The inspiration for Bridge Pledge came in mid-2023 as a one-two punch.
First, Tim Urban’s provocative book “What’s Our Problem” helped explain that our political enemies are not specifically “the other guys” but rather when our primitive minds hijack our higher minds. His frameworks enlightened me that our allies are more vertical (how we think) than horizontal (what we think).
Second, the discovery of Vanessa Otero’s enlightening media bias chart (produced by her company Ad Fontes Media) which measures and plots media outlets like newspapers, channels, and podcasts and plots them on a matrix comparing political bias against a news reliability scale. The striking bridge-shaped arch in her matrix makes clear the correlation between extreme bias and low reliability news sources in the lower right and left wings.
Which made me think. What if we could sort or politicians on a similar 2x2 framework that could plot ideology (left-to right) against a vertical dimension that measures their abilities to unite and bridge through consensus through coalition, rather than divide?
"Bridgers" vs "Dividers”
Bridgers are collaborative, seek consensus, build coalitions, have a growth mindset, look for win-wins, negotiate, listen, make tradeoffs, are pragmatic, and seek solutions. They unite.
Dividers dig their heels in, are dogmatic, see the world as black and white (no shades of gray), and see the world through the lens of a “zero-sum game” - when i win, you lose. They divide.
But can we objectively identify bridgers from dividers?
I believe we can. Even our first generation Bridge Grade yielded a promising result, sorting the 435 members of the 118th US Congress into bridgers and dividers across both parties as follows.
Given this initial effort, we have confidence that an even more evolved grading system will yield even clearer results over time.
But, why now?
For the first time, this sorting has become possible, thanks to access to public data, voting records, speeches, videos, tweets, funding sources, and other objective and observable behaviors.
Our mission is to use objective data and a transparent process to sort politicians on the dimension of bridgers versus dividers. Our north star is our conviction that there are bridgers within both (all) political parties. We want bridgers to represent our eclectic population, because bridgers are willing to find creative win-win solutions for our common interest.
As citizen voters, we join Bridge Pledge to form a cross-partisan voting alliance to agree to always vote for the highest graded bridgers - and bring back collaborative politics. Until now, as voters we have never been able to objectively and reliably spot them, let alone commit to vote for them.
Now, for the first time ever, we can.