America Has More Common Ground Than You Think. It's Blossoming!
Join Nationwide Deliberation Campaign to define the People's Agenda for Renewing American Democracy
Here is something most Americans do not know about themselves.
The University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation has identified more than 200 policy positions supported by bipartisan majorities of 60 to 80 percent of Americans — on healthcare costs, family support, campaign finance, immigration, and more. In surveys across six swing states, majorities of both Republicans and Democrats agreed on 55 out of 66 federal policy issues tested. Not slim majorities. Supermajorities.
We have been so saturated by the theater of polarization that we have lost sight of the solid ground beneath our feet. The common ground is real. It is vast. And right now, it is sitting there — inert, invisible, and politically powerless.
This essay is about activating it. And I am writing to invite your organization or network to help co-design and co-launch the campaign that will.
Why Now?
Let me be direct about the urgency.
In March 2026, three major democracy assessments converged on the same conclusion. The V-Dem Institute reclassified the United States as an “electoral democracy” — stripping its status as a liberal democracy for the first time in over fifty years. The Century Foundation’s Democracy Meter scored the U.S. at 57 out of 100, a 28 percent collapse in a single year. And Freedom House issued its starkest report yet on the global retreat of democracy, with the United States at the center of the crisis.
Executive power has been concentrated at unprecedented speed. Congress has abdicated its oversight role. Courts are being circumvented. Federal agencies have been weaponized against critics, immigrants, and communities of color. Civil society institutions — universities, law firms, media organizations — are buckling under authoritarian pressure or capitulating outright.
And yet: elections remain free. As Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky has argued, this is authoritarianism — and it is an authoritarianism that can be reversed. The Century Foundation agrees: the slide is reversible, precisely because elections have not yet been captured.
Polling can reveal common ground. Only deliberation can activate it — can let Americans experience their own shared purpose, build trust across divisions, and generate the political mandate that no expert report or survey can manufacture. That is why Renew American Democracy (RAD) movements are actively designing a Nationwide Deliberation Campaign—the NDC.
What We Are Building
The Nationwide Deliberation Campaign (NDC) is envisioned as a large-scale, cross-partisan campaign to generate a People’s Proposal for renewing American democracy — sourced directly from the American people through structured deliberation across every line that divides us: party, race, class, geography, and generation.
The campaign will operate through four interconnected layers, building and connecting on what is already happening. The campaign is being designed to meet Americans where they are.
Here are some examples of related efforts that are already underway:
Grassroots deliberation is the widest entry point — in-person conversations in public libraries, faith institutions, and community organizations. Earlier this year, In Iowa, cross-partisan meetings in public libraries produced over 50 proposals to amend the U.S. Constitution in two weekends at zero cost. Low-barrier, high-trust, radically accessible. Issue One has catalyzed the Council for American Democracy which brings cross-partisan citizen leaders into Town Halls and dialogues across this country on democracy reform and renewal. Braver Angels is awakening “courageous citizenship” in local-to-national cross-partisan dialogues, debates, and deliberations on topics such as immigration and controlling money in politics.
Deliberative technology extends the reach through structured online platforms with AI-assisted synthesis, so Americans who cannot participate in person still have a voice. The People’s Bill of Rights 250 will soon be launching nationwide deliberations on topics of national interest using the Frankly platform.
Deliberation-based polling applies scientific rigor — representative samples engaging with balanced briefing materials to surface where genuine common ground runs deepest. Recent efforts include: America in One Room - The Youth Vote was held in 2024, then in Pennsylvania in One Room was held in June 2025 to build bridges in this bellweather state.
Civic Assemblies — randomly selected through sortition at the state and national level — bring the most democratically legitimate deliberation to bear on the priorities the other layers have surfaced, synthesizing everything into a comprehensive People’s Proposal. In 2024, New Hamsphire held the first-ever State Citizen’s Assembly. Connecticut, South Carolina, Nevada, and others States are already actively planning theirs.
The NDC timeline is calibrated to the 2028 election cycle. We are aiming for a People’s Proposal completed by late 2027, giving candidates, parties, Independents, and cross-partisan movements at every level time to adopt and campaign on recommendations that the people themselves wrote and will demand. That is a stronger mandate than any party platform or poll.
Initiators of this NDC design process include: UCLA Center for Developing Leadership in Science (CDLS), Democracy Renewal Group, Federal Workers Alliance for Democracy (FWAD), #unifyUSA, and many others who are joing forces to create this historic effort.
An Invitation to Co-Design & Co-Launch
Here is the part that requires you.
The NDC is not a project owned by any single organization. It is a campaign designed so that new partners join as co-designers and co-leaders, not participants. The architecture, methods, outreach strategy, and synthesis process — all of it is open for organizations and networks to shape.
If your organization convenes communities, you already have the infrastructure for grassroots deliberation. If you build civic technology, your platform may be one of the channels through which millions enter this conversation. If you do common-ground research or democratic reform work, your expertise is the evidentiary foundation. If you organize across lines of race, class, faith, or political identity, you hold the relationships without which no deliberative process can claim legitimacy. If you fund democratic resilience, this is the connective tissue your portfolio needs.
America’s deliberative democracy landscape already contains many independent streams of innovation — community assemblies, dialogue platforms, civic technology experiments, trust-building initiatives. Brilliant work, most of it, and nearly all of it operating in silos. The NDC is envisioned as the container that gives these streams coherence, shape, and direction — so their outputs can be aggregated into something with real political weight and legitimacy.
The Stakes
The campaign will deliver three things at once. The product is the People’s Proposal itself. The process builds trust, provide civic education to reverse disengagement, and creates the organized cross-partisan constituency that will fight for its implementation. And the culture — at scale — cultivates a national expectation that
Americans will be meaningfully consulted, will reason together across differences, and will shape their own self-governance.
This is what distinguishes the NDC from every other reform effort: it does not just produce a plan. It produces the people who will demand that plan be enacted.
We intend to catalyze and co-create a cross-partisan supermajority political movement of movements that will lead efforts to renew American democracy by creating the most participatory, deliberative, and equalitarian democracy we have ever seen.
Join Us
We are approaching America’s 250th birthday. We can let it pass as ceremony, or we can seize it as a launching pad for the democratic renewal this moment demands.
If your organization or network wants to co-design the Nationwide Deliberation Campaign, reach out. We are not asking you to join a finished plan — we are inviting you to help design it. The campaign will be stronger for every organization and network that brings its constituencies, expertise, and resources to the table.
The common ground is there. The crisis is here. Let’s activate both — together.
United we deliberate. United we refresh. United we rise.
Dr. Paul Zeitz, is a preventive medicine physician, epidemiologist, ordained Song of Songs Rabbi, and founder of #unifyUSA and co-initiator of Renew American Democracy (RAD) movements, a new catalyzing platform. He is the author of Hit Refresh on the U.S. Constitution and Revolutionary Optimism: Seven Steps for Living as a Love-Centered Activist. He delivered the TEDxPrinceton talk “Peacecrafting: From Conflict to Collaboration” in February 2026.