Our presidential race is a poll-driven battle of teams managing superficial impressions. The public’s responses to horse race polls are based on little more than vague ideas of what the candidates are saying. When these polls surprise (like one — an outlier, to be sure — from Monmouth University released this week showing a sudden three-way tie among Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren), that drives coverage.

But how much thinking and how much information does it represent? Most voters are still barely paying attention to the campaign. It has too many candidates, too many complex issues and too many weaponized interpretations of who might be too young or too old, who committed a gaffe or who had a strong one-liner in debates where time permits few real exchanges on the issues.

There’s a better way for the American people to grapple in depth with the issues we face at the start of the primary season. Furthermore, we think that, despite their sharp differences of party and ideology, Americans can have serious and respectful conversations across our deep divides. A surprisingly simple innovation can help cut through the poisonous fog of our political polarization. It is an experiment in democracy to show what the whole electorate would think, if it could be similarly engaged.

In this experiment, we will bring America together in one room — not the whole country, of course, but a statistical microcosm of America, selected through the same methods of random sampling used to conduct the best opinion polls. This representative sample of the American public will meet for a weekend, in advance of the primaries and caucuses, to discuss in depth the issues and the candidates in the 2020 campaign. Instead of being one voice among millions, each of the randomly selected voters will know that his or her voice will matter in a sample of several hundred and in small group discussions of a dozen or so. They will feel the responsibility to take the issues and the viewpoints of others seriously.