The Round Table: A YVote Podcast

Real Talk cofounders Divya and Eliza find that there are elements of debate that are really effective—and some that are less so. One really valuable aspect is the ability to take on perspectives that you don’t necessarily agree with and go through logical reasoning and learn to listen really well so you can point out logical fallacies. A lot of what they are trying to do through Real Talk is creat...

Real Talk cofounders Divya and Eliza found that living in a liberal area, people were focusing on one side of the debate and were scared of bringing up other perspectives, even ones they didn’t believe in. Although the point of the discussion was to learn from multiple perspectives, that wasn’t what they were getting in the classroom. They recognized the need for additional instruction about how t...

Frances Lee noted that conflict leads, conflict is the story, conflict is exciting. so the issues that generate conflict get attention. When legislation gets worked out in a bipartisan way, it gets little attention. Do most Americans know much about the legislative response to the pandemic in the spring and the bipartisan agreement around it (as opposed to the conflict around current negotiations)...

Frances Lee of Princeton shared with us that in her class on Political Ambition, she teaches about how politics takes patience and perseverance and you have to be armed against the failure of your fondest hopes. So you push and push and yet you achieve less than you’d hope—that’s the norm in politics —BUT if you reflect on the course of U.S. history, you can see that a great deal of change has bee...

At this week’s Round Table, Julianna, Olivia, and Riya spoke with Divya Ganesan and Eliza Goler, co-founders of Real Talk . Divya and Eliza, now rising high school seniors, first began thinking about “Real Talk” as middle school debate partners because they recognized the value of the critical thinking skills and diverse perspectives represented in debate, but often absent from other settings (you...

Frances Lee underscored that even under circumstances where a party has its best opportunity to legislate a partisan agenda, it struggles and most of the time it’s not even possible. So despite polarization and the difficulties acquiring bipartisan support, our system requires it. And that’s just on the federal level! Given federalism, implementing national policy requires broad buy-in from states...

Frances Lee, Professor of Politics at Princeton U and a top scholar of partisanship, spike with us about how legislation gets enacted in American politics, which has not changed despite the rise in polarization. Bipartisanship is still necessary. Legislation that successfully navigates the legislative process IS bipartisan, as the reality of our government necessitates it.

Blanca and Rachel is OneFiveTen share that they don’t think all millennials and GenZ all think the same way but they do think we tend to support specific policies and specific ideas about society and what kind of country we want to live in. That has tended to be Democrats but they would love to hear about Republican candidates who uphold these values. Values, along with getting young voices heard,...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Olivia, and Sara spoke with Frances Lee , Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University and one of our country’s most instrumental scholars of partisan politics. Professor Lee has a new book coming out in the fall with co-author Jim Curry called The Limits of Party: Congress and Lawmaking in a Polarized Era , looking at how legislation does--an...

Rachel Kastner of OneFiveTen notes that the word “donor” feels scary to a millennial on a limited budget and juggling college loans. She noted that if someone like her who is politically aware and engaged isn’t giving, it’s hard to imagine how many millennials are. Yet If if want political change, we have to get our candidates into office and one of the ways to do so is to donate. You don’t have t...

Blanca Andrew and Rachel Kastner of OneFiveTen talk about the degree to which young people are left out of political power—despite comprising 138 million people. If we can each chip in small amounts, we can make the same impact as large donors. Further, when young people are invested, they’re gonna act, they’re gonna vote, and they’re gonna pay attention.

Michael Thorning discusses how divided Congress has become. Fortunately, I a crisis, people are more likely to put aside political differences because they’re comparing the consequences of not acting with potential electoral consequences. We have to be honest that electeds are going to make decisions that benefit their constituency AND their future electability.

At this week's Round Table, Riya and Sara spoke with Blanca Andrei and Rachel Kastner, co-founders of OneFiveTen . OneFiveTen is committed to making Millennials and Gen-Zers the political powerhouse they can be by empowering the  generation with information on progressive campaigns, and encouraging and equipping activists to become donors. With Gen Z and Millennials comprising 37% of the elec...

Michael Thorning underscores that our elections are the foundation of how we decide who is going to represent us. Unfortunately the parties increasingly believe that the other side is stacking the deck and changing the rules to work against them. This country and every country with free or fair elections has a history of people doing things that are illegal or bending the rules to try to get ahead...

Michael Thorning broke down the challenges of our time: People are more and more attracted to extreme views in politics—extreme views have become how people distinguish themselves from one another—AND we have been living through a period of extreme partisanship. These are two different things but play off of one another. Further, they build off really deep rooted trends that go back for many decad...

Michael Thorning from the Bipartisan Policy Center shares some of the fascinating programs he works on like BPC’s American Congressional Exchange, a first of its kind program in which bipartisan pairs of congress members visit each other in their home districts for a few days to build authentic relationships, and the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which is poised to make once i...

At this week's Round Table, Inica, Olivia, and Riya spoke with Michael Thorning , Associate Director for Governance at the Bipartisan Policy Center which, as the name implies, actively fosters bipartisanship by combining the best ideas from both parties to promote health, security, and opportunity for all Americans. Michael spoke with us about BPC’s strategy of strengthening institutions and foste...

In response to a question from Inica about whether there is value in establishing facts and enabling people to figure out their own opinions, Julian Zelizer notes that this is a debate historians have been having for a loooong time. His shared his belief that we are ALWAYS interpreting, which entails brings values. As such, he endorses acknowledging that there is no pure objectivity while still st...

Professor Zelizer debunks the idea of college campuses being environments where professors are scared to speak and everything is fraught. He underscores that he’s found students engaged in the issues and wanting to debate them, and that he uses that energy to animate his classroom.

Professor Julian Zelizer’s tells us about his newest book, which focuses on Newt Gingrich who helped bring down the Speaker of the House for the first time in history as he rose to power, introducing a new kind of partisanship called “smashmouth partisanship” where you can take down people and destroy institutions. The book also helps explain what came of the Republican Party and why we see the ki...

At this week's Round Table, Inica Kotosthane and Riya Mehta interviewed Julian E. Zelizer , a professor at Princeton University and author of 19 books on American History and politics and over nine hundred op-eds, including a weekly column on CNN.Com.  He's just published a book called  “ Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Par...

Johanna Lacoe of the California Policy Lab shared how in studying important issues related to education, school discipline and school safety, housing and foreclosures, neighborhood crime and criminal justice, she became increasingly aware of how linked all of these policy issues are, as is particularly evident in what’s going on right now with COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matters movement. We have...

Michael Jackson talks about the age-old tensions between uniformity at the top and local power. He underscores that a lot of the discourse around policing is because there is no uniform Use of Force law in America, there is no uniform training of cops in America. Criteria differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In order to address this, we as Americans have to decide how much uniformity we think...

At this week's Round Table, Julianna, Riya, and Sara spoke with Johanna Lacoe of the California Policy Lab . Dr Lacoe is a policy scholar with expertise in criminal and juvenile justice, education, employment, and housing. Her work includes evaluations of policies and programs aimed to prevent neighborhood violence, improve school safety and discipline, and prepare individuals reentering society a...

Michael Jackson talks about how policing has become so militaristic that it’s bled outside poor black urban communities and become ingrained in the culture of policing, affecting people it didn’t use to affect. Once a culture of authoritarianism and unaccountability becomes the culture of policing, it starts w poor and marginalized people and it keeps on going. The wider spread recognition of this...