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Wire Insider: Stuart Elway, Elway Research

Stuart Elway is the President of Elway Research, Inc. He joins us as a “Wire Insider” to discuss how to overcome partisanship.

There’s a lot of talk, particularly in a meeting like this about being able to work across the aisle and so on, and there are people who want to do that. There are, I guess, structural and partisan political barriers to overcome to do that, but I think it’s going to take individual legislators, so if we’re talking about the state legislature who are willing to work with people of the other party to compromise. That’s one of the other things that seems to be getting lost, particularly at the national level but it filters down.

Working across the aisle and working together means compromise. Compromise isn’t you agree with me and then that’s a compromise. A compromise is we each have to give up something in order to get something and that seems to be a hard thing to do, but that’s what it’s going to take in any given legislative body is people who are willing to say “Okay, I’m not going to get everything I want, but if I give up this, I’ll get something I do want from the other side” and that it has to work both ways. So, it’s compromise and we can’t let that become a dirty word and I think we’re seeing nationally that compromise is seen as surrender and our whole political system is built on compromise so they can’t let that go.


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