Have you truly been able to sway someones political opinion on a subject?

Never!

Thanks for the truly honest answer @stanleybmanly .
We stand our sides yell back and forth, produce hundreds of links to prove our point,and at the end of it we all still believe what has been ingrained into our souls over the years.

No. And it is folly to expect to.
All you can hope for is that maybe some in the audience will be convinced.

There is also the problem of the potential biological basis of political orientation.

I don’t think immediate large shifts in opinion happen often. But I do think many people have moments where they are more open to opposing argument. Over time this may result in a gradual shift. Plus, as @ragingloli notes, sometimes a public argument convinces a witness to the argument who is undecided.

@SQUEEKY2 Opinions may appear to be set in concrete, but that by no means renders debate here on hot button issues unworthy of effort. There is a rather marked (yet perfectly understandable) shortage of folks here willing to be saddled with the burden of defending ever more obtuse conservative positions and policies. Which brings up a point. I think @Jaxk in particular should be awarded his own special “voice in the wilderness” award for unfailingly marching to the defense of the right, usually in the face of withering fire.

I don’t bother to try. I feel the same way about politics as I do about religion: I have my opinion, you have your opinion, I don’t try to push mine on you and I don’t want to have someone push their opinion on to me.

The closest you can ever come is to make the argument that ones opinions will/would change depending on their best interests in the moment. If the rich became poor their interests would shift to taxing the rich, if the poor became rich their interests would shift in the opposite direction, so on and so forth.
I don’t even try, I might, MIGHT, interject a different perspective but I usually steer clear of any and all militant political fanatics. I really just don;t care and nothing is worse than listening to someone rave on and on about their political leanings.

You need to have someone’s respect to alter their opinion. Respect is really hard to come by online, especially with just text. Our natural reaction is to doubt the other person’s expertise, recollection, or genuineness. We just don’t see enough of each other to earn that respect.

So online, I don’t think I’ve ever changed anything for someone who had a strong opinion. In person, I think it’s a shorter hill to climb.

I was able to convince a friend that Sarah Palin was indeed just about fuckable, although agreement on the paper bag over her head was less conclusive.

I just love your little inputs @ucme .^^

That’s what she said…hang on !!

I have had recent luck making some war-hawk, so-called “conservatives” realize that our foreign policy actually helps create and strengthen groups like ISIS.
I have changed my approach when having political discussions to a much calmer approach, and rather than arguing and pushing my points on people, I ask them questions that have them start thinking about and questioning their beliefs in ways they may not have considered.
I feel it helps that I see through the left/right paradigm, and that most people align themselves with left/right beliefs based on the media they follow, so many peoples opinions are very predictable.
I think it also helps that consevatives can not label me as a liberal, and vise versa.
The media does a great job of establishing the limits of debate on subjects and always creates a left/right opposite opinion, no matter what the subject, creating teams of thoughts.
We need to stop aligning ourselves with teams and start having open and serious discussions with people with opposing opinions in the political world, now, maybe more so than ever.
I think getting rid of the two party system as we know it would be a great start.

I consider it a victory if I can even convince them that there is even any validity to opinions other than their own, or that it’s possible for anything that falls outside their bias has even a chance of being true.

It doesn’t help that most people who I disagree with on politics are from a party whose platform is to oppose dissenting views rather than support any particular view, and has a history of reversing their position at the first sign of possible agreement. In other words, they don’t really have any agenda beyond telling you that you are evil, stupid, and/or wrong.

Nope. Never tried. I don’t have that kind of free time.

I am a left leaning pro gun pro choice moderate Democrat. I might be able to find some common ground with right leaning moderate Republicans. I don’t think that I could sway their opinion on a given subject anymore than they could change my opinion on a given subject.

I know people who have changed their minds on political issues over time. It’s not usually from one conversation.

I once had an argument with a lawyer about gay marriage the guy was a southern religious republican. We are guard back and forth and he have me some line about the government’s interest in marriage being something about the bond between a man and a woman, and I said, “the government cares about allocation of money and property. We are talking civil marriage, a civil contract, not a religious marriage.” He paused. I could tell he saw some reality in my answer. It was amazing to me that he must be surrounded by so many right wingers he might not have ever heard that argument before. I don’t know if he changed his mind in the end.

I have changed views when faced with a sound argument, and I’m sure I will again. I wish I could think of a topic. I do remember that during the fallout from the shooting death in Ferguson Missouri that I was opposed to impaneling a grand jury and someone here on Fluther made me ‘see the light’. I did an about face and began advocating the move.

I think that we all need to realize that our news feeds shape a lot of our opinions. I intentionally avoid both Fox News and Huffington Post because I feel like they intentionally slant the news to validate preconceived notions. But there’s no such thing as unbiased news. I prefer the facts, then I can look up terms like “Grand Jury” and form an opinion. For that opinion to not evolve would be ignorance.

@ibstubro Huffington is, to my mind, an entertainment site, not a news source. I put it in the same league as The Daily Show.

Tried once and failed horribly, the person was a biased and slightly deluded classmate. They thought our government was trash and the only way to solve the situation was to “covert” to other countries.

Politics and religion are two most-avoided subjects of mine anyway.

I do my best to ignore Huffington, @jerv. If I do a Google search, then click on “News”, it’s rare that the Huffington Post is not listed on page one of results. Truth told, it was here, on Fluther, where the tag “Huff and Puff” – to counter “Faux News” – made me a non-believer of Huff posts.

@ibstubro All humor has at least a grain of truth, while those claiming to tell the truth are often telling pure lies to further their agenda.

Sure. And my political views have been swayed as well.

I meant to praise @funkdaddy in my post:

“You need to have someone’s respect to alter their opinion. Respect is really hard to come by online, especially with just text.”

Very true. It’s hard to gauge the sincerity and reliability of a post on-line. Impossible if the post is not on some form of ‘community’ site.