[2] Participants, referred to as citizen delegates, received comprehensive, non-partisan briefing materials covering five issues: immigration, the economy, health care, foreign policy, and the environment.

[6][7][8][9] During the plenaries, they had the opportunity to ask questions of presidential candidates and a bipartisan panel of experts that included Denis McDonough, Kori Schake, Judy Feder, and Douglas Holtz-Eakin.

[1][4][20] Both samples were selected to approximate the demographic diversity of registered voters across age, ethnicity, gender identity, education level, geography, religious affiliation, and political ideology.

[19] In advance of moderated discussions and plenary sessions, participants received a 55-page briefing document that provided background on issues identified by previous NORC polling as those most important to voters in the 2020 election cycle,[20] as well as arguments for and against related policy proposals.

[8][18] In an interview with Stanford News, Diamond noted the briefing document deliberately omitted “tribal” cues, saying, “In the ... materials and as much as possible, in the discussion, we very consciously avoided the following four words: Democrat, Republican, Trump, Obama.

We tried to get people just to talk about the issues without stereotyping themselves or one another.” [1] After reading the briefing materials, citizen delegates broke into small discussion groups led by neutral moderators who had been trained to maintain a respectful environment and encourage diverse participation.

The questions are probing with a purpose.”[6] Afterwards, 95% of participants said that they “learned a lot about people very different from me” [22] and nearly all (98.2%) reported that they found the experience “valuable.” [4] The group took part in five plenary sessions covering each area over the course of the weekend.

[2][11][15][4] Of the 26 policy proposals that generated the most dramatic partisan-based polarization among participants before attending America in One Room, post-event polling data showed the two parties moved closer on 22 of these, significantly so in 19 cases.

[8][1][9] The Southwest Times summarized a subset of these findings:[21] "Before the sessions began, 79% of Republicans supported forcibly deporting illegal immigrants to their countries of origin before they could apply to return.

If these discussions are in-depth enough, people will depolarize.” [1] America in One Room was covered by both right and left-leaning media outlets, including The New York Times, FiveThirtyEight, the BBC, The National Interest, Christian Science Monitor, Axios, Forbes, and Vanity Fair.

[13][25][15][14][12][22][3] Writing for Salon [4], journalist Paul Rosenberg observed: "Just as Donald Trump's fears of impeachment were leading him to tweet threats about ‘civil war,’ a real-life microcosm of the American electorate that gathered just outside Dallas … has produced a diametrically opposite picture of highly functional civic dialogue.

[32][33][31] The New York Times reported on the study on October 24, 2020, noting “few events -- including the president's impeachment and the pandemic -- have moved public opinion anywhere near that much.” [33] In July 2021, Fishkin and Diamond co-authored a research paper with Alice Siu of the Center for Deliberative Democracy and Norman Bradburn of NORC that was published in the American Political Science Review.