Sam’s Tavern in San Francisco was established in 1867. It is the kind of place that makes you wonder if Mark Twain or Jack Kerouac ever caroused in its cozy confines, but what I found there this week was a better conversation about the election than most of the professionals can pull off these days.
I had started the day talking to Cliff over breakfast at a diner. He teaches at Brigham Young University and was visiting the city with his wife. A Donald Trump supporter, he still has some doubts, and has never been what one would call particularly MAGA.
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"I’m still frustrated by both choices," he told me. "But when I look at the results, there is only one way to vote. But it isn’t always easy."
He reminded me of a guy I spoke to in Virginia recently who struggled to find his specific moral objection to Trump, but was quite certain that he had one somewhere.
It was clear that Trump didn’t float the boat of Cliff’s Mormon sensibilities, but he’s not impressed with the alternative, and doesn’t believe Trump is any kind of grave threat to democracy.
Some of the Kamala Harris supporters I talked to had similar reservations about their top of the ticket and party. One called Harris "Willie Brown’s legacy," which didn’t seem like a compliment, and another, not to be outdone, quipped, "There hasn’t been one yet," when I asked him who the state’s last good governor was. Not exactly a glowing endorsement of California Democrats.
But most of these slightly maudlin types on both sides tell me they will stick to their party, at least as things stand at the moment.
Later, at Sam’s, I met Scott. He and his wife were fresh from a cruise to Alaska and he had on the hat to prove it. He was very much the traditional Trump supporter.
"Honestly, I don’t know how this can even be close," he told me. "It's crazy."
He was mostly focused on the border and the economy, issues he thought any sane person had to trust Trump with over Harris.
Before too long, over oysters, we were joined by one of the owners of the establishment, a dapper older man and committed Democrat who knows Vice President Kamala Harris and had been friends with the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and many of the Beat writers.
The conversation that ensued was a master class of low expectations, but begrudgingly, the Trump supporter admitted that he sometimes wished the former president was more stable and had spent less in office and the Harris fan accepted that conditions in San Francisco and California under Democrats are, well, not exactly perfect.
Soon we were joined by more, mostly Harris voters at the corner of the bar. Later that night, some would take over my notebook, scribbling in it sideways like it was a high school yearbook. I had completely lost control of the situation, but it turns out, Americans know how to talk politics all by themselves.
The key to the friendly and at times even cross-generational conversation was the clear realization that everyone was acting and speaking in good faith.
It can be argued that the most important political divide in this country is not between Trump voters and Harris voters, but rather between those who believe the other side has a point and is being honest and those who do not.
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Both of these types of voters exist, in my experience, almost equally in both trenches of our political divide.
At the airport on the way to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I sat over a plate of eggs with a guy on his way back from Munich to Portland, Oregon, having a beer.
"Portland is very blue, but the rest of the state is almost all pro Trump," he said. "I was just saying to my wife, she really dislikes Trump, that I can kind of see both sides."
It is these partisans who still respect others who vote differently from them who may well decide this election. It is a thoughtful group, maybe a minority, maybe not, but a group that all of us should be able to learn from. After all, no matter who takes the final prize of the White House, we will still all be Americans together.
