- Hey, I'm Savannah.
I'm 25 years old.
I am an ex-Republican and now Democrat.
- Hi, my name is Kat.
I'm 27 years old
And I am an ex-Democrat,
who now identifies as an Independent,
with more conservative leanings.
(soft music)
- Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Northern Indiana, on the outskirts of a city,
I was basically in Elkhart, Indiana.
30 minutes away from the Amish, from Shipshewana.
My house was at the end of cornfield,
in the middle of the woods,
so I grew up in a small town in the Midwest.
- So I grew up an island north of Seattle,
called Whidbey Island.
Yeah, it was super small,
our main town, Langley, is about two streets.
And I grew up without television,
so I have a little bit different background.
I grew up with lots of nature and the radio station.
When did you first learn what politics were?
- I think I first learned about politics
from my dad when I was like six or seven years old,
because he would make jokes.
He would make like, the little one line, punch line jokes,
about other political parties.
And I started learning like, oh, this will be funny,
and that's side's bad, and this side's good.
Like, my dad would never say it that plainly,
but you could tell from reading between the lines.
I actually remember being like,
maybe eight years old and 9/11 had just happened,
and I was driving with my mom,
we were stopping off at a fast food place,
and we walk in, and there was a news reporter there.
And they were like, "How do you feel about this?"
And I remember smiling,
'cause my dad had made a joke about Cuba.
And I was like, "Yeah, I think it's good
"that the president is going to invade Iraq.
"I think he should do Cuba next."
'Cause I thought it would be funny,
and I had no idea, I was like eight years old.
And so of course, they put my picture and that quote,
and the fact that I was eight years old,
on the front page of our local newspaper.
- So when I was younger, I really enjoyed
going up into my grandmother's attic
and totally digging through all of her artifacts.
Her pins, buttons, travel items, all sorts of things.
I noticed there was a lot
of conservative buttons, paraphernalia.
And it got me thinking,
how could my loving, wonderful, artistic grandmother,
be such a conservative supporter?
And on an island half-full of hippies,
it feels like you would be absolutely alienated
if you were conservative.
It was that little inkling when I was younger,
that now has blossomed into what I know now.
Which is that, there's something very different
then what we've been told.
- What was your political affiliation growing up?
My political affiliation growing up
was completely right-wing conservative.
I would say up until the age of 12, I had this strong...
I felt like my identity was like,
Christian, home-schooled, in Indiana.
I remember slapping campaign stickers
for the McCain-Palin election, all over my notebooks.
And just posting about it on Facebook.
Everyone around me where I was growing up,
was right-leaning.
Whether that be, hardcore conservative
or Republican libertarian.
That was the spectrum.
- So I was surrounded by Democrats,
my family was not too active,
so we were all kind of like, in that middle zone,
where you think everyone's a Democrat.
Like, that's the right thing to be,
and we're fed all these things by the media
about Republicans, so it feels not cool to be that way.
What made you change your mind?
- I think it took a few years.
I think that I changed my mind through teenage years
into early adulthood.
I think it really took growing up
and seeing other parts of the world,
maturing, getting out of my bubble, college moving.
But I think I remember the biggest thing
that took me out of my bubble,
and it was more so like, a moral standpoint.
Is that I started doing musical theater
around age 12 or 13.
And that started exposing me to
a broader sense of the community.
And I remember I had tons of friends who were gay, LGBTQIA.
It must have been the first Obama election
into the second election,
that people kept talking about marriage.
Marriage and civil rights with LGBT,
and I remember that being such a hot topic,
and people around me in the community,
were saying stuff like,
"Well, you can have a union, but you can't have a marriage."
And I was like, wait.
Even being like 16, I'm like,
that is the definition of being prejudice.
The political landscape around that time
with marriage equality and LGBT,
with a lot of laws being passed from the other side,
to suppress it, really, really, really pushed me
into a different direction and a different path.
- In the first election that I got to be a part of
as a voter, I really got to think about politics
for the first time.
So this was around the time when Facebook
was starting to really take off,
and I was seeing a lot of libertarian forums,
and different perspectives,
and I wondered, am I an anarchist?
Why do I feel like what's going politically
with the Democrats is not making enough change?
Why do I feel like there's a discordance there?
And so I started to explore more groups,
and I discovered the Green Party.
Which was a little bit anarchist and a little bit pro Earth,
and then a little bit of worker's rights,
which is the main thing that I'm not supporting
is the working class.
The first time I got to vote,
I voted for Jill Stein as a Green Party candidate,
when it was Mitt Romney versus Obama,
and I got a lot of flack for it,
like why would you vote Green Party?
What is your vote gonna do?
But I truly believe and I still believe
that your vote needs to be a vote of conscience.
- What does your family think about your beliefs?
My family definitely knows.
I would say take those angsty teen years,
when I was 17 or 18 and then when I was like,
I'm gonna break free from Amish town.
I definitely used that as a way
to poke and jab at my parents.
I would love to sit down with my family
and have a more mature, older conversation,
but being in my younger years,
I feel like, I've directly been told things like,
oh, I remember when I went to college
and thought I was a liberal too,
and then I grew up and I learned.
And it's like, it's so demeaning.
I think the older I get, and the more healed I get myself,
that I realize a lot of people's reflectiona
are projections of their own understanding.
- In the beginning, my family has been kind of
individualistic when it comes to politics.
Like, it's your personal matter,
we don't really wanna talk about it too much,
because it does get a little heated.
I think even on Facebook,
when I would make a lot of political posts,
I would have family members, who I love very dearly,
reach out to me and say,
are you sure you wanna talk about this?
And that's when I'm like,
should I even be treading on people's toes?
Do I wanna make my family feel like,
maybe I don't agree with them.
But yeah, overtime the shift has been
from me being able to express how I feel,
to how something will benefit all of us,
and so I think that's helped the conversation,
is how I bring it about as well.
I'm trying not to be so divisive.
I'm not so pointed.
I'm trying to be like, okay, I understand
where you're coming and that together
we can get to the same destination.
What does your party stand for?
- My party,
I feel like,
is going through an identity crisis.
The party has folded in on itself.
So I feel like, what I define as my party for Democrats,
is a little up in the air.
Like, media-wise the want me to say
it's like, caring, more sociologically involved,
and progressive, but at the same time,
I haven't seen it be.
Ideally, my party would stand for independence
and an entity that is not enchained
by another entity above them.
Ideally, my party would not be paid off by billionaires,
paid off by world banks, paid off by other countries,
paid off by lobbyists and corporations.
- Where I fall in the spectrum between
libertarian, conservative, and justice Democrat,
social Democrat, whatever you wanna call it,
is absolutely liberty.
It's absolutely patriotism.
It's healthcare, it's clean water, it's clean flood.
It's these basic, basic rights,
and then it's looking back at natural law
in our constitution and going back to the foundation.
So I feel like that structure can fit
into several different parties,
it's ultimately who is the party benefiting?
Is it the corporations or is it the people?
And so I'm all about the people
and any party is for the people,
the working class people, and our rich fellows,
all of the people.
'Cause all of the people deserve to have equal benefit
from the government's labor.
- What do you think is the biggest
misconception about your political party?
I would say the biggest misconception about Democrats,
is a lot of misconceptions that are made to
perpetuate stereotypes.
Every single person is like, feel good, do-gooder,
that just loves to pat their own back and cry in a corner.
That's like, such a stereotype for Democrats.
To me, that's not what I've experienced.
I've experienced a lot of...
It's almost like Democrats have been associated
with being feminine, so it's like they're too soft,
they're too emotional.
There can be extreme courage within softness,
and people don't get that.
- The main fear I have as being more conservative now,
is being mistaken as a racist,
as a anti-human,
as a non-intelligent being.
I've heard all sorts of things about conservatives.
It's fascinating to hear how both sides
have a very warped perspective of the other,
by dehumanizing anyone, it just hurts yourself.
Like, ultimately, our end goal is unity,
and the more sit around and try to paint the other person
as an animal, the longer it's gonna take
to get to where we need to go.
And you look back in history,
and all the terrible things that have happened,
they've used dehumanizing tactics
to make people feel like they have a certain
supremacy and a privilege to believe what they do.
So we've got a great painted landscape of division,
because of the media thinking that one side is evil.
What is one thing you would change
about your political party?
- People pretending like they're so awake
and so self-aware, that they literally shoot down
every single person who is actually trying to help them
in their community.
There was actually a time online,
where I got into a small argument with a few people,
and out of nowhere it turned political,
then out of nowhere, I remember,
I was in like a Home Depot or some place
that didn't have phone signal and I was doing stuff.
I come out 45 minutes later,
and I had 100s of notifications,
personal messages, all this stuff.
They had gone back into photos of mine
from like 10 years ago when I was 12 years old,
and it was a picture of me
at a Sarah Palin rally in Indiana.
And they basically had posted it everywhere,
saying like, look at you, you white Republican,
you privileged bitch, like all this stuff.
And I said, "Okay, I hear you, I'm listening, let's talk."
And they're like, "Where's my apology?
"You aren't responding because you don't care."
And it was like, there was nothing I could
say, do, speak, anything, anything,
that would remedy the situation, any angle I would take,
and then on top of it I was being doxxed.
I was being threatened on private message,
and it was just insane to me,
because I felt like we actually deep down had similar morals
and on the surface, voted for the same party.
So it was a total mutiny
that was a triggered chain reaction, just by emotions.
It's been like five years and I still think about it.
I wish I didn't
- So for conservatives, the main thing that I would address,
is just understanding where the liberals are coming from.
Like, someone like me, who grew up on an island
with a radio instead of television,
and who was surrounded by other liberals.
Like, I'm not an evil person because of that.
And only upon my discovery of conservative values,
did I see that we both have
a warped perspective of the other.
And that the only reason I felt opposition
from conservatives, because they thought the same about me.
And so now at the end of it, I'm seeing, okay,
conservatives, I understand you think
the liberals are communists.
I know you think they're gonna take everything from you,
and your guns, but we actually kind of want the same things.
And at the end of the day, you just gotta give people time
to come out of the cave.
You gotta give them time to come from their coming from,
and all of us are going to the same place,
and I think we all need to just be on
an individual level first and then come to the table
with what we have to offer politically.
- What do you think about our current political climate?
Among the death threats, emotional labor, and everything,
I started seeing that there's not really any winning.
I think the conversations I have now politically,
is that this whole liberal, Republican deal, is binary,
and it is a purposeful, either or,
black and white situation, to pit people against each other.
So many things in politics now,
are just an emotional trigger on purpose,
to get people to vote a certain way.
And I think that, if you can strip away those labels,
and strip away those preconceived notions,
and talk to someone human to human being.
Take away jokes, take away trying to be mean,
any whatever adjective, and speak soul to soul,
that then you can start listening.
And I also think it's very important to ground yourself
and if that person wants to start ranting for an hour,
let them rant, they wanna go through different emotions.
And until they're ready to be at a grounded point
to actually talk, then you can listen and react
back and forth, respectfully.
- The main way I feel about this political climate,
is that I can not wait for it to be over.
And I wanna be like, beyond 2020.
I'm sorry, we just wasted three years
on this Russiagate hoax.
On behalf on whatever people
are trying to cause mayhem in our government.
Where's been changes on our healthcare?
If you really wanted a third party opponent,
were you out doing grassroots campaigning?
Like, what kind of action have we done?
It's sad and ultimately it's okay,
because it's exposing what is supposed to happen.
It's exposing, this is what our country is right now.
I'm sorry, like, it might be a big cesspool, metaphorically,
but Donald Trump is the pot stirrer.
He is stirring the pot and it needs to be stirred,
otherwise there would just stagnant toxicity.
And we would have no change in the current establishment.
And so whether you like Donald Trump or not,
he is causing there to be a reaction,
and we need to address the situation
that we really have a dilemma with,
which is corruption, and I think that's something
we can all agree on.
What do you think about people
who believe differently than you?
- I've been on both sides of the coin.
I've literally lived in Amish country,
Christian school, home-schooled.
And I literally have gone to like,
socialist, underground meetings,
underneath like, coffee shops, planning protests.
There are so many beliefs out there,
and it is so ignorant to think that you know.
Because you don't know what you don't even know,
and the older I get, the more I realize,
I don't even know myself.
There's so much out there.
There's just no way you know everything to a T,
there's just no way.
- I love people that think differently than me,
in every single way.
I love every single part of every person
that thinks differently than me.
And I ask myself, where do I stand,
and what do I have to learn from this person?
Because ultimately at the end of the day,
we all came from such different backgrounds.
To think that we would think the same,
is maniacal, it's insane.
My biggest struggle has been,
knowing that I don't know everything.
If we do have room to grow, it's in the room of discussion.
And the more we talk, the more we open ourselves
to a compassionate dialectic, where we're not in fear
of what we're gonna say is gonna get us into trouble,
that's where unity is.
Is feeling like, okay, I feel safe to be able to say,
hey, I think differently than you,
and what can you tell me to make myself maybe think,
hey, I have more of the picture now?
Because we don't have all the picture,
we're constantly learning.
Like, every single day, and until dead we're gonna learn.
(soft music)