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Follow NPR's Planet Money, wherever you get your podcasts, and start seeing how the economy really works. Hi, this is Liz in Akihik, Jalisco, Mexico. I'm listening to the Rockets or Coethys calling the faithful to mass at 630 in the morning to celebrate the town's patron Saint Feast, Saint Andreas. It's a nine-day feast.
That's a lot of Rockets. This podcast was recorded at 11, 12 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, November 26, 2025. Things might have changed by the time you hear it, but I'll still be listening to the Rockets and the Roosters bring on the morning down here.
Enjoy the show. That all sounds very lovely. I will say, I think hearing a Rocket at 630 in the morning would give me a heart attack. Yeah, that's definitely true.
But this sounded quite beautiful, and she did a really good job with that, and it sounds like a fun place to be. Yeah, I wonder where more about this feast? Sounds very interesting. All right, hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.
I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. I'm Elena Moore. I also cover politics.
And I'm Domenica Martin, our senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, we're going to be talking about politics. A lot of you are preparing to spend Thanksgiving with your in-laws or your extended family, your friends. And you may be wondering how do I avoid arguments about politics at a time when Americans are more divided than ever?
Well, today on the show, we're going to weigh in. I want to start with you because we actually have some polling that kind of gets around us. There was a recent NPR PBS News, Maris Poll. And it turns out Republicans and Democrats describe people in the other political party as closed-minded and dishonest when talking about politics, which is kind of charged.
I mean, how big is this divide that we're talking about here? Well, I mean, when you have more than eight and 10 in each party saying that the other side is closed-minded when talking about politics, I'd say the divide is pretty big. But at the same time, it's interesting because everyone then winds up getting together and having to kind of have this kind of awkward moment where they feel like, oh, how am I going to either talk about this, avoid talking about this, suppress feelings or not? And I mean, there's a ton of reasons for why we've gotten to this point in the country.
Yeah. Elena, you actually spoke to folks about this divide. I mean, what did you hear? Yeah, I called up a bunch of respondents who took part in our most recent poll to ask them about this question and get some more kind of personal understanding of where they're coming from when they say that the other side folks are dishonest or not open-minded.
And really, I heard from Democrats and Republicans a very similar message, which was things are harder to talk about these days. And I had people tell me that they feel judged or they feel like they're not being heard or on the other side that they don't feel like they can even have a productive conversation anymore. I talked to one man in Georgia who called himself kind of the black sheep of his liberal family. He's a Trump voter.
And he said that there is just kind of a known unspoken rule that we don't talk politics at Thanksgiving or holidays because it'll take away from the holiday and they're not going to get anywhere. And that kind of sense of almost like defeatism that I heard of people being like, this is a done deal. That was quite striking. I also heard people like a Democratic voter, Theresa Tucker in Lansing, Michigan who kind of said that this kind of feeling has gotten stronger over the last few years, last decade, even.
I think unfortunately, this administration has pitted people against each other. And if we would have more conversations, I think we would find we have a lot more in common than we don't. Yeah. That gentleman, like the law and his family is no talking about politics.
I think that's a hard one to enforce among most families. Everything is political, right? What do you guys do? Like when a relative or a friend starts to fight about politics?
You know, it's funny because we're reporters, so people always seem to want to pick our brains, but not really pick our brains. More like, tell us what should be in our brains. I find that especially with family to be incredibly frustrating because we clearly have a reason we do this job and we have personal opinions too. So that makes it difficult because you don't want anybody to necessarily judge you one way or the other for that.
So I often will try to not engage generally or trying to figure out who, you know, if I know if there's an in I have with that person, you know, if it's my brother or sister or there's like a way to talk about something that we've talked about in the past to try to go for that common ground a little bit. But mostly I cook usually for Thanksgiving for everybody. So I have a lot of time in the kitchen and I have a lot of time to talk about cooking or I'll talk about sports. Yeah.
I feel like there's no better tool than the segue and also just like the buffer and I. Not the one you write on. No, I mean, that's definitely a bad tool. But I feel like I love a good buffer.
Like someone basically reminds me of what I was told when I like started like trying TV hits where they're like, if you don't know the answer to this question, you're like, that's a great question. You know, by the way, it makes me think of Turkey. And while we're talking about Turkey and I love a good, I love a good shift. So I feel like as soon as you can kind of move the conversation along, that's kind of also our job.
I feel like in the field, definitely as Domenico said, like people will want our opinions or want our like own response to the same questions we ask. And I'm always like, well, I want to hear from you. You are the person that we're interested in. And I try to take that forward when I'm in conversations.
I don't necessarily always feel comfortable and be like, well, tell me why you feel that way. I'm channeling my therapist mother a little bit. I think that's called deflection. And that's so, and that can be useful.
I mean, it's very useful. I mean, I will say like as a reporter, it's very useful to have the skill of being able to be curious, but sort of dispassionate when you need to, like turning on that part of your brain and being like, you know, why do you feel that way? I'm curious, like what in your life has led you to this like opinion? I mean, it works mostly with like, I would say like extended family, but it's, if it's like a really close family member, it's kind of hard to put the like emotions of things away.
Yeah, I think people have like a big problem. I think a bigger problem now in the Trump era of really trying to understand where each other come from. I think it was a little bit easier before Trump because during Trump, he's done so many things that have been so divisive in ways where people feel really strongly on one side or the other. I mean, it shows up in our polling, you know, 48% of people in our poll strongly disapprove of the job that he's doing, but he has a very strong and dug in base.
And you know, I think there's a lot of people on the left who think that people on the right who voted for Trump that they believe and espouse all of the things that Trump does and see him as a real threat to democracy and can't imagine that anybody would support that. And for, you know, those on the Trump side, they feel like a lot of liberals don't listen. They feel like they will never give Trump the credit for anything they'll like to talk about and because the echo what he says about if he cured cancer, they wouldn't even like that, right? But I think that there are such passions that have gotten more divided, you know, because of social media, because of the Trump era.
And it makes it really, really hard when people are like siloed with the kinds of information that they take and where they get that information and whether or not they can bridge that gap to even understand where someone on the other side might be coming from. It's like deeper and deeper repercussions of labels, really, because like a label inherently, I think makes a lot of folks feel misunderstood and you can have preconceived ideas of what someone's identity is, what their views are, because of a label that they subscribe to, like Democrat or Republican. And I think, you know, voters that I talk to feel that that can be really misleading sometimes. I mean, I talk to Republicans and I've talked to lots of Democrats who call themselves conservative or liberal, but have tons of things to say that are a bit more nuanced on even folks in their own party.
And I think sometimes people can feel a bit like written off as just one thing or the other. When, you know, people are complex and they have lots of different opinions and just because they may have voted for one name doesn't mean they're 100% on board, sometimes it does. But I mean, even among Republicans, Dominico mentioned approval rating of the president right now. Almost nine in 10 Republicans do approve of President Trump's job in office.
That said, I still talked to Trump supporters who were like, I would like to see him focus more on this issue or this issue. And notably the number one issue that people want to hear him focus on, even if they support him, is the economy. Let's take a quick break, more in a moment. And we're back and we've been talking about navigating Thanksgiving conversations at a time when our partisan divides are deeper than ever.
And Elena, I want to go back to something you were talking about. I mean, are there any political topics out there that actually most people can agree on? Yeah, I mean, I think almost everybody can agree that the price of something in their life is too high, whether that be groceries or healthcare costs or try to buy a house or rent. You know, that's kind of something that's in the front of everybody's mind right now.
You know, whether we want to talk about it or not is kind of a big focus. And that's what we hear from voters really around the country. In some respects, politically, yes, there are, I think everything though you could argue as politics, everything has some involvement, you know, for a policy prescription or some other. So I don't know, I mean, I like to think about the people that I'm around.
And even if they believe what they believe, there's a reason why I choose to, you know, be at a Thanksgiving with them, for example, you know, I mean, obviously you can't pick your family. But there are reasons I would focus on or try to focus on the reasons why you like that with these people. And hopefully there's something that you do and you can focus on that. But you know, look at the political topics right now, make it really tough.
I mean, yeah, people think that stuff is, it costs a lot, but then of course you move to the next part of that conversation, which is, yeah, what are you going to do about it? Right. And also they have different folks to blame, different forces to blame for why things are expensive, which, you know, I joke about everyone being united on prices and the cost of groceries. Obviously those are real concerns, but it is funny where I'll have a conversation with a Democratic voter and then I'll have a conversation with a Republican voter and they'll really paint a similar picture of, you know, their challenges for the upcoming year, but they have completely different causes or say they have different causes.
And so, Dominick goes right, that is a bit of a little bit of a landmine right there. But a complaint is fun. I think like you can complain about something you can't control. It is very uniting.
It's a good time. Like a complaint fest sometimes. It can't be all bad. A little bit of a festivist preview.
Exactly. My favorite holiday. I mean, well, let's talk more about like some safe topics, you know, that are maybe completely not political at all. If someone's like trying to think of like, okay, I need to change this conversation to something safe.
What is usually y'all's go to? How about them? Oh, gosh. Yeah, we're going to talk about the brand and demo trade.
It's already hard enough. We're almost everyone else is a Yankees fan. Oh, sad for you. It's been sweet though that my daughter, see, there's that snark again.
My daughter just became kind of a Mets fan in the past year, which I'm sad for her on that, but it's also sweet. But she like was crying because of the Mets trading brand and demo. The longest tenure I'd met on the team, which I thought was very like sweet, took me back to my youth. And I was like talking to her about times when I was like really sad about something with baseball.
And it's just interesting. I think that there is like people have passions about different things, whatever it is, right? And I mean, for me, sports seems like an easy place to go because I mean, number one, my dad was a gym teacher, coach, I grew up playing sports. Everybody in my household basically is somehow involved or pays attention to it.
And it's metric based, right? Like the sort of New York talk radio culture as annoying and loud and obnoxious as it is, it's like you yell and scream, but whoever's got the best points based on the best data gets to win and the one who loses like their feelings don't matter. And there's something like actually nice about that because there's something pure about it where you have a chance at the next thing and it doesn't have to do with just your feelings. It has to do with, you know, whether or not you make better points or not.
Yeah. So in my house, I mean, obviously we've talked about I'm also New York or Go Yankees. We'll see next year, but I'm in my grandma's house in Baltimore right now. And so I am in an Orioles house, which is kind of like, they are kind of like the Mets of the A.L.
used in some ways, amazing team, you know, heart wise. But so sports is one thing, but I think also. You're struggling here. You're struggling with the grace.
I will say. I'm sorry. No, it is grace. Look, I'm friends with Mets fans and Orioles fans.
I got to say, I got a non-sports person. I know you guys both said this contentious already. Okay, very true. But there's a love fight and there's politics fight.
I was going to say one thing that isn't political and may, you know, relate to people not on living on the Northeast Corridor train line is I am become in the last few years, really since COVID, a avid reality television watcher. And I say that because I have found it the most uniting thing, maybe ever, in like anything I can talk about, because really anywhere in this country, you can find someone who watched a specific real housewives of Salt Lake City scene that is obsessively incredible and crazy. And like, it's like kind of my new conversation starter. I'm like, do you watch any mind-numbing television that you want to talk to me about?
Except for that person who is really serious about politics, like grandparent, and thinks that watching reality TV is shallow. Yeah, and then we go back to sports, or we talk about the Oscars. I mean, bring back hobbies guys. Like I have gotten really into knitting and sewing and I love talking about that.
And even if the other person's not interested, they're like kind of like, oh, this is sort of a light topic. My little brother's really into cooking. I don't care that much about cooking. But you know, when he talks about something he's cooked, I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting.
It kind of gives me ideas for a meal. Like it's light, especially, I mean, we are talking about Thanksgiving here. Talk about the food. Well, I do wish you guys a very nice, peaceful Thanksgiving.
I hope you have a great time. I think we'll leave it there for today. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics.
And I'll say, it's Thanksgiving, so focus on what you're thankful for. Yeah, I'm thankful for this card. Yeah, I'm thankful for your... I'm thankful for your...
And we're thankful for your listening. And thank you for listening to the NPR politics podcast.