In Ohio, one man鈥檚 quest to get more voters to agree to disagree
| Fairlawn, Ohio
About 50 people, many of them meeting for the first time, have gathered in this Greek Orthodox church hall in a suburb of Akron, Ohio. Over a buffet of chicken, pasta, and tossed salad, they politely get to know one another, five to a table, including this reporter, asking icebreaker questions provided on a sheet of paper. The atmosphere is cordial if a little hesitant.
After all, they didn鈥檛 come just for the meal.聽
They cast sidelong glances to the front of the room to five spotlighted director鈥檚 chairs. Each chair sits behind a printed sign, from left to right: 鈥渁gree strongly,鈥� 鈥渁gree somewhat,鈥� 鈥渘eutral,鈥� 鈥渄isagree somewhat,鈥� and 鈥渄isagree strongly.鈥澛�
Why We Wrote This
A story focused onIn a divided nation, Ted Wetzel draws voters out of political bunkers to talk through their differences. To him, respectful disagreement can be patriotic, a way to renew the republic.
Each chair will shortly be claimed by one of the dining companions; nobody knows who they will be.聽
As the meal ends, Arlin Smith, one of the event organizers, fades the music playing from his laptop and picks up a microphone. 鈥淟et鈥檚 get ready to rumble!鈥� he growls, emulating boxing announcer Michael Buffer.聽
Before the 鈥渞umble,鈥� Mr. Smith offers some guidance: Listen to the speaker, try to understand where he or she is coming from, use positive language, and be responsible for your own feelings. 鈥淲e all have emotions. So when you feel those feelings kind of rattled up, try to get comfortable. Lean into the situation and take control of your own self,鈥� Mr. Smith tells the diners.聽
Then he hands the mic to Ted Wetzel, the creator of this grassroots effort to help Americans of all political stripes disagree constructively and, perhaps, rebuild civic bonds in an era of intense polarization and social atomization. He titles this gathering 鈥淒inner and a Fight,鈥� but 鈥淔ight鈥� is crossed out and replaced by 鈥淒ialogue.鈥�
Mr. Wetzel, a retired small-business owner, wears a red checkered shirt and jeans with gray sneakers; half-moon reading glasses hang from his neck. He looks both elated and antsy. 鈥淭his is the eleventh Dinner and a Fight, so give yourselves a round of applause,鈥� he says.聽
As the clapping ends, he explains that he鈥檚 about to reveal tonight鈥檚 鈥渄ivisive topic.鈥� (Previous topics have included face masks, guns, and gender identity.) Once the topic is announced, anyone can take a director鈥檚 chair: First come, first served.
鈥淒oes America have any easy problems?鈥� he asks, pausing for some nervous laughs.
鈥淭hey鈥檙e all tough problems. So we need to be exploring.鈥�
Mr. Wetzel鈥檚 disputation dinners in northeast Ohio are among a cascade of bridge-building efforts aimed at countering America鈥檚 scorched-earth partisanship. They seek to promote civil dialogue as a path to finding common ground on issues that don鈥檛 yield easy solutions, such as policing, immigration, and race relations.聽
Red-blue divisions aren鈥檛 exactly new; some dialogue groups have been at it for decades. But Donald Trump鈥檚 rise to power, undergirded by social media tribalism, injected an outrage-driven intensity into public life that many traditional venues for discussion, from civic clubs and churches to office parties and family gatherings, struggled to handle. The violent Jan. 6 Capitol riot over the 2020 elections only served to deepen the political chasm.
For proponents of dialogue, reaching across that chasm is complicated by a suspicion on the right that liberals are setting the agenda. 鈥淭ypically, [these dialogue forums] are very blue,鈥� says Peter Coleman, a psychologist who studies polarization at Columbia University. 鈥淥ne side is more eager to do it than the other side, and that is part of the problem.鈥�
But by advertising a fight and using folksy language and metaphors, Mr. Wetzel seems to have cracked the code. His speak-your-mind dialogue dinners attract conservatives and liberals, as well as independents. Older pro-Trump voters break bread with Bernie Sanders-supporting millennials. Racial and religious minorities join the conversations. Many come back for more. 聽
鈥淚t鈥檚 hard to get people who really see the same world differently into the same room, and he succeeds at that,鈥� says Bill Lyons, a political scientist at the University of Akron and an informal adviser to Mr. Wetzel.聽
Lately, Mr. Wetzel has expanded his initiative by recruiting attendees to join small panels that meet over several months to draw up policy recommendations. The first group, focused on threats to U.S. democracy, started in September. He has also found partners to hold dinners in California, Arizona, and Washington, D.C., next year, and eventually wants to create a playbook so like-minded groups can hold similar events in their communities.
The long-term goal, he says, is a rediscovery of bonds that are stronger than the political tribalism that divides us. 鈥淲e鈥檙e really not that polarized. We鈥檙e proving to people that they can come together,鈥� he says.聽
For now, each dinner is something of a gamble: Who will show up? Will opponents find common ground? Might disputation turn into confrontation? It takes a large dollop of faith to believe that getting a roomful of strangers talking can hold back the partisan tide. Mr. Wetzel鈥檚 brother likens his work to 鈥渂oiling the ocean.鈥澛�
But Mr. Wetzel isn鈥檛 about to quit. He鈥檚 just getting started.聽
It all began, appropriately, with a meal, and a fight. It was 2017, and Mr. Wetzel and his wife were meeting two other couples for dinner. The two men were his former colleagues, back when he was a young engineer before he went into sales and management, then bought a specialist painting company in Akron. 聽
He had been looking forward to seeing old friends. But the dinner talk got heated over the topic of President Trump鈥檚 ban on Muslim immigrants and the perceived threat of sharia (Islamic law) to U.S. freedoms. The testy conversation continued over dessert and into the parking lot. 鈥淚t didn鈥檛 end well,鈥� says Mr. Wetzel. He knew that his rancorous reunion was being repeated all over the country, as friends and families clashed over politics. But he wanted to study the underlying problem, to figure out what really ailed American society and democracy. So he took a three-month sabbatical, which turned into a year and a half. Eventually he sold his paint company so he could work full time on this project.聽
Among the first people that Mr. Wetzel asked for advice was Professor Lyons, then director of the Center on Conflict Management at the University of Akron. 鈥淗e came with great humility. I was a little bit doubtful that anything would happen because he was so humble. He recognized a need, a problem to solve, but he didn鈥檛 know what to do,鈥� he says.聽
He sent Mr. Wetzel away with a list of books to read and advised him to reach out to communities of color to build his network. 鈥淭ed is a really good listener. He took a lot of notes,鈥� Mr. Lyons says.聽
At his brick ranch-style house in a Cleveland suburb, Mr. Wetzel filled a wall with sticky notes as he kept researching polarization and talking to others who shared his concerns. He self-published a book, 鈥淚s America Broken? 11 Secrets for Getting Back on Our Feet.鈥�
But he didn鈥檛 have a formula yet for how to bring people together to disagree constructively. He tried holding a seminar at a church, but it fell flat. 鈥淣ot one person said, let鈥檚 do it again,鈥� he says.聽
In 2019, Mr. Wetzel attended a national conference on civility in Alexandria, Virginia, where he learned about a dialogue method developed in 2004 at Arizona State University (ASU). The five-chair method offered an alternative to standard debates between hyperpartisans who reinforce a binary choice. Instead of a simple binary, the method gives moderates a greater voice since three of the five chairs are taken by those who somewhat agree/disagree 鈥� or are undecided. The occupants of the chairs start the discussion and can question one another; then the audience joins in.聽
Serendipitously, Rob Razzante, an ASU Ph.D. graduate trained in the five-chair method, grew up nearby; Mr. Wetzel coached him in Little League. Last summer, Mr. Razzante joined Mr. Wetzel on his back porch, which looks onto a generous lawn flanked by mature oak and maple trees. No fences divide his yard from the surrounding lots, as is typical of his Ohio neighborhood.聽
By then, Mr. Wetzel had tried the five-chair method in Professor Lyons鈥� classes and found it effective at guiding a respectful dialogue. Now, he told Mr. Razzante that summer evening, he wanted to bring it to the wider community and to insert it into a communal meal. And he wanted to call it a fight. Why? Because people 鈥渨ant to get into it,鈥� he says.
Mr. Razzante liked the dinner format, but wasn鈥檛 sure about the name. He wasn鈥檛 alone: Other ASU dialogue facilitators also blanched at this branding. 鈥淭he Arizona people were constantly trying to get him to call it a dialogue,鈥� says Professor Lyons.聽
Mr. Wetzel resisted. It was a fight 鈥� and a dialogue. He says the name is both humorous and honest about the fact that disagreement in public can be awkward.聽
Doug Oplinger, a former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal who has worked on other civil dialogue efforts in Ohio, also tried to dissuade Mr. Wetzel from advertising a fight. 鈥淥h my word, Ted. You can鈥檛 do that,鈥� he recalls telling him.聽
But his determination to use that phrase was of a piece with his approach to the challenge, says Mr. Oplinger. He asks 鈥渨onderful questions鈥� and absorbs information, but he also thinks outside the box. He 鈥渂elieves he can do things ... [and] 鈥榶ou can鈥檛 tell me I can鈥檛,鈥欌�� Mr. Oplinger says.聽
The first Dinner and a Fight took place here in September 2021, amid a national surge in COVID-19 infections. Most of the 30 attendees had been personally invited by Mr. Wetzel or his associates. Mr. Razzante agreed to moderate. After dinner ended, the topic was announced, along with a dialogue prompt, which participants could support or oppose, or be neutral.聽
It read, 鈥淲earing a mask is the American thing to do.鈥� The room fell silent. 鈥淵ou could cut the tension with a knife,鈥� recalls Mr. Wetzel. He grins. 鈥淚t was awesome.鈥澛�
Of the five chairs on stage, 鈥渄isagree strongly鈥� filled in seconds. Another man jumped up and said that he was 鈥渆ven more strongly opposed鈥� than the man who had taken that chair. Neither wore a mask, says Mr. Oplinger, who was struck by their fervor. 鈥淚t was one of the most dramatic things I鈥檝e ever seen,鈥� he says.聽
Ihsan Ul Haque, a Pakistan-born cardiologist, took the 鈥渁gree strongly鈥� chair. He had met Mr. Wetzel at an interfaith dialogue and became an informal adviser. 鈥淚t鈥檚 my civic duty to my adopted country,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e need to have a civil dialogue. We need to agree to disagree.鈥澛�
That night, he says, was a 鈥渉igh temperature鈥� dialogue. He faced anger at his support for masking. But after others had left, he talked with someone at his table who opposes wearing a mask, and listened to the person鈥檚 defense of individual rights. 鈥淚鈥檓 not going to convince anyone all the time, but I can understand where they鈥檙e coming from,鈥� he says.聽
This is another feature of these events: Attendees return to their tables for dessert and continue talking about the topic, what they have learned, and the dialogue itself. 鈥淚t gives people time to process,鈥� explains Mr. Razzante.聽
Mr. Oplinger says the post-dialogue table talk often alights on the fact that a frank but civil conversation occurred. 鈥淓veryone says we need to do more of this. We need to go deeper. Just getting together and talking to people who are not like us gets the creative juices going,鈥� he says.聽
To do that, the dinners need to bring in conservatives, including Trump supporters, who may suspect that dialogue groups are pushing progressive politics. 鈥淭hey turn off red Americans. They think it鈥檚 a plot, that we鈥檙e sneaking up on them,鈥� says Professor Coleman, author of 鈥淭he Way Out: How To Overcome Toxic Polarization.鈥�
That dilemma confronts most organizations that work on polarization: Red-blue dialogues tend to get centrist or progressive Democrats talking to moderate, white-collar Republicans. The dialogues may be productive, but aren鈥檛 fully representative.聽
Has Mr. Wetzel, who leans liberal, found a special sauce for inclusive bridge-building? He鈥檚 hesitant about claiming victory, but says, 鈥淲e do seem to attract more of the disenfranchised everyday people who say, 鈥楾his is what I鈥檓 looking for.鈥欌��
Daniel Messina, a Republican software developer, says conservative and libertarian friends push back when he invites them to these dialogue events in Ohio. They praise him for going, but say they fear being outnumbered by liberals and that 鈥減eople are just going to pig pile鈥� on them. 聽
Mr. Messina helps coordinate workshops for Braver Angels, a national dialogue group formed in 2016, and has joined several of Mr. Wetzel鈥檚 dinners. He tells his friends they鈥檇 be surprised at how friendly and civil the conversations are, and how much all sides can agree on. 鈥淵ou walk away a little more hopeful,鈥� he says.聽
鈥淲e鈥檙e allowed to be passionate here. We鈥檙e not allowed to be offensive here,鈥� says Mr. Wetzel. Back at the church hall, he is warming up for tonight鈥檚 dialogue. He鈥檚 picked a topic 鈥� elections. It is both timely, less than a month from Nov. 8 midterms, and combustible.聽
鈥淲e are not here to decide the 2020 election,鈥� he adds, looking over his glasses at the attendees who have moved from dinner tables to the seating area. 鈥淵ou can breathe.鈥澛�
Then he reads the prompt, which has been carefully wordsmithed by Mr. Wetzel and his collaborators. (The challenge is to craft a prompt that is provocative but allows for shades of opinions.)聽
鈥淭he results of the U.S. voting system do reflect the will of the people,鈥� he reads. He declares the five chairs open as Mr. Smith fades up 鈥淭ake a Chance on Me鈥� by ABBA.聽
The first chair to fill is 鈥渄isagree strongly.鈥� It鈥檚 taken by Mike 鈥� participants wear name tags 鈥� who is joined in 鈥渄isagree somewhat鈥� by Natalie. The other chairs fill more slowly; Mr. Messina takes the center chair.聽
Mr. Wetzel thanks the volunteers and asks for opening statements of a minute, which he will time with a stopwatch. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really good for people who need to find their off-ramp,鈥� he says.聽
To start, much of the discussion concerns whether 2020 ballots were secure. Both Natalie and Nathan, who sits in the 鈥渁gree strongly鈥� chair, worked as poll watchers that year, but came away with different views. While Nathan praises the 鈥渂ipartisan effort鈥� to secure voting in Ohio, Natalie says ballots were mailed to her two sisters who live out of state. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 a real concern to me. I want people鈥檚 votes to count and fraud to not be an option,鈥� she says.聽
Audience members challenge her claim, pointing out that Ohio mailed applications, not ballots, to households in 2020. A young man in the audience says he previously worked on the printing of ballots in Ohio and that 鈥渢he checks and balances on the back end are insane.鈥澛�
Then the next speaker from the audience, an older man who arrived with a group of Kiwanis Club members, repeats electoral fraud claims, saying that 鈥渋t only takes one county sometimes to tip the whole state ... and that is what we saw happen.鈥澛�
Mr. Wetzel and his stopwatch keep the conversation moving. The dialogue remains civil, if somewhat stilted. None of the fraud proponents say outright that 2020 was stolen by Democrats. Nor does anyone utter the name of the former president, who has been spreading untruths for the past two years about an election he lost.聽
Toward the end, Marsita Ferguson rises from the audience and takes the mic. Ms. Ferguson works at a university in Cleveland and has brought several students to the dinner. She asks why nobody has talked about a history of denying the vote to Black Americans and women, why nobody is talking about a new wave of voter suppression in states like Georgia. 鈥淚 strongly disagree that the will of the people is reflected in anything in this country when it comes to government,鈥� she says.
It鈥檚 time to head back to the tables and review the debate over brownies. Mr. Wetzel praises a 鈥済reat conversation,鈥� saying that he feels 鈥渨ay more than informed鈥� now. He compares it to a snow globe being agitated. 鈥淲hen we came in, all the stuff [was] sitting right on the floor 鈥� and we shook it up,鈥� he says.聽
If U.S. politics were a snow globe, the glitter would be calcified into opposing armies fighting over a castle. This polarization long preceded the Trump presidency; bipartisanship as measured by cross-party votes in Congress has been in decline since 1979.聽
But this is not just a hardening of ideological differences. It鈥檚 also an emotional tribalism, a sense, say voters in surveys, that the other side is not just wrong but immoral.
The good news is that it鈥檚 possible to counter this animosity by humanizing the other side. Even light-touch interventions, such as asking Democrats or Republicans to talk about a friend or neighbor whom they respect and who supports the other party, lead to warmer mutual feelings. Studies show that correcting misperceptions about the other side also reduces polarization.聽
This builds what Professor Coleman at Columbia University calls 鈥渞eservoirs of emotional positivity鈥� that can buffer partisan talk, something he鈥檚 observed in his Difficult Conversations Lab.聽
The bad news is that reducing animosity doesn鈥檛 necessarily dissuade partisans from supporting extralegal measures, including violence, to defeat the other side. A 2021 Stanford study currently in peer review found that successful online depolarization measures generally didn鈥檛 reduce anti-democratic聽attitudes, though a larger study found that some measures did move the needle.聽
Reducing polarization can be 鈥渁 valuable outcome in itself,鈥� says Jan Voelkel, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford who co-wrote both of the studies. 鈥淛ust think about the families that are divided鈥� by politics, he says. But anti-democratic practices may need to be tackled directly in order to lessen the threats to a fair electoral process.聽
Simply getting reds and blues to talk civilly 鈥渋s a narrow conception of the problem. Our democracy problems extend far beyond an inability or unwillingness to talk to one another,鈥� says Joseph Bubman, who runs Urban Rural Action, a nonprofit that brings together urban and rural cohorts to work on social problems. He says groups like Braver Angels, for which he鈥檚 volunteered*, are helpful but don鈥檛 address the underlying forces that fuel political distrust and violence.聽
Mr. Wetzel recognizes these challenges. He knows that what he seeks 鈥� a reboot of American democracy, which he calls 鈥淲e the People 4.0鈥� 鈥� is beyond what a shoestring operation like his can achieve. But he also says that citizen-led efforts to make civil discussion a building block of democracy are essential. 鈥淚t鈥檚 patriotic to have a good constructive disagreement,鈥� he says.聽
Mr. Smith, his co-host, says he isn鈥檛 deterred by the enormity of the challenge. 鈥淚 come from the perspective that people can change in their hearts; they can change in their heads,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 tell Ted, if we change one person, just one, we鈥檝e made a difference.鈥�
Back at her table, Ms. Ferguson vents about the dialogue and how little time was spent on issues like voter suppression and the Electoral College. Her tablemates, who lean left, seem to agree. Clayton Cox says that he came tonight with Mike (鈥渄isagree strongly鈥�) who is a staunch conservative prone to conspiracy theories. The two meet regularly for breakfast in Cleveland, explains Mr. Cox, and 鈥渨e go at it鈥� over politics but remain friends.聽
Mr. Wetzel has left a wrap-up sheet on each table for groups to fill out. At the top it reads, 鈥淲e will not solve this vexing topic today, but we can make progress.鈥� The first question asks for something agreed upon at the table. Their answer: 鈥淓lection education is important.鈥澛�
The final question is about what 鈥渙ur community鈥� tends to forget. The table chews this over. 鈥淚t鈥檚 OK to disagree,鈥� says Ms. Ferguson finally.聽
鈥淲e鈥檙e all in this together,鈥� adds Mr. Cox.聽
Editor's note: This article has been updated to clarify聽Joseph Bubman鈥檚 relationship with Braver Angels. He was a volunteer.
