Context — where agreement already exists

Most of us
already agree on this part.

Americans genuinely disagree about guns, abortion, immigration and taxes, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But on a narrow set of questions about how power and money should work, support crosses party lines by margins almost unheard of in modern polling.

Every figure below names its poll. Where a commonly cited number could not be traced to a source, it appears in the second section instead — not here.

Documented cross-partisan support

Four reforms, four sources.

Applying our own standard

Numbers we could not source.

Several reform proposals circulate with precise-sounding support figures attached. We went looking for the underlying polls and could not find them. They may well be popular — we simply cannot state a number.

This section exists because it would have been easy to publish five confident percentages and much harder for anyone to check them. On a site whose entire argument is "check the receipts," inventing a poll number would be the fastest possible way to lose.

Why this page is here

An accusation is not a solution.

Everything else on this site documents what happened. This page is the only one that points at what could be done about it — and deliberately limits itself to measures that already command majorities among Republicans, Democrats and independents alike.

That matters for a practical reason. Reforms that poll at 70–86% do not fail for lack of public support. They fail because the people who would have to enact them are the people they would constrain. That is a structural problem, not a partisan one, and it has persisted across administrations of both parties.

If you arrived here from a section documenting one administration and concluded this is a site about one man, this page is the correction. The record happens to be current. The problem is older and larger.

Send this to someone who'll check it