The Great Experiment: A 10th-Anniversary Symposium and the Nationwide Democracy Poll That Anchored It

The brief

The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon turned ten in 2023. The annual George Washington Symposium — supported by a Barra Foundation endowment, with Ford as presenting sponsor — was the marquee anniversary moment. The institutional ambition was bigger than a typical academic gathering: Mount Vernon wanted to convene the most serious living thinkers about American democracy, but it also wanted to put that conversation in front of a national audience that wasn’t in the room.

The symposium itself was the foundation. To extend the reach, we wrapped it in three things: a commissioned nationwide poll, a celebrity short-film series, and a national press rollout — all engineered to give the in-room conversation a public mirror.

The symposium itself

Mount Vernon convened a slate of historians, journalists, judges, generals, business leaders, and Founding-era scholars across eleven panels over three days. Each panel was filmed and published to Mount Vernon’s YouTube channel after the event — turning a three-day in-person convening into a permanent thought-leadership library.

Panel topics

• The Great Experiment: Democracy from the Founding to the Present — H. W. Brands, Douglas Brinkley, Joanne Freeman, Edna Greene Medford, moderated by C-SPAN founder Brian Lamb.
• The Founders — Denver Brunsman, Lindsay Chervinsky, Annette Gordon-Reed, moderated by Library Director Patrick Spero.
• The Role of the Military in a Democracy — Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Jim Mattis with Pulitzer Prize–winner Rick Atkinson.
• A More Perfect Union: The Constitution’s Principles and Ideas — Mary Sarah Bilder, Michael J. Klarman, Jeffrey Rosen (President & CEO, National Constitution Center).
• The Art of Constitution Interpretation — Judge David S. Tatel and Neal Katyal with Jeffrey Rosen.
• The Importance of Free and Fair Elections in a Democracy — Trevor Potter (Campaign Legal Center) with Margaret Hoover (Firing Line).
• The Business of America: Democracy and Capitalism — David Rubenstein (Carlyle) with Kenneth Griffin (Citadel).
• First Amendment: The Role of Journalism in a Democracy — Jacqueline Alemany, Robert Costa, Heidi Przybyla, moderated by John Harwood.
• The Role of Education in a Democracy — Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels, Valerie Strauss, John White, moderated by historian Johann Neem.
• George Washington’s Warnings and the Future of Democracy — John Avlon (CNN) and Larry Sabato (UVA Center for Politics) with Patrick Spero.

The nationwide poll — the news hook that made it travel

A symposium — even a great one — needs a piece of news to drive press coverage. We commissioned an original public-opinion survey on the state of American democracy and released the headline findings five days before the symposium opened. The poll was conducted September 15–21, 2023 by Project Home Fire with InnovateMR, sampling 1,020 adults nationwide using Census-weighted quotas, with a margin of error of ±3.1 percentage points. It was published in publicity partnership with the University of Virginia Center for Politics — the Larry Sabato shop — which gave it instant credibility in political-press circles.

Read the full 45-page report

Headline findings

• 77% say American democracy is in jeopardy
• 67% say it’s on the wrong track
• 59% of Gen Z see democracy as the preferred form of government — vs. 84% of Boomers
• 90% agree the right to vote is a core democratic value
• 92% of Democrats and 83% of Republicans agree the peaceful transfer of power is fundamental
• 85% say “despite our differences, we should all see ourselves as Americans first”

The poll travelled. It gave the press a sharp news peg — generational confidence in democracy is collapsing, but cross-partisan agreement on the core principles holds — and gave each panel a piece of empirical scaffolding to react to in the room. The Friday afternoon panel on the survey itself (Sabato, Avlon, Spero) became one of the most-watched videos out of the symposium.

The “Foundations of Democracy” celebrity series

To carry the symposium to an audience that wasn’t watching C-SPAN panels, we produced a four-part short-film series titled Foundations of Democracy, each delivered by a friend of Mount Vernon, each speaking to one of Washington’s defining democratic contributions:

The four films pulled Washington’s legacy into the present tense for an audience that doesn’t spend its weekends watching constitutional historians on panel. Each spoke to a single pillar — unity, civic virtue, relinquishing power, individual freedoms — and routed viewers to the symposium content and the poll.

The national press rollout

The press release went out October 31, 2023 — five days before opening day. The framing the news media picked up:

America is deeply divided on many issues, but Americans, on the whole, are united across party lines when it comes to support for the core principles of our democracy. The challenge going forward is to do the hard work to repair what is fraying the nation.— Patrick Spero, Executive Director, George Washington Presidential Library

What we did

Built the program as a campaign, not a calendar event

An anniversary symposium is easy to design as a self-contained gathering — doors open, panels happen, doors close. We engineered the opposite: a connected program with a press hook (the poll), a popular-culture hook (the celebrity series), and a content-library hook (the 11 panel videos), all pointed at the same destination: mountvernon.org/democracy.

Commissioned original research as the news strategy

Original survey research is one of the most cost-effective ways to put a nonprofit at the center of a national conversation. We partnered with Project Home Fire on the fieldwork and the UVA Center for Politics on the publicity, and we timed the release to anchor the symposium’s news cycle. The 45-page report still lives on Mount Vernon’s Issuu shelf and continues to generate research citations.

Produced a celebrity short-film series for reach beyond the room

We worked with talent representation to bring on Harrison Ford, Zoe Saldana, Don Cheadle, and Maya Hawke; matched each to a thematic pillar; produced and edited the four spots; and rolled them out across Mount Vernon’s social and Vimeo channels to extend the symposium’s reach to audiences who wouldn’t otherwise have engaged with the substance.

Operated the press shop end-to-end

Press release, embargoed advance look at the poll for key reporters, media credentialing for the symposium itself, follow-on briefings during the event, and post-event distribution of the panel videos. The poll’s headline numbers — especially the Gen Z confidence gap — were the lede in national coverage going into the weekend.

What we learned

• The research is the news. A great convening doesn’t make news on its own. A piece of original research that contextualizes the convening does. The poll is what gave national reporters a reason to write about the symposium before it happened.
• Cross-partisan empirics defuse a partisan topic. The cleanest single data point in the deck — 92% of Democrats and 83% of Republicans agree the peaceful transfer of power is fundamental — gave Mount Vernon a calm, non-partisan claim to make in a season when most institutions were either silent or shouting.
• Celebrity short films do reach, panel videos do depth. The two formats served two completely different audiences, and pretending they’re the same channel is a mistake. We produced each on its own terms and let them stack.
• Anchor the whole campaign on a single URL. mountvernon.org/democracy was the only call-to-action across the press release, the celebrity spots, the panel videos, and the social campaign. One place to land. Everything else fed it.

Why it mattered

You can’t just convene the conversation. You have to give the public a reason to look up — and a place to look.

The tenth anniversary could have been a beautiful symposium that nobody outside the building heard about. Instead, the poll became a piece of national news, the celebrity series gave Mount Vernon a foothold in popular culture, and the eleven panel videos became a permanent thought-leadership library that has continued to be cited and watched in the years since. The Library used the moment to claim the question of what does American democracy mean now as part of its institutional remit — which is exactly the position a presidential library at the start of its second decade ought to be staking out.

References: Symposium home & full speaker roster · Press release, Oct 31 2023 · 45-page poll report on Issuu · mountvernon.org/democracy · Foundations of Democracy film series