Builders Can Win: Thoughts on Attending a National Governors Association Convening

Some thoughts from our CEO Tom Fishman:  

Builders can win. That was my main takeaway after attending last week’s summer convening of the National Governors Association (NGA) in Salt Lake City, Utah. 

For the last year, Starts With Us has partnered with the NGA and Utah Governor Spencer Cox, the NGA’s outgoing chair, on their #DisagreeBetter campaign, a series of videos featuring opposing-party elected officials modeling respectful disagreement. You, our Builders community, have helped us drive millions of views and hundreds of thousands of engagements to those videos, often leaving incredibly positive feedback.

So many of us have such distorted ideas about “the other side” – there’s an enormous upside in simply correcting misperceptions, which these videos help to do. And there’s evidence to back that up.

At the Utah NGA conference, sociologist and friend of Starts With Us, Robb Willer, presented new research from his group at Stanford demonstrating that the #DisagreeBetter videos consistently reduced partisan animosity among viewers from the furthest left to the furthest right. Willer’s research also showed that viewers’ affinity for both elected officials in each video went up — and this was true for both general and primary election voters. 

About these results, Willer said, “It’s enough of an effect size to where if you were in the context of a campaign, you might consider [using Disagree Better] to advance your candidacy.”

This is an incredible result. This research shows that many Americans, across political parties, respond positively to courageous leadership aimed at reducing our toxic divides — to Builder behavior. 

Imagine a world in which candidates running for office each saw the political benefit in modeling respectful, constructive disagreement as a part of their campaigns. We can help create this norm together, but only if we take action to politically reward Builders.  

My last thought from the NGA convening is that it was enormously uplifting. In my view, the attending governors represent the best of American politics. They are impressive, thoughtful, compassionate Democrats and Republicans, working hard to solve problems and improve the lives of their constituents, and proud to publicly collaborate and #DisagreeBetter across the aisle. 

And of course, it might go without saying, but one can strongly disagree with the stances of any specific political leader while seeing the value in this work. With that in mind, it was hard not to leave inspired by the collective efforts of the governors and the hundreds of attendees, including many in our field. And Matthew McConaughey’s participation, along with a galvanizing speech from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, gave the distinct feeling that our shared work is connecting with leaders and shapers of culture.

Solutions are possible if we #DisagreeBetter. 

Tom Fishman
CEO, Starts With Us | Builders

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