42: Moving Away From the Fringes: Who Voted For Herschel Walker and Why it Matters

Here in the United States, we just held midterm elections that broke all kinds of expectations and historical trends. Although the house will have a Republican majority by a very slim margin, the "red wave" of wins that was projected across the country did not happen, even though typically the party of the sitting President does poorly in the midterms. In this episode, we're going to dive deeper into what these results mean, and again talk about the divisions that exist in this country and the communication challenges that come as a result of this divide. 

Now more than ever, it feels like the voices at the extreme, or the "fringes", are getting louder and louder, and we want to explore this and do our part to see how we can all listen and move away from these extremes.  

And as we've been doing the last few weeks, we're excited to share our latest nominees for our new Models of Respect segment, highlighting people in the world that are living and demonstrating our Respect Circles values. If you have someone in mind that you'd like to nominate and have featured on a future episode, please let us know! 

Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and Facebook, and we'd really appreciate you leaving a review on your favorite podcast platform to let us know what you're enjoying about this show. You can also go to https://www.respectcircles.com/voicemail/ to leave us a message and you can also reach us by email, [e-mail] to give us your thoughts. 

In this episode you'll hear:

• What we are observing on the fringes of both sides of the political spectrum, and where AJ feels we are right now as a society and how we can do things differently [3:01]
  
  
• A closer look at the concept of "naive realism" and how this applies to political views in our country at this moment [5:13]
  
  
• A life-altering experience that AJ had and how it made him realize he was moving towards the fringes himself [7:18]
  
  
• Why the candidate race in Georgia has been garnering so much attention and the many surprises that came out of this race [13:40] 
  
  
• A discussion around the question of why certain demographics support each of the candidates [15:49]
  
  
• What people can or should do, and how we can start the journey back from the fringes [24:50]
  
  
• The role that conversational receptiveness plays in listening today [26:50] 
  
  
• Announcing our Models of Respect for this week [33:00]