No, those from the opposite side are pig-headed and won’t listen to reason, anyway.
No, not even a little bit. Not when baited. Not even when I’m told what I believe because of the party I vote for even if I’ve never expressed an opinion on the subject in my life. When the discussion turns to politics, I stop talking. Completely. When asked a direct question, I tell the person “I don’t discuss politics or religion with anyone for any reason.” Then I stop talking again.
I used to engage in these pointless conversations until I realized that people only got angry and no one ever changed their mind. So to keep my blood pressure and anxiety at a healthy level, I refuse to engage and let the other person turn red and reach for the Xanex.
I try not to but my dad likes to bait us. He’s a drunk opiate addict and a retired guy who watches Fox News all day, when not listening to AM talk radio, so he has no compunctions about saying the most awful, vile things, right out loud for anyone to hear. He thinks his audience is the same as it was 30 years ago in the factory break room but it turns out my brother and I (said audience) are actually good people.
Everyone else I know is either like-minded or classy enough to shut up.
I have to keep reminding myself that my father is not my father anymore. It’s drugs and boredom talking.
Not quite two years ago, after saying grace at the Thanksgiving table, my father went on a rant about welfare cheats and the like.
After the fact, I let several family members know that I was seriously offended by this, as Thanksgiving is about giving thanks and sharing with people and this was the very opposite of Christian. That if it happened again I would walk out and never return.
It got back to him (as I expected it would) and I haven’t heard any such rants at family gatherings since then.
On the plus side, my 24/7 Fox News watching parents are so horrified by Trump that they cannot vote for him and may not vote at all for the first time in their lives.
Never. Pure and simple. NEVER!
My father is the same way, a Reagan voter in the 80’s who has gone far left and is now a Bernie Sanders supporter. I’ve stated before in other threads how he is basically a left-wing equivalent of the conservative relatives that liberal SDMB members are always complaining about: someone who can’t seem to understand that everyone around them doesn’t want to constantly hear their opinions, and are always ruining innocuous, pleasant Thanksgiving dinners with their rants. I wish I could avoid discussing politics with him, but absolutely anything* will set him off. You try to keep things safe by making a nice comment about, say, the weather–“what a nice day we’re having, good thing it’s not raining”–and that will trigger in his mind the thought of climate change, and the next thing you know he’s ranting about how our state government failed to charge petroleum companies hefty fees for fracking, so clearly somebody’s getting paid off, because in this country all our politicians are corrupt sellouts to the highest bidder bought and paid for by lobbyists funded by rich corporations run by plutocrats who get away with paying no taxes because they’ve rigged the system to their own benefit blah blah blah.
I recently spent some time with him and it was almost unbearable. Come to think of it, he was lamenting how he doesn’t get to see me very often, so I’m considering using that as a bargaining chip, and telling him if he doesn’t agree to shut up about politics while in my presence once and for all, I’m going to refuse to associate with him.
*Or nothing. Literally. Once, during the 2000’s, we were on a hike together; we’d been hiking for a good 20 minutes in silence, and suddenly, out of the blue, he turned around and began “and another thing about Bush…”
Yeah it’s amusing the implication you get from a forum like this that that is any more common with right leaning than left leaning people. IME it’s a personality type pretty evenly distributed across the spectrum IME, and as in your example not a few people swing from being vociferously at one extreme to the other during their lives.
In our family my liberal brother is the one who usually starts in with politics. He’s not far left, but his SO is a lot further left, and others are conservative or rightist populist (ie pro-Trump, or I assume so in case of ones I haven’t seen things heated up, I hope it’s over with by the time we meet again). Not a good idea.
Most people live in a bubble politically with like minded people most of the time, and/or don’t have any original thought on politics or much knowledge of anything beyond their own lives. Politics for them is a social exercise in conformity, or deliberate non-conformity if that personality type. There isn’t anybody in my extended family in the US who has a background of knowledge to make their opinions of US politics of any real interest to me. I’m interested in my non-US relatives opinions of politics in their country, but naturally that’s not as sensitive.
Stuff related to sexual orientation or race goes even beyond ‘politics’. You have to have a screw loose IMO to debate stuff like that face to face.
The bruises around my neck usually are gone soon enough … small price to pay to get my sissy-in-law wound up about taxes …
I was at the inlaws this weekend and went out for dimsum with my husband’s aunt, and as we were walking, she started talking politics. ugh! I don’t think anybody in my family or his is going to vote for Trump, they all think he’s a crazy SOB, but she started talking about how “crooked” Hillary is.
It’s like the party of personal responsibility (hahahahaha) has spun it so much, that everyone believes it now, that Hillary is crooked. As if Trump was straight!
I changed the topic to hats -she had given me a new one - but she changed it right back. 
General all purpose comment:
"You know my politics are very different from yours, right?"
generally followed up with
“Well, since you know I’m not going to agree with you, I don’t know why you insist on bringing such things up. Can we avoid that in the future?”
Depends on with whom.
Some relatives, and some points, need only one sentence to be made and understood. Those will get… well, discussed is probably not the right word; stated. Any discussion is pretty short, because we know each other well enough and can be blunt enough that there really isn’t much of a point unless we happen to be in a debating mood.
Other people may get one reminder that “it’s my foot you’re standing on” and if they insist that this little detail is unimportant, I switch them off.