As we enter the 2024 presidential campaign season, the nation seems to be on the verge of another round of partisan warfare over vote counting, voter registration, election audits, partisan redistricting, and electoral system reforms such as ranked choice voting.
Partisan differences seem immovable, some say even “calcified.” However, in our recent national experiment “America in One Room: Democratic Reform” we find a very different picture. When Americans take the time to talk to each other in a civil, evidence-based way, they learn to listen to each other and often change their views dramatically, depolarizing across partisan divides. This Helena project shows that Americans’ views are not so deeply entrenched but very much open to reason.
More remarkable is that these discussions took place virtually, in small groups of 10, using a video-based online platform. Participants met for an entire weekend in June (or the equivalent in weeknight discussions). The AI-assisted platform moderated the discussions, ensured equality of participation, intervened if there was any incivility, and helped the participants identify their key questions for panels of competing experts in shared online plenary sessions. The online platform has now been used around the world and makes organized deliberation a practical experience that can be spread widely.
When our nationally representative sample of 600 (selected by NORC at the University of Chicago) deliberated for a weekend about these issues, Republicans often moved significantly toward initially Democrat positions and Democrats sometimes moved just as substantially toward initially Republican positions. The changes were all consonant with basic democratic values, such as that everyone’s vote should count and that our elections need to be administered in a nonpartisan way.
Only 30 percent of Republicans initially supported providing access to voter registration online, but after deliberations, Republicans moved to majority support, joining Democrats (who overwhelmingly supported it at 81 percent). Republicans abandoned their view that “increasing opportunities for voter registration would open up more opportunities for voter fraud.” The percentage of Republicans believing that dropped 26 points (from 56 percent to only 30 percent). Republicans similarly abandoned their opposition to restoring federal and state voting rights to convicted felons upon their release from prison. Republican support for restoring voting rights for felons increased dramatically, from 35 percent to 58 percent.