AI polling: Americans aren't as divided on declaration of American ideals

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(The Center Square) – In honor and ahead of America’s 250th birthday, polling and analysis organization the Napolitan Institute released a “declaration” of 27 shared American ideals Thursday based on the findings of an extensive artificial intelligence-powered survey.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen, the founder of the Napolitan Institute, said that the results showed him that the U.S. isn’t as polarized as it can appear.

“We are not a 50-50 polarized nation. What I believe we are is a 10-10-80 nation,” Rasmussen said at the unveiling of the declaration. “There are people on both the left and the right who reject America’s founding ideals… [but] 80% of Americans hate the political fighting.”

More than 2,400 people across all 435 congressional districts responded in their own words to a series of prompts online asking them about freedom and equality. With oversight, advanced AI models were then used to synthesize those results into 27 core summary statements, “most of which had over 80% agreement from everyone who participated,” according to the website chronicling the initiative.

At Thursday’s annual meeting of the American Philosophical Society, Rasmussen read the declaration. The first statement was a slightly modernized version of the most recognized excerpt from the Declaration of Independence: “We have been endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Another borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, saying “We should be judged by the content of our character, not by the color of our skin.”

That statement was the “only ideal that had not a single congressional district in opposition,” according to Rasmussen.

Others included “People are born with basic rights that the government does not give them and cannot take away” and “Freedom is the power to make your own choices and control your own life.”

On equality, some of the AI-generated summary statements were, “Equality is everyone having the same opportunity to succeed based on their own efforts, not a guarantee of the same results,” and “The law should apply to everyone in the same way, no matter who they are.”

Participants not only responded to the prompts in their own words, but they were also able to up- or down-vote statements from others. 

The institute was founded in 2024 by founder of RMG Research Rasmussen to “lift up and amplify the voice of the American people so loudly that it cannot be ignored in the halls of power.” 

Napolitan partnered with Google incubator Jigsaw to develop an AI model to support the We the People initiative. 

“One of the domains that we’ve been working on is giving people more agency in their civic life,” said Spencer Baim, head of brand, creative and marketing for Jigsaw. “What if AI could help you chat better with someone else, human-to-human in a world that is increasingly divided? Would it be possible to help people have better conversations and have a feeling that their voice and their table matters?”

One woman at the meeting posed a question to Rasmussen after the unveiling.

“It’s great to hear about these agreements on very general, feel-good kinds of claims. But I would wonder how those people would line up if you asked them about gun control, immigration and their feeling about January 6,” she said.

“One of the great parts of the whole process was that people told us from the very beginning that they were skeptical that they would find common ground with anybody else. Having gone through the process, they were shocked at how much common ground they found on different topics,” Rasmussen said.

The survey was held online for just over five weeks in September and October, and participants were informed at the beginning that they would need to complete three rounds of the survey. To select a nationally representative sampling of participants, the Napolitan Institute partnered with the recruitment firm Rep Data, which recruited U.S. citizens across the country along the dimensions of sex, age, race and political affiliation and aligned with 2024 data from the U.S. Census Bureau. All respondents were compensated for their participation and informed of the purpose of the survey and AI’s role in the process.