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The Common Ground Agenda
Each topic lays out civic principles for approaching it, where agreement is broad or still forming, and the questions honest people still argue about. No policy endorsements; no candidate references.
Jump to: Democracy · Economy · Community · Opportunity · Institutions · Information
Issue area 1
Elections are run by neighbors, not strangers. Americans across the coalition want voting to be easy for eligible citizens, hard to cheat, and trusted by the people who lose.
Most Americans believe elected officials listen more closely to large donors than to ordinary constituents. Fixing that without silencing legitimate political speech is harder than the slogans on either side suggest.
Issue area 2
A country where steady work no longer guarantees a stable life will not stay calm for long. Americans across the coalition want an economy in which effort is rewarded and a bad year does not become a ruined decade.
The federal government spends more than it collects nearly every year, regardless of which party is in charge. Americans disagree about why that matters and what to do about it, but few think the current trajectory is sustainable forever.
Issue area 3
The habits of self-government are learned in lodge halls, congregations, and league nights, not on cable news. As those places empty, Americans are losing the practice of getting along with people they did not choose.
A nation can secure its borders and treat people decently, and most Americans want both. The hard part is agreeing on what each requires and being honest that the two sometimes pull against each other.
Issue area 4
When teachers, nurses, and young families cannot afford to live where they grew up, a community loses its future one moving van at a time. Housing is where opportunity either takes root or leaves town.
College costs have outpaced inflation for decades, and millions of Americans now carry student debt for degrees that did not deliver the career they expected. Whether college is still worth it is a question more families are asking, not fewer.
Issue area 5
Courts that decide by law and agencies that answer to the public are what stand between a citizen and arbitrary power. Both have earned criticism, and both are worth defending.
Nearly every American wants safe streets and police they can trust, and wants both delivered fairly. Where those two goals seem to conflict is where the country's hardest arguments about policing begin.
Issue area 6
When a town loses its newspaper, it loses more than headlines: it loses the shared facts that let neighbors argue productively. Rebuilding the information commons is a civic task, not a partisan one.
AI can now generate a convincing photo, voice, or news article of something that never happened, in seconds and at scale. A society that cannot agree on basic facts will struggle to do anything else together.
Rates of teen anxiety, depression, and suicide have risen sharply over the past decade. Parents, schools, and doctors across the political spectrum agree something has gone wrong, even as they disagree about the cause.