety of options that people can choose from, but in this case, we asked a simple open-ended question that said, please tell us why you avoid these political discussions.

And people could answer however they wanted. And it's kind of interesting now here, speaking to a Minnesota audience. You know what we got in response to this one. It's a lot of trying to please other people or avoiding conflict, and that's probably the number-one theme that came up.

In fact, this is a nationally-- as I mentioned, a nationally representative survey of 1,000 people, and I just looked this up. And just to confirm it, 17% of the US population is Minnesotan, and so 17 respondents-- it turns out exactly that number of respondents were from Minnesota, and let me give you some examples of what people say is the reasons they avoid politics from Minnesotans.

Here's a 78-year-old female. She says, quote, it would lead to our arguing, which I don't want. Here's a 55-year-old woman from Minnesota. She says it always starts fights. Another 56-year-old male, because most of my family are Republicans and I am a Democrat, and then-- this was an internet-based survey-- he ended his comments with all caps, a huge fight will erupt.

And then one last one from another Minnesotan, a 24-year-old woman, maybe my favorite answer of the whole survey, why she avoids political discussions, she says, quote, because with certain individuals, they will be volatile towards others political beliefs as well as that awkwardness and bummer feel that these discussions can have.

EMILY BRIGHT: Anything to keep the peace.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah, yeah, we don't want to bum each other out, I guess.

EMILY BRIGHT: What are some other reasons that people avoid discussing politics?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah, there's-- one of the other major themes that came up in these descriptions of why people self-censor when it comes to politics has to do with not wanting to cause controversy at work. Here's a quote from somebody else, and I think it's important to say these quotes because sometimes we do we hear from other MPR members here on Minnesota Public Radio. But these, again, are from the general public. They're not necessarily public radio listeners.

Anyway, here's something from, in this case, a 39-year-old Asian-American male from the state of Washington. He says, at work, it's an echo chamber, and saying one thing that they disagree with can result in being canceled or, worse, losing my job.

EMILY BRIGHT: That sounds like a stressful situation.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah.

EMILY BRIGHT: Other themes?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Yeah, other themes include, unfortunately, not thinking too highly about the person on the other side of the issue. So here's a 50-year-old white male from Florida. He states, some people only get their political news from heavily biased sources. They're spoon fed what to believe, and they refuse to consider that they may have been lied to. So those are some of the main themes on why people are avoiding political discussions.

EMILY BRIGHT: Well, I want to get back to that idea of sources in just a moment. But first quickly, did the political party of the person in the survey affect their response at all?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: In this case, no. So often, when I'm talking about survey results, there is a split between Democrats and Republicans. But here, 50% of Democrats and just about exactly the same percentage of Republicans strongly agree that democracy is the best form of government, and about 2/3 of Democrats as well as 2/3 of Republicans say that they selectively self-censor their political speech.

EMILY BRIGHT: All right, so Craig, where does this leave us? If democracy is built upon this free exchange of ideas but so many people don't say-- say they don't feel comfortable talking about politics unless, presumably, they already know the other person already agrees with them, where do we go from here?

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Ah, now, I got to solve the whole problem.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, that's a tough question, and the survey really describes more about what people are thinking than specifically provides a solution. But I will say that part of the survey results from an earlier part of this same survey do kind of speak to that question. And so we asked a series of questions about school policies, and one of them was, should schools be teaching about contemporary racism? As you might imagine, there is a political split there. 75% of Democrats said, yeah, schools should be teaching about contemporary racism. Only 25% of Republicans gave that same answer.

So in a sense, there's a big split, but I want to remind people that, hey, there's still common ground among that 25%. So if you're talking to a Republican, assuming that they might have a different opinion than yours or vice versa, in this case, you're going to be wrong for one in four Republicans that you're talking to. So there's plenty of room for common ground that you might not expect.

And even if there's not, you might learn something, so don't-- and try to be a little less Minnesotan, and don't be afraid to have a little conflict. Maybe engage a little of that political discussion. That's where I would leave us.

EMILY BRIGHT: You might discover there's more common ground than you think, regardless of what your political beliefs are.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: That's right, and we have some more results from this survey coming out in another week or two on gun policy. And from past surveys that we've done, we know that there's some surprising common ground, even on gun policy, which people often see as divisive.

EMILY BRIGHT: Well, that'll be really interesting to dive into. Craig, thanks for your time.

CRAIG HELMSTETTER: Thank you, Emily.

EMILY BRIGHT: Craig Helmstetter is managing partner of the APM Research Lab, and you can read more of their research from across the state and the nation at apmresearchlab.org.