Neal Simon, who ran for the U.S. Senate from Maryland in 2018, is very critical of both Democrats and Republicans and proposes ten concrete steps to unite Americans. Simon writes that Americans’ confidence in our nation’s ability to deal with either domestic or international issues has been “severely breached,” according to Gallup, and has reached record lows. These views are shared by Americans of both parties.

Much of the book focuses on ways Republicans and Democrats make it very difficult for independents to run for office and to succeed when they do run. He proposes term limits, limiting the amounts that can be spent on elections, making campaign financing transparent, and ending gerrymandering. He also proposes multimember congressional districts and ranked-choice voting. Simon writes: “Every one of these ideas, polls show, is favored by at least 60 percent of Americans.”

He specifically mentions Better Angels in his Item 10, Creating a Culture of Unity:

Others, such as Better Angels, are going about it in more creative ways, such as facilitating lunches between grassroots Democrats and Republicans and running workshops in which liberals and conservatives learn how to listen to the other side without demonizing each other.

“Our goal is nothing less than to replace the era of polarization with the era of citizenship,” explained David Blankenhorn, the president and co-founder of Better Angels.