Lessons from a Year of Exploring Common Ground

The Americans Agree project started July 4, 2025, with an eye to concluding its active data collection today, July 4, 2026. The goal was to answer two questions:

• Which policies do clear majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents agree on?

• Of these, which have or have not become law and why?

The project ended up tracking one hundred points of agreement across a wide range of topics, a list that surprises most people for its length and variety. The average item has nearly 75% support across the total population and at least 55% support among Republicans, Democrats, and (where polled) Independents alike. So no matter your politics, you are likely to agree with a lot of what’s on the list.

In addition to tracking specific points of agreement, Americans Agree published 26 “Insights” essays. Each analyzed a particular point or category of agreement. In a year, Americans Agree covered a lot of America’s common ground.

Just creating that awareness was an important part of Americans Agree. In our era of intense polarization, it’s easy to see only conflict. Social and traditional media amplify this. For those seeking a path away from polarization, a good place to start is with agreement that already exists.

But awareness of cross-partisan agreement in public opinion is not enough. The other challenge is to understand how and why points of agreement become policy—or, as is often the case, do not become policy.

The Agreement-Action Gap

Many of the agreement points we tracked are not currently enacted into law on a broad scale. That means if enactment requires a federal law, it does not exist. If enactment requires state laws, it may be enacted by some states but not others.

What explains this gap between agreement and action? Different issues face different obstacles, sometimes in combination. Following are prominent patterns.

A broad but diffuse majority can lose to a small but intense minority. 80%+ of Americans across party lines support mental-health and criminal background checks for gun buyers. But much of that support is passive—it’s just an opinion, not a personal priority. In contrast, many opponents are personally motivated, politically active, and well organized by groups like the National Rifle Association. The result is that background-check laws remain incomplete at the federal level and uneven across the states.

Activists often fight to tilt a balance the public wants kept. “The History Wars” are about how American history should be interpreted. Cross‑partisan majorities want a balance, with achievements and failures both covered. The activists don’t split evenly around that middle. On the left, they want to widen the story, foregrounding the experience of oppressed groups. On the right—with allies in the Trump administration—they want to narrow it, emphasizing achievements and minimizing failures like slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. Instead of problem-solving how to find the balance the public wants, the activists are trying to push the balance as far to their respective sides as they can.

Symbolism can defeat substance. Large majorities support requiring a photo ID to vote. Opponents argue that such laws suppress certain groups’ votes, but extensive research finds little evidence of meaningful suppression. That same research also undercuts supporters’ claim that photo ID is essential to election integrity, since in-person voter fraud is rare. But both sides keep fighting because the issue’s symbolic meaning far exceeds its practical stakes.

The same cross‑partisan demand can favor different parties as conditions change. Immigration is a good example. From 2024 to 2026, broad public opinion was consistent: secure the border, deport serious criminal offenders, and keep interior enforcement targeted, lawful, and accountable. Biden and the Democrats ended up on the wrong side of “secure the border” in 2024. Trump and the Republicans ended up on the wrong side of “keep interior enforcement targeted, lawful, and accountable” in 2025 and especially Minneapolis in early 2026.

Agreement on a problem does not necessarily imply agreement on the solution. Majorities want to eliminate the twice-yearly clock change for daylight saving time. But agreement falls apart on whether to lock the clock to standard time, daylight time, or something else—and so we still have the twice-yearly clock change.

Agreement about taxes and spending often omits trade-offs. Cross-partisan majorities favor several recent concepts for tax cuts, as well as greater spending on Social Security and veterans. Yet they also favor a balanced-budget constitutional amendment. Such contradictions come from pollsters asking about topics in isolation, without reminders of necessary trade-offs. That said, over the past two decades, administrations and Congresses from both parties have themselves avoided trade-offs, running up the national debt to $39 trillion.

The Constitution is sometimes the biggest obstacle to enacting policies based on public-opinion agreement. Term limits and age limits for Congress are examples. Enacting them would likely require a constitutional amendment—a very difficult undertaking. Also, the normal route for a constitutional amendment requires two-thirds of the House and Senate to approve. That means the very people who the amendment seeks to limit would need to vote for it overwhelmingly. Which brings us to…

Politicians tend to protect their personal interests. Given the constitutional hurdles, advocacy groups have asked Congress members to voluntarily submit to term limits. Although some have, most have not. At the state level, the pattern is telling: legislative term limits have almost always been enacted by ballot initiative, meaning voters went around lawmakers to limit lawmakers’ own tenure. Voters have no comparable direct mechanism for imposing term limits on Congress.

Politicians sometimes say yes and do no. In response to public opinion, many politicians agree there should be less money in politics, but far fewer actively pursue campaign finance reform. As incumbents, the money system favors them versus challengers. Similarly, many Congress members say they and their colleagues should not be allowed to trade stocks, but the history of attempts to ban stock trading in Congress has so far resulted in half-measures and failed bills.

Politicians’ inaction is sometimes productive. Making Election Day a holiday has roughly 75% cross-partisan support in public opinion. It’s not a particularly red-versus-blue issue, which might suggest it’s an easy yes for politicians. But when you look into the details, problems become apparent. Most notably, in our era of mail-in voting and early in-person voting, most voting occurs before Election Day—thus negating much of an Election Day holiday’s purpose. So in this case, inaction may be the best policy.

The Trump Effect

When this project was active, Donald Trump had recently started his second term as president. Republicans aligned with him controlled the House and Senate. As a result, Trump dominated the political agenda with a whirlwind of executive orders, policy changes, and his 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Much of what pollsters asked about was responding to what Trump was saying and doing.

This led to cross-partisan points of agreement that, in the past, wouldn’t even have been questions, such as:

• The U.S. should not take control of Greenland using military force.

• It is unacceptable for a president to withhold federal disaster aid within the country based on political considerations.

• The U.S. should not give people priority in the immigration process if they pay a $1 million fee.

• If the Supreme Court rules against the president in a case, the president is required to do as the ruling says.

• When Congress fails to act, the president should not be able to make laws on his own.

A unique subplot in the Trump administration has been the actions of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Many HHS policies appear to be driven by his personal worldview. A longtime vaccine skeptic, he’s gone against cross-partisan public opinion in his undermining of vaccine recommendations and research. At the same time, his initiative to eliminate artificial food dyes is aligned with cross-partisan public opinion.

Another subplot: In the first 18 months of Trump’s second term, the Republican-controlled Congress has become known for following Trump’s lead. But for certain policies with cross-partisan agreement, Congress quietly pushed back. For example, it stopped the Trump administration’s attempt to claw back funding for PEPFAR, a long-running aid program for developing countries fighting HIV/AIDS. The program has been supported by presidents and Congresses of both parties for more than twenty years.

When Agreement Prevails

Cross-partisan agreement does sometimes prevail. Veterans spending has doubled over the past decade, although much of this was from past obligations coming due. On taxes, the Child Tax Credit has gone up, and taxes on Social Security have gone down. Immigration officers in Minnesota were required to wear body cameras.

Also, it should be said that Congress regularly passes bipartisan laws on issues that are consequential but not controversial. For example, you probably have never heard of the Homebuyers Privacy Protection Act. It protects the privacy of anyone applying for a mortgage. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate in 2025.

At the state level, the unlikely phrase “bipartisan abortion bill” accurately describes Texas’ 2025 Life of the Mother Act. It clarifies the legality of abortion as an emergency medical intervention, a concept with 80%+ cross-partisan agreement in national public opinion polls. Texas’ largest healthcare systems supported the bill, responding to several needless deaths of women with pregnancy complications. But despite all this, some pro-choice groups opposed the Life of the Mother Act because it didn’t go far enough; and some pro-life advocates opposed it because they saw giving any ground as bad. In the Texas legislature, Democrats and Republicans joined to pass the Act anyway—not because they suddenly agreed on abortion overall but because they agreed to put aside the bigger conflict and address a subproblem in a way that would save lives.

State laws reflect many other policies with cross-partisan support in national polls. Usually, when the policy is left-associated (for example, gun regulation), it is implemented mostly in blue states; when it is right-associated (for example, photo ID for voting), it is implemented mostly in red states. Judging the democratic “correctness” of these outcomes gets difficult without state-level polling of the topics, because issues that have cross-partisan agreement nationally do not necessarily have it in Wyoming versus Massachusetts.

There’s also the local level, where politics is usually more about solving practical problems—collecting garbage and filling potholes—than fighting over symbolic issues. The people involved often know each other as neighbors and community members. This personal accountability allows more to get done with less polarization.

Finally, it’s not just laws that can create action on a public-opinion consensus. In the case of social media regulation, recent court cases against tech companies will likely push the companies to make their social products less available and addictive to children.

The Agreement Challenge

After a year of active data collection and analysis, the Americans Agree project has made its point. The data is now a snapshot, stopping at July 4, 2026. But it will remain indicative of how Americans of different political stripes can agree, even if some of the specifics have changed by the time you are reading this.

Granted, polarization is a major force. But it’s neither total nor inevitable—unless we choose to see it that way. By instead viewing politics through an agreement lens, we can see beyond what’s polarizing to what’s possible: the points that, if enacted, all sides could support.

This will not eliminate disagreement, but it can help restore a healthier balance between what divides us and what unites us. It’s something our era needs.

So as Americans commemorate the 250th anniversary of independence, we should remember that the country was built by people who disagreed about much, yet they found enough common ground to act together. Two hundred fifty years on, that is still the challenge.