Future Directions
The initial mission of Americans Agree is to inform policymakers and the public of what Americans agree on. The purpose is to make common ground more visible and actionable.
That is enough to do for now. But looking forward, there are natural extensions to the mission.
Agreement discovery
In addition to documenting existing agreement, we’ll partner with polling firms to systematically test policy alternatives, to discover where Americans could agree. This approach recognizes that most policy debates do not need to be binary choices, even though they’re often presented that way.
Take healthcare policy: Instead of asking “Do you support universal healthcare?” we might test a range of options—from expanding existing programs to different models of universal coverage to market-based reforms—and see which combinations of features can attract cross-party support. The goal isn’t to find policies that make everyone completely happy, but to identify solutions that majorities across the political spectrum can accept as genuine improvements over the status quo.
This kind of structured exploration could reveal compelling policy options—or viable trade-offs within gridlocked policy alternatives—that traditional polling misses.
Fair-minded polling
In the spirit of research programs like public consultations and deliberative polling, we’ll work to improve the quality of public opinion by helping people better assess questions in an informed, fair-minded way. For example, instead of only asking “Do you support Policy X or not?” we might add a brief explanation of what Policy X would do and why different sides support or oppose it. Or we might work with representative panels willing to engage more deeply with policy details. Whatever the means, the goal is to increase the likelihood that a person’s response reflects an accurate, fair-minded understanding of the question.
It’s important to note that this kind of polling measures something different than normal polling. It’s what public opinion would be under better and more fairly informed circumstances, whereas normal polling measures what public opinion actually is. They both are important.