Season 1 Finale: Losing an Election

Morgan Lasher ran for a seat on the school board. She lost the race but learned a life-changing lesson in defeat. 

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Michael Lee: [00:00:00] When We Disagree is a show about arguments. How we have them, why we have them, and their impact on our relationships and ourselves. We live in an unpersuadable age. That is, on many of our social and political problems, it feels like there's no room to come together. If we talk about the 24 election, the 20 election, any election, really, Or an issue, or a global conflict, or global warming, for instance, it feels like there's only the possibility of further division, not connection.

But is this true? Is there really no room for building bridges? One way forward is a simple one, and that's curiosity. Instead of shutting out beliefs that are different from my own, we can try to maintain curiosity about what someone believes, how they justify their belief, and what would lead them to this belief in the first place.

Then, when you're actually in the room listening to someone express a belief you don't support, [00:01:00] try to listen actively without A. waiting for your turn to argue, or B. spending your quiet time thinking of all the ways this person has completely lost it. To be sure, curiosity is not the same thing as support.

Being interested in other ideas and what leads people to them is not endorsement. It is merely the first step in humanizing our beliefs and making person to person connections while we disagree. I'm Michael Lee, Professor of Communication and Director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston.

Our guest today on When We Disagree is Morgan Lasher. Chief community officer at Unify America, which promotes the power of different perspectives. If you would like to practice disagreeing respectfully, you can sign up to do so across 16 hot button issues at unifyamerica. org. Morgan, tell us an argument story.

Morgan Lasher: All right. Thanks for having me on. Um, so my argument story is connected to my [00:02:00] time as a school board member at the Akron Public School System. In February 2018, I was appointed to fill a vacant spot on the school board. I was such a newbie to local politics. I didn't know how to fundraise for myself. I didn't know how to ask for help.

I had never attended, like, a local party meeting. I'm a registered Democrat, uh, which will come into my argument story here in a second. So, I'm such a newbie, I don't, um, I don't understand the local politics world. It's kind of the background. So, in the fall of 2019, I had to campaign to be elected. Um, which I also didn't really know how to do.

I did know I needed yard signs, and I also knew that there were two other people who were going to be elected as part of this. We're electing three new school board members, and this was a really high functioning school board, which is kind of hard to imagine. It was hard to imagine then in 2018 19, even across the state of Ohio.

I just felt really lucky to be with [00:03:00] this group. We had different perspectives, different experiences, but I think we also. Believed in the like collective wisdom that all those experiences combine. So I'm ready to run my campaign And I put my yard sign in my front yard. But I also put another yard sign in my front yard, and it is a Republican.

I'm a registered Democrat. I put a Republican yard sign in my yard. It is a, a person who's, who I sat with on the board, and I always found his perspective incredibly valuable because his mind worked so differently than mine did. Um, I learned so much from him about our financial situation. He was always the first if, you know, four or five of us are in an elevator, he's the first one to be like, nobody talk business.

There's like, where's the sunshine? We got to do this publicly. Nobody talk business. Like he was so good at that stuff and taught me so much. And I felt like it was really important that his voice stayed on, on the board. [00:04:00] Turns out, that's not an especially popular thing to do in a local party, which I totally understand.

At the time, the local Democratic Party is also fighting back against national trends. They're really scaring them. There's all this other national party stuff going on. So when I throw up a Republican sign in my yard, I immediately get a phone call like within hours. I'm not sure even how they knew but I get a phone call from our county wide um democrat leader 

Michael Lee: What what was the nature of that call?

Morgan Lasher: Um, uh, he he said okay morgan, what are you doing? We cannot support you if you are going to put a Republican signed in your yard. We can't do it. And by the way, our, our mayor, who's also a Democrat had this person sign in his yard too. It's like, that's my next call. We, you can't do that. That's not how any of this works.

And if you keep the sign up, we won't [00:05:00] support you for the next four years. 

Michael Lee: Was there a reason given as opposed to why they would withdraw total support because you were expressing symbolic support for a Republican? 

Morgan Lasher: Yes, I mean, I think the big reason it was like I'm I'm not being a good Democrat if I'm supporting a Republican, so I got this message of like, Okay, my it is Unhelpful to want to work across party lines because you can't actually be elected.

Now that's not the reason that I lost the race. I didn't know how to run a campaign. But I think it was a really fascinating. Um, disagreement that I did not do particularly well. So on that phone call, I listened and I didn't say very much. And when I hung up, I immediately called my Republican, um, fellow board member and said, Tim, this is what just happened.

And he, before I even [00:06:00] said anything else, he said, get it outta your yard. Pull that sign, pull that sign right now. Um, and I did, and I. I'm I don't think it was my finest decision point to actually take the sign out, and I wish I would have thought more about why I put it in there, in my yard in the first place, and had a bigger conversation, um, with my community and with my constituents at the time about what, what this means, why I put it up there.

I wasn't trying to silence voices or to support the Republican Party, but from a makeup of a seven person board. What it means to have different perspectives and how that actually benefits students by having the different perspectives on, on the board. 

Michael Lee: So going back, and I want to cover, um, a lot about what you think you would do differently and larger lessons you've learned, but just to clarify the arguments in turn, or at least as you saw them or heard them, you get a call from Uh, [00:07:00] Democrat honcho saying, what are you doing, you're not being a very good party member here because we're trying to win all these races and you're trying to win one race and promote this guy in a different race.

Morgan Lasher: You don't say much. 

Michael Lee: You don't say much in response, you're kind of surprised, shocked, is that fair? 

Morgan Lasher: Yeah, I think that's, I think that's fair. Um, at the time I was, and now looking back, it's like, Oh, I, I completely get that's the function of the party. I get it. Totally. 

Michael Lee: And so then you call the Republican and say, look, I just got this crazy call.

What do you think I should do? He says, take the sign out, you take the sign out and then go on to lose the race anyway. 

Morgan Lasher: Right. And I would say, I didn't even really ask him what to do. I like just quickly said, here's the phone call I get. Cause I was kind of processing what I was going to do. And he immediately said, before I asked anything, um, and I wasn't, I didn't think I even wanted to pose it to him as a question, but he jumped in and [00:08:00] was like, take that out.

Michael Lee: Yeah. Can you get back in your head then? And then with a more fully formed version now, especially given your career, um, post 2019, Yeah. what your rationale was for putting the two signs up? 

Morgan Lasher: Yes. Yeah. Um, so for me, our board was high functioning because we were all different and because we valued the differences.

Um, That the Republican candidate was an especially astute listener, um, was a person who brought different arguments to the table that I found really, really valuable. Even if I didn't agree with them, they, they made our conversations better. I think they made our decisions better for the school and the community and the students too.

Um, and he had like just a different way of approaching problems that to me felt really, really valuable. And this is a single, I think to your point [00:09:00] earlier. It's a single election in this much, much, much bigger scenario. But it's interesting to think if this is happening on such a local, low stakes level, what is happening from a bigger state or national level in these same, with these same kind of parameters of it's, there's, there is a bigger party that's saying we, we actually shouldn't be working, working together or valuing other parties perspectives.

Michael Lee: Is there some part of you that wishes you could go back and have it do over here and kind of run a different campaign that says, I'm not your normal type of Democrat. In fact, I'm getting pressure to tow the party line and I'm bucking them. And here is a vision for a world, a school board that celebrates not negates difference and make this a bigger public issue in op eds and speeches in face to face greetings, etc.

Morgan Lasher: You know, I'm really torn [00:10:00] because part of me feels like I wish I could. I wish I could go and do that. But the other part of me learned so much from this experience that then propelled me to look for a career that I have now in the unified America world. Um, so I I am not sure that I actually would have changed it because I would have been on a totally different path afterwards.

And I don't think I had the skills to have those conversations in a really meaningful way at the time. I don't think I was as I've, my thoughts weren't as fully formed as they are now about the power of the different perspectives that existed there. It was more like I thought he was an excellent candidate.

And now I'm starting to unpack more and more about why that, why that was. 

Michael Lee: Take us through your transition from this failed campaign to your success at Unify America. 

Morgan Lasher: Oh yeah, interesting. Um, so at the time I ran an agency that supported locally owned businesses [00:11:00] and nonprofits, um, that I felt like that was part of my, um, what I loved about the school board too, because I kind of came in with a comms and community building background, which is something I think our school really.

Needed at the time. Um, so after, after the election, um, and then The COVID ness of it all. I started to look around for what could possibly be, um, who, who else is working on issues about depolarization or problem solving, not in spite of differences, but like using differences as a power and not as this like weapon that we have against each other, who is doing that in the world?

Um, so I, I started to look at programs, education. Could I go back to school to learn more of this stuff? I looked at a program at Northwestern and happened to stumble into a job description that was out of Evanston in Chicago, Illinois, and then met the founder of Unify America who said, Hey, [00:12:00] we're starting this thing and we're looking for a person to run communications, marketing, community.

Uh, What do you think that was, it just felt like absolute kismet. Using my comms background, but also experience in the, my short experience in the political world. 

Michael Lee: In sum, this campaign, this disagreement were vital educational experiences to you about our political culture, and in terms of shaping your professional priorities.

In other words, this loss was kind of essential. 

Morgan Lasher: Oh, 100%. It was absolutely, absolutely essential to me. I think there's the other interesting thing that I learned, and I'm saying learned in quotation marks, because I don't think it is a, it is a learning that now I have, um, unlearned later. Uh, but in that world, there were seven of us.

And I mean, we had a half a [00:13:00] billion dollar budget because there were so many capital campaigns at the time happening. Like it was this huge, massive budget, so much information that I really believed that it was important for the board to understand this and make decisions. And I didn't rely on. public input and public decision making processes as much because I was like, there's no way that my neighbor is going to understand this giant budget.

She's got no time to do this. Like I had a different perspective on what it meant to be a public servant. Like I had all this information and there's so much weight on making decisions based on this. expertise and now information that I had access to, but the public didn't. So the other thing I'm now learning in the Unify America world is that there are so many other and better systems to help the public get more engaged, get more information, get more access to experts that I think our politicians can do a lot more in terms of public decision making processes that do more than just You know, two [00:14:00] minutes at a microphone at a town hall and more about a deliberative assembly kind of process to bring the community in.

So I, I think my school board experience did two things for me. One helped me understand that depolarization, um, kind of, Functional issue that we have, but also how how politicians, even though I was one for two years or so, feel like they are the only ones with access to this information and how ridiculous and unfair that is from the public who also needs to know those critical pieces.

Michael Lee: It seems like we have a real investment in red meat, anger culture, and soundbite culture in the political process, meaning politicians have at least two incentives that I can think of off the top of my head to touch hot button issues as quickly as possible and not get into the weeds about policy. One, it seems like the more [00:15:00] deeply informative the information is that works against emotional agitation or activation.

So stay high level and get people fired up not get in the weeds and then second Maybe that's motivated by a kind of basic cynicism about how much information The regular american folks can really handle 

Morgan Lasher: Yes, which is bananas like I was I it was part of my job to understand that but You pay my neighbor and give them time to understand it and ask questions.

They could also make the same decisions, if not better decisions, because they're coming from different experiences and perspectives. So it now reflecting on that experience, I, I'm glad that I am seeing more and more tools in the U S and beyond to actually engage the public in real decisions and not just this like quick input feedback thing.

Michael Lee: Morgan Lasher, thank you so much for being on When We Disagree. 

Morgan Lasher: Thank [00:16:00] you. Thank you so much. 

Michael Lee: When We Disagree is recorded at the College of Charleston with creator and host Michael Lee. Recording and sound engineering by Jesse Kunz and Lance Laidlaw.