By Vince Bzdek
In September 2019, 523 Americans traveled to Dallas, Texas, for an experiment called “America in One Room.”
The gathering was designed to test a theory: Could representative citizens deliberate productively even in an era of intense polarization?
The event took place soon after the presidential primary and it focused on policy proposals in five polarizing issue areas: immigration, the economy, health care, the environment and foreign policy.
The participants received balanced briefing materials vetted by bipartisan experts and then broke off and deliberated on the issues in moderated small groups. They questioned panels of competing policy experts and completed surveys before and after deliberation
The driving force behind the gathering, Dr. James Fishkin, wanted to know one thing: Might there be a “talking cure” for what ails American democracy?
The results were a bit astonishing. The deliberations produced striking depolarization on the most contested issues.
For example, support for “forcing undocumented immigrants to return to home countries” fell dramatically among Republicans in the group, from 79 percent to 40 percent.
Many of the Republicans were concerned that immigrants did not pay taxes and might be a source of crime.
However, the evidence-based discussions made clear that undocumented immigrants pay significant taxes (sales taxes and social security taxes, at least) and they have low crime rates (since they do not want to be swept up the the criminal justice system and possibly get deported), Fishkin wrote in his book, “Can Deliberation Cure the Ills of Democracy?”
Kat Garner from Australia holds an American flag during the Nationalization Ceremony on Dec. 18, 2025, in the historic courtroom at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum. (Christian Murdock, The Gazette)
Democrats also went through some equally large and depolarizing movements, especially on expensive social programs. A proposal that the government fund a bond for each child born that would accumulate in value until the child turns 18 started off with 62 percent support among Democrats. But support dropped to 21 percent after deliberation helped Democrats understand the real costs of the program despite the positive implications. They decided that upon reflection it was not something the country could truly afford.
Out of 26 “extreme partisan” policy proposals, Democrats and Republicans moved closer on 22. In 19 of those, the movements were significant. The proposals that most divided the parties going in were the ones that depolarized the most.
“People almost always changed where they started from, and they almost always moved to a less polarized position,” said Chris Anderson, who created a company called Balancing Act to build tech tools to bring Fishkin’s deliberation techniques to a wider audience.
Deliberation “is actually part of the work of being a citizen, it’s not just spouting off what you think off the top of your head, but actually learning about it … and actually having a conversation with people about it,” he added.
“When people deliberate, they weigh the merits of competing arguments for and against some proposal for action,” Fishkin writes. “The key point is that in true deliberation, people do not just acquire information, they gain access to arguments that weigh in favor or against the proposed action and they come to considered judgments about the merits of those arguments and what should be done.”
America in One Room began as an ambitious national application of something called Deliberative Polling invented by Fishkin and his colleagues at Stanford University.
In the late 1980s, Fishkin began developing the tool to improve the results of modern polling by asking those polled to engage in structured, informed deliberation as well.
He conducted the first deliberative poll in the United Kingdom in 1994, which demonstrated that ordinary citizens, given time and balanced information, could engage seriously and successfully with complex policy issues.
From that point on, Fishkin’s career focused on institutionalizing deliberative processes around the world, eventually founding the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford University.
After decades of running deliberative polls in many countries, Fishkin wanted to test in Dallas whether large-scale, structured deliberation could reduce partisan polarization in the United States in a representative sample of citizens.
Many scholars and observers argue that this kind of true deliberation has been declining precipitously in the United States.
One of the biggest reasons for the reduction is the erosion of public trust in Congress, courts, media and elections. Studies from institutions like the Pew Research Center show Americans and elected officials are more ideologically distant than in past decades as a result of that lack of trust. As Americans have begun to see their opponents as enemies, not partners, zero-sum strategies replace collaborative ones.
More and more, the 24-hour news cycle, cable commentary, and social media have turbocharged this trend by rewarding sharp sound bites, outrage, viral moments and ideological loyalty over nuance. Platforms like X amplify emotionally charged messaging, encouraging politicians to perform for audiences rather than deliberate with colleagues.
Republican members of Congress stand while Democrats keep their seats during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Feb. 24. (The Associated Press)
As a result, Washington has become a kind of Kabuki theater, with politics growing more and more performative rather than truly deliberative.
In Congress and many statehouses, major bills are also increasingly negotiated behind closed doors by leadership. Floor debates often become symbolic rather than decision-shaping. Committees in Congress historically allowed detailed hearings, bipartisan negotiation, and expert testimony. But in recent decades, leadership has centralized agenda control and omnibus bills like the recent Big Beautiful Bill bundle many policies together. That reduces spaces where slower, substantive discussion once occurred.
Gerrymandering and partisan geographic sorting also have contributed by creating many “safe” districts. In such districts, the real contest is the primary, not the general election, so candidates appeal to more ideologically intense voters. That also discourages moderation and deliberative compromise.
Presidents of both parties have also increasingly relied on executive orders and administrative rulemaking rather than legislation. When policy is shaped by executive action rather than through legislative bargaining, deliberation within representative bodies declines.
The Mile High Drone Show on Monday ended with a preview that our country will celebrate its 250th birthday and Colorado will celebrate its 150th birthday in 2026. (Jerilee Bennett, The Gazette)
Deliberation requires time, trust, shared facts, and incentives for compromise. Modern political systems increasingly reward speed, certainty, and ideological loyalty instead.
As a result, recent polls show that on key issues (economy, healthcare, immigration, budget priorities), large shares of Americans feel that Washington’s actions don’t reflect their priorities.
This is reflected not just in approval ratings — though those are low for handling of many issues — but in specific policy disagreements where majority public sentiment differs from enacted or proposed policy approaches.
But Fishkin believes we can begin to address the gap between the public will and Congress’s willfulness by supplementing representative democracy with deliberative institutions to clarify and amplify the will of the people.
Fishkin believes a number of targeted, deliberative interventions could be transformative.
For one, Fishkin and constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman have proposed a Deliberation Day in the U.S., a public holiday scheduled before major elections, where citizens gather in community spaces to discuss issues and hear from candidates or representatives in structured forums.
Fishkin also stresses that deliberation should be scaled up and institutionalized using technology such as online platforms to allow more citizens to deliberate thoughtfully and interactively on public issues. Fishkin “found that you could create an online deliberation platform that has the same causitive effect as the face-to-face one” he hosted in Chicago, Anderson said.
Anderson has begun experiments combining deliberative polling and budget simulations that allow citizens to engage in making budget tradeoffs online and pass along their recommendations to politicians.
The Gazette newspapers and Colorado Politics plan to partner with Anderson to allow readers to try this kind of budget simulation and deliberation around TABOR tradeoffs. “The idea is to use simulations that don’t just educate people, they ask people what they would do,” he said.
Fishkin also argues for creating citizens’ assemblies that advise legislatures and other government bodies. Such experiments are already underway right here in Colorado, and in Washington state, Oregon and California. Dozens of European and Eastern European countries, including the United Kingdom and Ireland, already have significant experience with citizens’ assemblies.
And lastly, deliberative practices should be aggressively promoted in schools and civic education so future voters grow accustomed to weighing evidence and discussing alternatives rather than relying solely on partisan cues.
It’s time to move beyond our “audience democracy.”
“Deliberative institutions can depolarize our most extreme partisan divisions, they can create more deliberative voters (who vote their sincere policy views, even after a considerable passage of time), and they can strengthen norms central to the guardrails of democracy, especially the norms that protect the conduct of elections,” Fishkin writes.
“Each generation should be able to utter the words ‘we the people’ as the subject of an active verb in which they thoughtfully govern themselves.”
Vince Bzdek, executive editor of The Gazette, Denver Gazette and Colorado Politics, writes a weekly news column that appears on Sunday.