Multi-Majority Agreement

As a project named Americans Agree, we owe you a definition of “agree.”

For our purposes, it’s clear multi-majority agreement: when 55% or more of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all align to support or oppose a policy in recent national polls.

Why 55%? Because polls have margins of sampling error, especially when comparing subgroups like Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. The extra five percentage points above a bare majority of 50% helps ensure we’re identifying real agreement.

Why multi-majority? Because we care about agreement across party lines. It’s not enough to simply get to 55%. That could be done with, for example, 90% of Democrats and only 40% from Independents and 35% from Republicans—definitely not cross-party agreement! In contrast, when a clear majority of each party aligns on the same conclusion, it signals meaningful agreement.

Scale aggregation: Sometimes polls use response scales with intensity levels—such as “strongly support,” “somewhat support,” “somewhat oppose,” and “strongly oppose.” We aggregate the results of these into just “support” and “oppose.” This provides consistency with polls that do not have scales.

Active choices: We only count when poll respondents make active choices in support or opposition to a policy—for example, checking a checkbox or radio button that indicates support or opposition. We do not infer anything from the absence of a choice.