Katherine Gehl, founder of The Institute for Political Innovation, joins the Unbiased Podcast to explain Final Five voting. Gehl also discusses why party primaries are a major cause of our political dysfunction. With ranked choice voting making gaining popularity and making its way into elections, Gehl offers a fantastic overview of how the system works and why it would solve several US election issues.
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Citizens’ Assembly on Democracy in Leipzig, Germany
The Great American Deliberation
Oct 05, 2026
Almost everything in our public life is organized as a contest — debates, elections, legislation, litigation. Contestation is so pervasive that we mistake it for the natural order. But operating from a competitive mindset is a choice, not a law of physics. A country where all can thrive together cannot be built by defeating one another; it has to be built by a movement that models a different way of governing, one that weaves our differences into social cohesion instead of deepening division.
The path to that renewal starts with an important distinction. Martin Carcasson, who directs Colorado State University’s Center for Public Deliberation, identifies three modes a free people can use to work through disagreement. Debate is built to produce a winner: two sides marshal arguments to defeat each other, and positions harden. Dialogue is built to produce understanding. It enables us to grasp how another person sees the world and to build the mutual trust that safe, healthy communities depend on.
We propose to use widespread public deliberation as the foundation for building and maintaining a new era of collaborative governance. Deliberation is an approach in which everyday citizens learn together about an issue, talk with rather than past each other, usually with the help of a facilitator, and weigh the tensions and trade-offs among diverse views. Using deliberation, those who disagree can reason together toward a consensus decision.1 Most of our hardest problems are conflicts between competing goods, where every path forward asks someone to give something up. Debate can inflame those conflicts; deliberation can resolve them.
None of this is theoretical. Since the 1980s, a tidal wave of public deliberation has been expanding around the world, with the sharpest rise in the last fifteen years – and it is still growing rapidly.2 Ireland is the pioneer: its citizens’ assemblies took up questions politicians feared most — about abortion, same-sex marriage, and other constitutional questions. Twice, the whole electorate confirmed the assemblies’ measured and nuanced recommendations by referendum. The deliberative wave is rising at home, too, with state-level civic assemblies in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and elsewhere taking up everyday concerns like housing, taxes, and energy. The next step is to turn this method toward the structures of our system of self-governance.
The Nationwide Deliberation Campaign
At the heart of the Great American Deliberation is a nationwide campaign — a nonpartisan collective effort to bring Americans, at unprecedented scale, into structured deliberation about our democracy’s future, synthesizing what emerges into a “People’s Proposal”: a common-ground agenda of structural reforms sourced directly from the American people. Deliberations would be conducted through four layers that winnow and refine citizens’ views:
- Grassroots deliberations in libraries, faith communities, and union halls form the widest entry point;
- Online deliberation platforms extend the reach of deliberation to those who cannot take part in person;
- Deliberative polling — where a representative sample of Americans receives balanced information before registering considered opinions — tests which proposals hold up under scrutiny; and
- Citizens’ assemblies — Americans chosen by lot, the way we choose juries — deliberate deeply at the state and national level to produce the final, nuanced People’s Proposal.
The grassroots layer is where the campaign does its deepest work — and where the nationwide campaign brings value from the beginning. In many communities, asking people to deliberate on divisive questions before they trust one another is why such efforts fail. So the campaign begins earlier, with a sequence our partners call mutual aid, mutual understanding, mutual agreement.3 Neighbors first come together around their concrete needs — a food drive, mutual aid, a clean-up, or other shared project — discovering each other as people before they are asked to discuss anything contentious. From there, neighbors build the capacity to talk across differences and bring down the temperature when conflict becomes heated. Only then do deliberate together on the rules of our democracy.
Trust is built as neighbors spend time together, work together for the common good, and talk through their life experiences and hopes in search of common ground. This is the campaign’s quiet power. The process is not merely a way of gathering input around structural reforms to renew our system of self-governance. The process itself is healing. It turns political discourse from a zero-sum battle into shared problem-solving, and channels grievance into dialogue before it hardens into contempt. Even if it produced no proposal at all, a season of structured deliberation would leave the country less polarized and better equipped to govern itself.
America’s common ground is not hypothetical. Among the more than one hundred cross-partisan supermajority positions the University of Maryland’s public-consultation research has identified,4 a distinct cluster rises to structural reform — changes not to this or that policy but to the rules of the game: how we elect and hold Congress accountable, the role of money in politics, the balance between the branches of government, ethics in government, and election integrity. But research only shows what people think; it does confer a mandate. What emerges from the nationwide deliberation campaign will be closer to a jury’s verdict than a poll result5 — carrying the considered judgment of the people who reasoned together.
From the People’s Proposal to a Renewed Social Contract
Renewing our system of self-governance turns on legitimacy — what makes people accept a decision as rightful because they trust the process that produced it. To earn that trust, the Great American Deliberation must pass a few hard tests. It must include everyone: conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between as genuine co-leaders, with participants in the most intensive deliberations selected by lot so the table looks like the country itself. It must reflect considered judgment, elevating the reforms that command broad, informed support across our divides rather than those pushed by whoever speaks loudest. Critically, the people must be able to see that the Proposal is theirs: every recommendation traceable to the deliberations it came from, minority views preserved rather than averaged away, and the whole process audited independently, the way observers audit an election.
Here it helps to be precise about what renewing a social contract actually requires, because, as I argued in the first essay of this series, a Founding has two halves. The first half is cultural: a change in how we treat one another and how we engage the institutions we share. The second is formal: writing our common ground into the Constitution and other foundational documents, beyond the reach of any single election to undo. A change in culture that is never entrenched gets reversed when power turns over; legal entrenchment without a genuine change of heart is a dead letter. A true Founding needs both.
This is why the deliberation is not merely preparation for the real work — it is already half of it. Every community that reasons together across differences, every citizen who discovers that the person across the divide is not the caricature they feared, is already renewing the social contract. The cultural half of a Fourth Founding is not something the campaign proposes for later; it is what the campaign does by design.
The second half consists of carrying the common ground we surface into our foundational documents so that it lasts. A proposal, however broadly supported, is not yet a political settlement. Translating what the people have said into how we govern ourselves requires champions — a broad coalition of conservatives, progressives, and independents, united not by a shared ideology but by shared ownership of what the people produced, and including the officeholders, candidates, and civic, faith, labor, and community organizations that helped convene the deliberations. Reform advanced by one faction invites reversal by the next; that is the toxic tug of war we are trying to end. Reform carried by a genuinely cross-partisan coalition, standing on a platform the people themselves authored, earns the legitimacy to endure. Building that coalition is a task in its own right — the subject of a future essay.
Crucially, renewal need not wait on Washington or the Constitution. Most of it can be won without a constitutional amendment at all — through ordinary legislation, ballot measures, and reform in the states where Americans are already rewriting the rules of the game. Citizens in Michigan created an independent redistricting commission by ballot initiative, taking the map-drawing pen out of legislators’ hands.6 Montanans, after long decades of copper barons buying their politics, made their state a determined laboratory for getting money out of elections. They enacted the bipartisan DISCLOSE Act, which forces the groups paying for political ads to reveal who funds them, and the Supreme Court let it stand.7 An all-volunteer campaign has since gathered nearly fifty thousand signatures, from all fifty-six counties without a single paid canvasser, to put “the Montana Plan” on the 2026 ballot. None of this required amending the Constitution.
Reforms drawn from the People’s Proposal can therefore be enacted at every level at once — by a city council, a state legislature, a ballot measure, and/or an act of Congress. Only the deepest and most fundamental of them — the changes most vulnerable to being undone the moment power changes hands — need to be entrenched in the Constitution and other foundational documents, where no single election can reverse them. That entrenchment is the keystone — the last stone set, the one that locks the arch in place.
As we conduct the campaign, we must keep in mind a grim possibility. If our political system were to melt down faster than the ordinary channels of reform can work, the patient work of deliberation would not be wasted — it would matter more, giving any future effort to renegotiate our public life a reservoir of common ground and cross-partisan trust to draw on rather than starting from nothing. How a divided society can deliberate its way through a democratic crisis and transition is the subject of a later essay.
The Invitation
We have a rare opportunity to do the work of democracy renewal deliberately, in good time, rather than in the aftermath of a rupture. The bonus: the work itself heals. A season of nationwide dialogue and deliberation would (re)build relationships across our lines of difference and let grievances be spoken and heard — reweaving the social fabric in the very act of deciding what comes next.
Importantly, we would not be attempting something alien to us. Twice in the twentieth century — through the women’s suffrage movement and the civil rights movement — Americans renewed the terms of our common life nonviolently. Founding-scale change without catastrophe is not a fantasy; it is part of our inheritance.
But it need not take a lifetime. The process of achieving women’s right to vote, according to the suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt, cost American women “52 years of pauseless campaign.”8 Fortunately, we have deliberative processes and tools no earlier generation possessed. With focus, the nationwide deliberation campaign could begin to heal our social fissures and surface a common-ground People’s Proposal in as little as one to two years — in time to inform the platforms and candidates of the 2028 election cycle. What took the suffragists half a century of organizing, we can now begin in a single cycle. What the Great American Deliberation asks is that we claim that inheritance courageously and deliberately at a scale worthy of the whole country — and make our Fourth Founding a peaceful one. The planning has already begun.
Danielle M. Reiff is a retired American diplomat, peacebuilder, and writer. Her new book, The Power of Public Love: Evidence and Practices for Weaving the Social Fabric of Peace, will be published in late 2026. As a U.S. diplomat for twenty years, Danielle specialized in supporting democratic transitions and peacebuilding around the world. After retiring, she founded the nonpartisan Peacebuilders initiative to promote nonviolent approaches to complex systems change. She also co-founded the Democracy Renewal Group, Renew American Democracy (RAD) platform, and Renew to Thrive initiative. She believes we must renew our system of self-governance so that all Americans can thrive together.
The Great American Deliberation was originally published by The Democracy Renewal Group and is republished with permission.
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Massive Racial Wealth Gap for Massachusetts Latino Families
Oct 05, 2026
BOSTON — A comprehensive statewide report released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has exposed a staggering racial wealth gap in Massachusetts, revealing that Latino families hold a median net wealth of just $1,200.
The landmark study, titled “Family Wealth in Massachusetts,” indicates that despite the Commonwealth ranking near the top of national measures for median income, economic security remains profoundly stratified along racial lines. The findings show that the median net wealth of White families in the state stands at $549,200—an amount 458 times greater than that of typical Latino households.
The data stems from the 2025 Massachusetts Economic Conditions and Household Opportunity Survey, or Mass ECHOS. Compiled in collaboration with The Boston Foundation, the Barr Foundation, and the Eastern Bank Foundation, researchers collected detailed asset and liability profiles from 5,018 randomly selected households across the state. The survey serves as an expansive follow-up to the Boston Fed’s controversial 2015 “Color of Wealth” study, which faced criticism for a small sample size after finding that U.S.-born Black households in the city of Boston proper had a median net worth of just $8. The new, larger data set expands the lens statewide and illustrates that immense disparities cross local municipal boundaries.
According to the report, median family net wealth across major demographic cohorts follows a stark trajectory: White families hold $549,200; Asian American, Native Hawaiian, & Pacific Islander (AANHPI) families hold $305,000; Black families hold $7,800; and Latino/Hispanic families sit at the bottom with $1,200.
The report underscores that deep systemic cracks leave communities of color uniquely vulnerable to economic shock. According to the data, 40% of Latino families and 31% of Black families in Massachusetts hold zero or negative net wealth, meaning their collective debts outpace the value of any assets they own. By comparison, only 1 in 9 White families face a negative net worth. Researchers pointed to the state’s severe housing divide as a primary structural anchor. The state median net wealth for homeowners climbs to $790,500, whereas renters possess a median net wealth of just $1,500. Advocacy groups like the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center (MassBudget) noted that generations of discriminatory practices, such as historic redlining and exclusionary covenants, have locked Black and Latino residents out of homeownership, blocking the primary vehicle Americans use to build and inherit wealth.
This lack of asset equity translates directly into immediate household instability. More than a third of families statewide confessed they could not cover a sudden $400 emergency expense using immediate cash or liquid savings. For Black and Latino households, that emergency anxiety hits a critical two-thirds of all families surveyed.
The Mass ECHOS dataset also documents vast geographic wealth disparities, demonstrating that families living in the state’s Gateway Cities lag far behind the affluent Greater Boston core. The report found that the median family net worth in Gateway Cities—the 26 municipalities eligible for state economic development incentives due to lower education and income averages—is just $101,500. This is less than a third of the $373,000 median wealth found in Greater Boston, even though half of those Gateway Cities technically sit within the Greater Boston region. Furthermore, one-in-four families in Gateway Cities hold zero or negative net wealth, and a staggering 50% of Gateway City respondents reported they cannot access $400 in cash to pay for an emergency expense.
“Having wealth is the ability to financially navigate an unexpected job loss, a serious illness, or buy and/or maintain a home,” noted Ali Noorani, CEO of the Barr Foundation, in a public statement regarding the data. “The surest way to reduce the wealth gap is by working together across sectors and ideologies to remove barriers and improve access to capital.”
In response to the troubling indicators, local civic leaders, philanthropies, and state policymakers are utilizing the Mass ECHOS data to push forward immediate structural remedies. The coalition of foundations backing the study emphasized a collective call to action to dismantle the explicit barriers keeping lower-income residents and communities of color trapped in debt cycles. Initial policy recommendations focus heavily on targeted public-private partnerships to bridge the capital divide. Local strategies under review include expanding state-backed down-payment assistance programs to specifically target the deep renter-to-homeowner asset divide, implementing municipal small business lending units modeled after successful Boston initiatives to prioritize minority and immigrant entrepreneurs, expanding access to higher education and debt-free degree paths, and launching collaborative initiatives to shore up workplace retirement plans and IRAs for low-wage earners who currently lack emergency safety nets.
The Boston Fed’s report highlights that the state’s average family wealth technically sits over $1 million, though that metric is heavily distorted by extreme concentrations of wealth among the state’s wealthiest tiers. For the typical, baseline Massachusetts household across all backgrounds, the true median net wealth anchors at $374,000.
Massive Racial Wealth Gap for Massachusetts Latino Families was first published by Massachusetts Latino News and is republished with permission.
MA Latino News is part of the Latino News Network, best serving Hispanic, Latino communities with a national and nine local multimedia news websites across the US.
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The One Thing Both Sides of the Data Center Fight Already Agree On
Oct 04, 2026
In Festus, Missouri, a town that gave Donald Trump 67 percent of its vote, residents have filed to recall the mayor and three council members over a $6 billion data center. In New York, a Democratic governor has signed the first statewide moratorium on new ones. Across seven states, at least 33 recall campaigns are targeting as many as 58 local officials for the same reason, and the reason is not a party. It is a building.
That makes data centers the rarest thing in American politics right now: an issue where the folding chairs in a red county and a blue one are filled with people saying the same words. They are not saying "no technology." They are saying the box across the road raises their power bill, drains their water, takes the farm, and was negotiated behind a nondisclosure agreement before anyone in town knew its name. In Luther, Oklahoma, the moratorium passed only after word leaked that the mayor had been in closed talks with a developer for months. The anger is not about servers. It is about being handed a decision that was already made.
Here is what almost nobody in those rooms has been told, and what both sides would want if they knew it.
Every data center is a furnace. Nearly all the electricity that goes in comes out as heat, and in every facility in America that heat is thrown into the sky through cooling towers, at the owner's expense. The newest liquid-cooled halls release it as warm water, exactly what a greenhouse wants in January. A two-and-a-half-acre greenhouse on that water grows on the order of
695,000 pounds of fresh produce a year with no boiler and nothing burned. Write into the rezoning that at least 15 percent of it is covenanted to the host community, to the schools, the food bank, the farm store on the road, and one building's waste feeds about 400 of its neighbors, year-round, in towns where the nearest winter tomato has traveled 1,500 miles. Put the fish house on the same loop and homes on radiant floors at the end of it, and the campus that was going to bury the farmland has built a farm.
Notice what that covenant is. It is the opposite of an NDA. It is a promise, written into a public document, that a resident can read at the county clerk's office and hold the developer to at every hearing for the life of the project. The reason people in Festus and Luther and Prince William County feel the technology is being forced on them is that the terms were hidden. A heat covenant puts the terms on the wall.
And it is the one proposal that does not ask either side to give up what it wants. Conservatives want the tax base, the jobs, and the AI race won; Loudoun County, Virginia, collected $1.2 billion in data-center property taxes this year and cut its residential rate for the tenth straight
year, so the money is real. Progressives want communities protected, ratepayers held harmless, and food grown close to home; a farm on the fence line does all three. Michelle Obama and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. agree on almost nothing, but they agree that Americans should eat real food grown nearby. A data center that powers the cloud and feeds the town is not a compromise between the two camps. It is both of them, in one site plan.
Virginia noticed first. This spring its General Assembly passed the first law in the country directing the state to put data-center waste heat to use, and the Senate vote was 39 to 0. In a legislature that spent the same session at war with itself over data-center tax breaks, that is what an issue looks like when it belongs to no one.
Wall Street has noticed too. Lenders now weigh local opposition and permitting status before financing a campus, and local resistance blocked or delayed some $130 billion in projects in the first quarter of this year alone. The developer who arrives with a public covenant and a farm in the first phase of the site plan is not being generous. He is de-risking his loan.
So, to the organizers running recall petitions and the officials facing them, to the governors weighing a pause and the developers hoping they don't: there is a yes here that both of you can sign. Put one question in every rezoning, in public, in writing: where does the heat go, and what share of what it grows stays here? A moratorium buys a town a year. A covenant buys it a farm. The fight in Festus and the fight in Albany are the same fight, and this is the same answer.
Andrew Potter is the founder and CEO of Intelligent Harvest, a Lynchburg, Virginia company that develops greenhouses and community farms powered by data-center waste heat.
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When One Person Can Do the Work of a Team
Oct 04, 2026
The harder question is how many capable people organizations will need. My latest lesson about artificial intelligence did not come from a research report or technology conference. It came from running the Security and Sustainability Forum.
Until recently, I depended heavily on an assistant to manage much of the website and webinar production process. Now I can do many of those tasks myself with Claude and ChatGPT. They help me develop content, revise web pages, solve technical problems, and manage projects that once required considerably more human support.
I am not eliminating my assistant’s position. I am redefining it. Instead of spending as much time on routine production, my assistant can concentrate on creative design and technical review. That work requires human judgment and can help SSF improve its programs and grow.
That experience led me back to an idea Apple popularized: the “directly responsible individual,” or DRI. Under Steve Jobs, an effective meeting reportedly ended with an action list, and each action carried the name of the person responsible for ensuring it was completed.
The AI-enabled DRI could become a defining worker of the future. One person will be able to direct artificial capabilities for research, writing, coding, design, and analysis. The individual will define the objective, divide the problem into parts, judge the results, and take responsibility for the final product.
That person need not be an engineer or computer scientist. A humanities major who understands context, formulates good questions, detects weak reasoning, and communicates clearly could be well positioned. AI can increasingly perform technical production. Human value may shift toward determining what should be done, recognizing when the result is wrong, and accepting responsibility for the outcome.
These could be fascinating jobs. My concern is not whether people can prepare for them. It is the number of such people an organization will need.
We tell workers to learn AI, and they should. But if everyone becomes more productive, it does not follow that companies will need everyone. AI could give more people access to sophisticated work while reducing the number of positions available to them.
Organizations will face a choice. They can use AI to produce yesterday’s output with fewer employees, or they can redirect the capacity it releases toward better products, new services, stronger relationships, and growth. Before eliminating a position, a leader should ask what higher-value work that person could now perform.
There is another problem. The future DRI will need judgment, but judgment develops through experience. Junior professionals learn by researching, drafting, analyzing, making mistakes, and receiving criticism. AI is absorbing much of that work. We may be creating a workplace that demands more judgment while eliminating the work through which judgment has traditionally been acquired.
AI also differs from earlier technologies. It acts upon the intellectual work through which we create new products, discoveries, and technologies. AI companies are already using it to help develop more capable AI, although full autonomous self-improvement has not arrived and may never arrive. The tool is beginning to participate in the process that improves the tool.
There is no realistic way to stop this change. The competitive advantages are too great. People will need curiosity, judgment, imagination, problem-definition skills, and the willingness to be responsible for results. Organizations will have to decide whether AI’s gains mean fewer jobs or greater ambition.
But preparation cannot rest entirely on individuals and employers. If the economy eventually requires much less human labor, telling everyone to master AI will not answer the larger question. Society will have to decide how opportunity, income, and purpose are distributed when productive capacity grows faster than the demand for people.
We do not yet know whether AI will take us that far. We know that it has started moving us in that direction, and that each generation of the technology may accelerate the next.
The Industrial Revolution showed how profoundly technology could reorganize society. It may have been the appetizer. AI is the main course.
Edward Saltzberg is the Executive Director of the Security and Sustainability Forum. He is a Visiting Scholar at George Washington University and writes the Stability Brief.
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