Jan. 6 still divides people. Is there a productive way to move past it?

It’s been four years since a violent mob overtook the U.S. Capitol to protest the 2020 presidential election results. Protestors who gathered in Washington, D.C., that day claimed President Joe Biden unfairly stole the election from former President Donald Trump. It’s a claim that dozens of courts have rejected as false.

Driven by the debates over the 2020 election, the national organization Braver Angels, MPR News’ partner on Talking Sense, has been working on ways to make elections trustworthy to both liberals and conservatives going forward.

MPR News correspondent Catharine Richert spoke with Braver Angels co-founder Bill Doherty about that work — and about why the events of Jan. 6, 2021, still divide people. 

Differences over the results of the 2020 election or over the events of Jan. 6 are at the center of so many political conflicts. Why is this issue so fraught?

These two events are at the heart of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power after free and fair elections. What could be more important?

If you believe that the election was stolen and that there were people there to protest … you’re sympathetic with them. You’re thinking that this is what democracy is about. You say, “Well, 90 percent of the people were perfectly fine.” On the other hand, if you think their cause was not just, you understandably focus not on the folks who just went home, but on the people who attacked the Capitol.

What is the point of trying to talk to a friend or loved one who sees the outcome of the 2020 election differently? Is there a productive conversation to be had? 

The productive conversation can be, “How do we move forward to have changes in our election system that reassure people around two kinds of doubts: Doubts about whether there’s fraud, and doubts about whether there is equal access and fair access?”

Those are the two divisions in the country, with one side, usually the more Republican side, having historical concern, not just about 2020. But there is a long history among Republicans of concern about electoral fraud, particularly in large cities.

So there used to be this joke in Chicago, you know, “Vote early and often.” And so there is a multi-generational kind of legacy of thinking that to win in the big cities, a Republican candidate will have to get 55 percent of the vote, because there’s going to be some skimming. This is long-standing belief.

OK, so you take that into the 2020 election, and you have the pandemic going on, and you have states like Pennsylvania changing rules in order to accommodate the fact that, you know, it wasn’t always safe to go out.

And then the leader, President Trump, saying, “They’re out to get me on this.” So you have leadership, you have rules changes, and you have a historical legacy of thought that there’s fraud. You’re going to have people pretty convinced of that.

And so the point is, then, of discussion is not to try to persuade somebody that the history is not as they see it, but to say, “What do we need to do to go forward?”

And this is what Braver Angels has done with this. We formed groups of reds and blues — conservatives and liberals — not around what happened in 2020 but how we move forward with our elections so that people who are worried about fraud are relieved, and people who worry about access are relieved.

We had hundreds of people around the country working on this. And we came up with 21 common ground policy solutions. So the point is, then not to argue about the past, when people’s minds are made up, but to talk about how would we go forward.

Tell us about some of those common ground solutions. What stands out to you as areas that might help people on both sides tamp down their fears to move forward? 

One of the first principles that these groups agreed on is that voting should be easy and cheating should be hard. 

And to give some idea of the give and take, the reds agreed to the idea of a national holiday for the presidential election, and the blues agreed that there ought to be voter ID with an affirmative obligation of the state to get that in everybody’s hands. 

The key to this working is not trying to relitigate 2020 but to take each other’s concerns about fraud and equal access seriously. This is being presented to the secretaries of state … at their conference coming up in January. There’s been a lot of interest in common ground solutions that both reds and blues can agree on. 

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