“Wait. You’re voting for him?” one friend says. “Girl, you literally asked me who I was voting for,” her friend responds. “Well, I thought you were going to say someone normal!” the first friend counters. “What does ‘normal’ even mean?”
It starts as a joke. Maybe someone brings up a candidate over dinner, or a friend shares a political Instagram reel. But all of a sudden you start thinking…wait, that’s not funny.
How well can you know someone when you have never really asked what they believe politically? Aren’t politics a reflection of someone’s values? If someone’s values are the complete opposite of yours, how does that affect your friendship?
The 2026 midterms are making these questions harder to brush aside. On Nov. 3, voters decided the new balance of power in Congress. All 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats were up for election, as were 36 governorships.
These decisions are pertinent to college students’ lives. These include but are not limited to reproductive rights, gender-based violence, economic inequality, and access to mental health care. Suddenly, the person sitting across from you at dinner is another person whose vote will help shape the laws that affect you, your safety, your family, and/or someone you love.
Your brain is not a neutral political commentator
In a 2023 study published in Science Advances, research led by Oriel FeldmanHall, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University investigates how political ideology influences the way people receive information. The researchers examined 44 participants, equally divided between liberals and conservatives, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while participants completed tasks involving political words and watched political videos.
FeldmanHall’s team found that participants with similar political ideologies had more similar neural representations of political words. For example, let’s take the word “freedom.” To one person, freedom might mean being able to make decisions about their own body without government interference. To another, it might mean protection from surveillance by tech companies. Neither person encounters the word in a vacuum because its meaning is influenced by personal experiences, values, and associations.
You did not grow up in the same world, even if you grew up together
Political beliefs develop within families, communities, schools, religious traditions, and even the information people encounter online. One person may have grown up watching a parent struggle to afford medical care. Another may have watched a family member lose a job or business while participating in a government help program and come to distrust intervention.
Instead of asking “How could you vote for that person?” a good first step is asking: “What experiences led you to believe that this is the right choice?”
The answer may not change your mind on who you plan to vote for. It might, however, provide better context about your friend and exceed the limits of what you previously understood.
The ballot is personal, even when the conversation is not
There’s a reason political disagreements can feel much more intimate than arguments about music, television, or restaurants. Laws establish rules and determine what options and rights people have in their everyday lives.
Imagine telling a friend that you’re terrified because of a pregnancy scare and the way it will take over, or even take away, the rest of your life. They stay up texting you, help you find a clinic, and tell you that you can trust them with anything. Months later, they enthusiastically support restrictions on abortion access. You could conclude that their kindness was never real. You could decide that their political beliefs tell you everything you need to know about them. You are not obligated to maintain every friendship. The difficult work is figuring out which differences can be discussed, which boundaries must be respected, and which beliefs are incompatible with the relationship you want.
So, would you still be friends?
It’s easy to call someone a good friend when your conversations stay within familiar territory. You can commiserate over terrible dates, share your notes before an exam, and sit together through a difficult night without ever discussing the values that guide your understanding of the world. Politics create an opportunity to ask questions you might otherwise avoid.
Sometimes, after asking the questions, you’ll decide that a difference is too significant to ignore. Understanding why someone holds a belief does not require you to accept it. Your friend may surprise you when speaking about the election. You may surprise yourself.
Or, you may discover that a difference you once treated as abstract hits much closer to home than you expected.
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