The upshot of Ball’s essay, aptly titled, “On Safari in Trump’s America,” is this: the policy people start out thinking that if they just meet and talk with some of these “real Americans” in flyover country, they’ll discover that these folks are actually interested in meeting in the middle, in compromise and consensus and living together in harmony. After all, writes Ball, Third Way’s raison d’être is “premised on the idea that partisanship is bad, consensus is good, and that most Americans would like to meet in the middle.” That’s not what they find.

They travel to Wisconsin’s Third Congressional District, which voted Democratic for more than 20 years until Trump won it last year, where they find people looking for someone to blame: farmers who blame America’s troubles on “parasites making a living off the bureaucracy,” old white men who blame young people for being lazy and drug-addled, union workers who blame the GOP, hippies who, as Ball writes, are “separatists, proud of their extremism and disdainful of the unenlightened.” They don’t find many people looking for common ground.

Little of this makes it into Third Way’s final report, a tidy piece of legerdemain that sanitizes what all these Wisconsinites actually think about their fellow countrymen. Writes Ball: “Despite the great variety of views the researchers and I had heard on our tour, the report had somehow reached the conclusion that Wisconsinites wanted consensus, moderation, and pragmatism—just like Third Way.”