Polls Show Voters Want Civility. Shapiro and Cox Just Modeled It

Josh Shapiro and Spencer Cox showed Americans this week (at least those watching them on NBC or CNN) how politics can be conducted in this country. With class. With dignity and mutual respect. Without acrimony, let alone insults and invective.

Both men have known each other through their work on the National Governors Association but became closer after enduring searing episodes of recent political violence trauma in their respective states. For them, it put partisanship in perspective. Cox, a Mormon Republican from Utah, went so far as to tell Dana Bash of CNN that Shapiro, a Jewish Democrat from Pennsylvania, would make a good president.

In September, Cox was forced to face the horror that one of his own – a young man from a close-knit LDS family – stands accused of the most heinous kind of crime: the politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk. A dedicated 31-year-old family man and committed Christian, Kirk paid the ultimate price for exercising every American’s birthright: talking publicly about faith, civics, politics, and public policy.

Few people outside Utah even knew his name prior to Kirk’s murder. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, however, Americans marveled at the governor’s grace under fire – with many openly pining for a Cox presidency.

“This is a dark day for our state,” the governor said. “It’s a tragic day for our nation.”

“Nothing I say can unite us as a country,” Cox added after citing other examples of recent political violence. “Nothing I can say right now can fix what is broken. Nothing I can say can bring back Charlie Kirk. Our hearts are broken.”

One of the examples Cox mentioned was the firebombing by some Jew-hating lunatic of the Pennsylvania gubernatorial mansion while Josh Shapiro and his family were inside.

“No one will deter my family or any Pennsylvanian from celebrating their faith openly and proudly,” Shapiro said after escaping the rubble. A noble goal, to be sure, although in the current environment, an elusive one.

Even before the attempt on his life Shapiro led his state through the horror of the near-assassination of Donald Trump. The once and future president was campaigning in a western Pennsylvania field when a young man on a rooftop tried to alter the course of U.S. history with a bullet – and instead ended up taking the life of a beloved local fireman. Shapiro was a calming influence on what could have been a devastating pivot point in U.S. history.

“The assassination attempt on the former President Donald Trump last night was absolutely unacceptable,” Shapiro said. The governor added that 50-year-old volunteer firefighter Corey Comperatore died “a hero” after using his body as a human shield to protect his wife and daughter.

Gov. Shapiro was widely credited with exhibiting perfect pitch that day, as was Gov. Cox after the Kirk assassination. Their shared experience became a shared bond and the duo appeared together Tuesday night on NBC’s new “Finding Common Ground” feature with Savannah Guthrie.

Cox told the audience that “when that dark day happened in my state” the first call he got in support was from Shapiro.

“He told me to speak with moral clarity and to speak from the heart,” Cox said. “I don’t care what color his politics are, in that moment we were two Americans who were deeply saddened and struggling.”

This is the kind of civil discourse NBC’s brass had in mind when it launched “Finding Common Ground.” Likewise, it’s what Dana Bash was going for in her interview with Shapiro and Cox – and what Sam Feist, the top man at C-SPAN, envisioned when launching a regular segment called “Ceasefire.”

This is the territory the American people want the media and the politicians to inhabit – at least they say they do – although you can’t prove it by recent voting trends.

In any event, a new Gallup poll shows that large majorities of Americans hold the view that both Democrats and Republicans have taken their rhetoric to unacceptable levels.

This finding tracks with an October survey by YouGov done for CBS News showing how concerned Americans are about political violence and how many (68%) believe it’s going to increase in the future. More than four out of five Americans say civility in politics has gotten worse. This, in turn, has created a climate of fear, as fewer than half of Americans feel comfortable expressing their political views in public.

“We’re passing all the checkpoints toward ultimately failed states and civil wars,” was how Cox put it in his conversation with Savannah Guthrie and Josh Shapiro. “I hate using that phrase, but if we don’t make a course correction, that’s where this leads.”