🗽 9/11 was another country

Today, the country marks the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The pictures of that day bring back the fear Americans felt in the days and weeks that followed. But out of that fear came a wave of national unity and pride that we haven’t come close to experiencing since.

Looking back at the polling after 9/11 is a reminder that the past is another country. Our immediate instinct was to come together. In one poll, 72% said the country was going in the right direction; just 11% said it was off on the wrong track.

The post-9/11 period was the last sustained stretch of when a majority of Americans were optimistic about the country. There were smaller rallies at the start of the Iraq War and after Saddam Hussein’s capture. But by 2004, “wrong track” had taken the lead, and we haven’t looked back since.

The same went for presidential job approval. Americans rallied behind George W. Bush, including overwhelming majorities of Democrats. Democratic job approval reached well into the 80s in September 2001. The conventional wisdom is that Iraq broke our post-9/11 unity. But the rally lasted longer than people remember. Bush’s overall approval was still above its pre-9/11 level when the Iraq War began 18 months later. The invasion itself triggered another rally. Partisan divisions had already begun to return, but the prolonged insurgency deepened them. By Bush’s second term, we were settling into the extreme polarization that has carried through to today.

Notice where Bush’s job approval was among Democrats before 9/11, during normal times: nearly 30% — roughly where it returned before the Iraq War, then briefly spiked to close to 50%.

Those out-party approval numbers would be unheard of for a president of any party today.

The 2000 election gave us the modern partisan alignment that 2016 ratified. But 9/11 interrupted it. The unity that followed was a great anomaly, born of something nobody would have wished for. We haven’t seen unity on that scale in a national emergency since.

More jarring still are the figures for Congress, trust in government, the political parties, and the press. Start with Congress. In the days before the attacks, its approval stood at 42%. A month later, it had doubled to 84%.

In January 2001, just 31% of Americans trusted the federal government to do what was right. In October 2001, 60% did.

Even before the attacks, both parties were viewed more positively than negatively. Both improved afterward, with Republicans holding a 56-22 favorability rating and Democrats 48-23 in December 2001.

Even the media benefited. The share saying news organizations generally got their facts straight rose from 35% in early September to 46% in November. The share saying that news organizations stood up for America rose from 43% to 69%. The share viewing them as protecting democracy rose from 46% to 60%.

Thankfully, America hasn’t faced an attack like 9/11 in the quarter century since. Amid today’s doomerism, it’s worth remembering that the worst fears about what comes next don’t always come to pass. America bounced back.

But we have faced major national emergencies since — Covid-19 being the most prominent — and the public reaction was nowhere close to what we saw after 9/11. Donald Trump’s overall approval went up a few points in March 2020 and a Gallup poll recorded 60% approval of Trump’s handling of coronavirus, including 27% of Democrats. But by the summer of 2020, 77% of Americans thought the country was more divided than before the outbreak.

These numbers can’t be separated from Trump’s own conduct. Other world leaders enjoyed longer rallies, but those, too, faded as the pandemic dragged on and inflation took hold. The contrast with Bush is striking: 9/11 arguably guaranteed his re-election, even as Iraq grew more difficult.

Nor has the recent upsurge in political violence produced anything resembling that broader sense of unity. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump and the killing of Charlie Kirk a year ago didn’t produce any lasting change in public opinion.

Perhaps some of this comes down to the sheer scale of 9/11, the first mass-casualty attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor. But it also happened in a country that was already more trusting and optimistic than the one we live in today. If the same thing happened today, I suspect the grief would be just as great, but the sense of shared purpose and unity nowhere close.

🗣️ How voters talk and what gets their attention

The Center for Campaign Innovation looks at which words and phrases voters bring up on their own when talking about politics, and why it’s important for political practitioners to meet them where they are.

Then there’s the question of whether they’re listening at all. Danielle Butterfield writes in FWIW that 54% of registered voters consume news passively or avoid it altogether, according to Priorities USA’s research. A separate study of YouTube watch histories makes the gap clear: active news seekers gravitate toward political commentary, while passive viewers favor music and entertainment. The voters campaigns most want to reach watch things that have nothing to do with politics.

📮 The weight of your ballot

Very few states and districts will end up deciding control of the House and Senate. VoteHub’s Voter Power Index maps just how much your vote matters to deciding control. The sobering fact is that only a tiny geographic sliver of the country is up for grabs.

👫 Examining the diversity of the U.S. electorate

Shifts in the demographics of the electorate continue apace, according to Pew. White voters are down to 61 percent of eligible voters, and Hispanics up to 16 percent — though actual turnout patterns differ markedly.

🔮 Reading your horoscope might make it true

The latest from David Shor finds that your zodiac sign means nothing for your behavior — unless you actually read your horoscope.

Of course, the idea of uniform swing was always too simplistic. Seats don’t swing uniformly. Demographics and candidate quality make them swing differently. We need a Swingometer that does the same. So I decided to build one.

The Intersection’s 2026 Swingometer starts with Democrats winning a 224-211 majority in the House based on today’s D+6.0 generic ballot polling average. Unlike the swingometers of old, not every seat to the left or right of the dial is the same color. Seats vary based on demonstrated track records of over- and under-performance and a few penalties added for ideological extremity or controversy.

The Swingometer starts with the 2024 presidential vote in a district and adjusts the baseline expected result accordingly before other factors are applied. A D+6 generic ballot translates to a 7.5-point shift left from the last presidential result, so the very simple version is that Republicans are only favored to win in seats won by Trump by 7.5 points or more. Now, here’s the fun part: Think the final national vote will be something different, like D+8 or D+4? You can move the dial on the interactive version and see what happens in each seat. This interactive version will also update live for the rest of the cycle with the latest generic ballot numbers.

One thing I wanted the Swingometer to clearly show is how the House battleground changed as a result of redistricting. The part of the wheel between Trump +0 and Trump +9 is much emptier because these were the kinds of seats drawn to be more safely Republican in redistricting. That’s why the tipping point for House control only happens at a D+4 generic ballot and Democrats are projected to only win a handful of seats over that. A tied national vote would leave Republicans with a 225-210 majority.

The Swingometer also factors in the recent Missouri Supreme Court decision reverting the state’s to its pre-existing lines. If this decision is overturned, the Swingometer will also adjust.

There’s only so far redistricting can go, though. At Trump +9 or more, the offensive opportunities for Democrats start to mount. If they can swing the national vote by 3 points more, 13 more seats would be expected to flip.

What are the tipping point seats?

The Swingometer shows electoral tipping points a few different ways. With randomness turned off, it expects Marcy Kaptur’s OH-9 to be the tipping point and also the reddest seat a Democrat in Congress will hold after the election. Only one Republican would survive in a Harris district, and you can guess who that is: Brian Fitzpatrick in PA-1.

The closest seat in the country is expected to be David Valadao in the redrawn CA-22, with the swingometer more bullish on him than his primary results because of his past overperformance and his drawing a progressive opponent. Other extremely close seats feature controversial candidates we’ve accounted for with 2026-specific adjustments. These include Tom Barrett, who survives in a Trump +1.3 due to his past performance and the 4-point penalty applied to his leftist challenger Will Lawrence, and Max Miller in OH-7, who squeaks by in a Trump +11.5 even with a 5-point penalty.

While I’ve made some attempt to account for past electoral performance and apply penalties for recent controversies, I don’t consider the Swingometer to be a full House forecast. And if you disagree with any of these assumptions, you’re free to change them. Just move the dial or adjust the penalties or per-race candidate quality metrics to your liking.

Some other knobs you can play with

Another setting that’s available to you, but is off by default: the Battleground Damper. In the 2022 House races and the 2024 presidential battleground, the seats and states closest to the tipping point swung less than the national average, thanks to a more vigorously contested campaign on both sides. In both 2022 and 2024, this meant a more favorable environment for Democrats in the battlegrounds than nationally (albeit still losing all seven battleground states in 2024). If the swing were reduced by half in the closest battlegrounds — defined as the 10 seats closest to the tipping point getting a 50% swing reduction, and the next 20 getting a 25% swing reduction, Democrats would eke out the narrowest 218-217 majority while still winning the popular vote by 6 points. Because this is a relatively recent phenomenon and has not been tested in favor of Republicans, this setting is turned off by default.

You can also turn the effect of incumbency off or reduce it by half. Turning it off would net Democrats one more seat in most scenarios.

Finally, random variation is turned on so that the swingometer behaves more like a probabilistic forecast, particularly near the Trump +9 cliff where the impact of randomness is not evenly distributed on both sides. Randomness helps Democrats by 1 seat at the current D+6, but if you moved the dial to D+7, it would net them 3 extra seats above a purely deterministic model, as they move closer to the large seat haul above Trump +9.

🗳️ The case for a bad Republican midterm

A couple of weeks ago, I laid out the case for why the polls may be overstating Democrats again. That point coexists with the fact that this should be a pretty bad election cycle for Republicans. The main question is how much the GOP’s structural advantages — redistricting, races on red terrain — insulate them from the full effects of a bad midterm.

It’s not hyperbole to say the political environment is worse for them than in 2018, even though the seat losses — at least in the House — should be nowhere near as bad.

First, let’s take Donald Trump’s net approval rating. At -20, it’s 8 points worse than Joe Biden’s at this point four years ago, and 7 points worse than Trump heading into the 2018 midterms.

Then there’s the economy. In Civiqs’ tracking, 75% of registered voters rated the national economy as good and just 18% as bad at this point in 2018. Today, that’s flipped: 33% good and 64% bad. There’s a night and day difference in voter perceptions of the economy now versus 2018.

Another question is: how easily can you blame the person in charge for the number one problem facing the country? In the voters’ minds, who’s holding the murder weapon?

Trump in 2020 did not hold the murder weapon for mass unemployment. Despite an uneven response to the pandemic, he didn’t cause it and continued to hold strong ratings on the economy. Biden did hold the murder weapon on inflation and immigration, pursuing multiple rounds of inflationary spending and relaxing Trump-era border restrictions. Trump arguably didn’t when it came to the cost of living—until the Iran war spiked a new round of concern about inflation. Iran is not in and of itself something voters think about a lot, except as a cause of the problem that they’re most worried about getting worse.

The primaries are another data point. According to data compiled by the great John Couvillon, Democrats are pacing ahead of 2018 primary turnout, usually a strong indicator for where November should land.

There are varying sources for special-election performance. Some show Republicans doing worse than in the 2018 cycle. This series looks on par or better for Republicans when compared with the late-2017/early-2018 peak, but still quite negative and consistent with a high single-digit Democratic generic ballot advantage.

This election is about what happens when unstoppable force of bad national fundamentals meet the immovable object of a political geography that favors Republicans.

Does rising negative partisanship — even higher than 2018 — actually insulate Republicans? Biden had roughly the same net approval in 2022 as Trump did in 2018 but had a far better midterm. That was because Democrats were able to drive a negative message about election denialism and the danger of MAGA Republicans. Will Republicans be able to do the same, to make the election (at least a little) a referendum on the DSA?

The generic ballot right now, about D+6, is slightly better for Republicans than in 2018, something at odds with the fact that Trump’s approval is worse. Perhaps the fact that rising disapproval is coming from low-turnout independents and not Republicans (as in 2018) will also insulate them from the worst effects.

Perhaps. But perhaps one doth protest too much and we should just pay attention to the headline numbers. We’ll see in 60 days.

🆕 New features and tools for election season

Starting next week, The Intersection will be releasing a series of new features and tools to help you better understand the midterms. I’m excited to share more!

One thing I’ll get a little bit more specific about is a way to benchmark all the individual polls in House & Senate races to 2024 vote as another way to track the shift in the national political environment. Are shifts in the national generic ballot tricking down to individual races, or not?

As previewed this morning on X, this will include a tracker of 2026 Senate polls versus where these same kinds of polls stood from 2018 to 2024. This builds on my work documenting the polling bias Democrats typically experience in the summer. And while Democrats are currently on something of a high, this hasn’t started coming down yet. In 2022, things had already started moving back towards Republicans, while this started right around now in 2018. If this line doesn’t budge, that’s bullish for Democrats.

One warning sign is that a key signature of polling error is repeating itself: more Democratic polling overperformance in red states and districts, consistent with previous midterm cycles. And that’s with pollster house effects factored out.

📮 Follow the candidates

VoteHub keeps finding new ways to feed our collective election-data habit. Its new Campaign Tracker maps where Senate and gubernatorial candidates have been and where they’re headed next.

💰 When campaigns spend it

Jordan Lieberman does yeoman’s work to break down campaign spending from every imaginable direction. And here’s a chart anyone in the game will appreciate, answering when campaigns actually spend money on various functions. The most backloaded expenses are GOTV, media, and… food.

👫 Who calls themselves working class?

Half of college graduates and half of upper-income Americans call themselves working class, according to Pew. So do 60% of Americans overall. It’s clearly not just people without college degrees or with low incomes.

And Republicans are more likely to claim the label: 67% versus 55% of Democrats. That gap persists among people with money and degrees. Among upper-income adults, it’s 61% of Republicans versus 38% of Democrats. Among college graduates, it’s 56% versus 44%. When we talk about Republicans now being a party of the working class, that’s not just about electoral shifts in working class precincts, but about the self-identity that Republicans ascribe to themselves.

🔥 Burning Man is getting old

Burning Man has a census that puts people in their 20s at just 10% of attendees in 2025, down from about 30% in 2014. People in their 30s still make up the biggest group, but those in their 40s and 50s are gaining ground. Burning Man is now a haven for elder millennials with Gen Z checking out. David Shor comments:

And here’s the New York Post’s spin on the same data:

🤖 Why voters oppose data centers but like Amazon distribution centers and chip fabs

As the data center debate reaches escape velocity, there’s a question of what’s really driving opposition: is it just the “physical manifestation of AI” or more localized concerns about water usage or utility rates?

Both Gallup and Fox News dug into this and the answer is consistent: environmental concerns and resources heavily outweigh AI as contributing factors for data center opponents.

But the answer can be a bit of both. We’ve polled on the difference between AI data centers and data centers used for everyday services like streaming and banking for months, and it turns out that the purpose of a data center does make a difference.

This indicates a strong revealed preference against AI relative to older digital services which manifests in AI data center support that’s lower than building a nuclear power plant in one’s local community.

But the idea of a Netflix data center being lower than most other things on this list also suggests that NIMBYist concerns are real. A chip manufacturing plant is at +15. Many of these plants may make chips for AI. But they aren’t as common as data centers and haven’t been a focus of media attention.

Meanwhile, an Amazon distribution center, a large warehouse that looks similar to a data center and unleashes trucks on local roadways is A-Ok with most voters. That might be because most people can see the value in next-day delivery of everyday staples in a way they don’t yet see for AI. Amazon, incidentally, is the most popular tech company and has avoided the worst of the tech-lash since it’s not in the position of policing online speech or designing apps many say are stunting kids’ social development.

As our own Avery James put it on the FAI podcast, just building a transactional service people find convenient might be a better way to win hearts and minds than trying to wrap AI and social media in the language of ethics and “connection.”

🧑‍💻 METR’s report on the HuggingFace attack

Several previously unreleased details in METR’s report on the HuggingFace hack. About 700 AI agents collaboratively attacked HuggingFace after discovering that their task could not be solved legitimately, communicating via an improvised message board, engaging in sacrificial behavior for the good of the collective, and trying to erase logs of the incident. Not one alerted a human about the impending attack.

This seems like a good time for one of the all-time great Mad Men memes:

📈 AI makes it easier to flood the government with complaints

Across countries, formerly obscure government complaint portals are seeing record levels of traffic, straining government services. And it begs the question: will government using

🎙️ Democrats’ summer polling high

I joined Chief Elections Analyst Geoffrey Skelley this week on the Decision Desk HQ podcast to break down whether 2026 red-state polls are really so optimistic for Democrats.

Zachary Donnini compares Kalshi odds to polling and finds that bettors like Democrats better than the polls in Alaska, Michigan, and New Hampshire, and like them worse in Ohio, Texas, and Nebraska.

📰 Woke 1 started earlier than you think

We associate Woke 1 with 2020 but it really started in polling back in 2014 after the protests in Ferguson, MO. That’s what polling data highlighted today by Matt Yglesias finds, with white Democrats moving even further to the left on racial justice issues than nonwhite Democrats.

Meanwhile, the unwinding of Woke 1 has a clear echo in LinkedIn edit histories for DEI, which suddenly became a lot less common after the 2024 election.

🗳️ What works to reduce bogus online survey responses

A new Pew report finds that no one-size-fits-all solution can be found for purging bogus respondents in online surveys, but that some combination of trap questions and automated prescreening work best.

📉 No one should be surprised at the rise of fake polls

In a week, we’ve gone from inaccurate polls to completely fabricated ones. “Median Strategies,” which got its “polls” reported by major media outlets and cited by campaigns, was revealed to be a “social experiment” by 21-year-old Rahil Prakash to show far and fast fake data could travel. The answer: pretty far.

Meanwhile, The Public Sentiment Institute (TPSI), an outfit which has used synthetic samples, admitted to outright fabricating data by switching votes from one candidate to another. And that candidate just happened to be one they lied about working for.

cAnother fun tidbit: TPSI founder Lance Tellez is currently in felony pre-trial diversion in Miami-Dade County.

I’m not surprised it’s come to this. Two factors have come together to create this fake polling breakthrough:

• Prediction markets create a direct financial incentive for manipulation. One “poll” of a thinly-polled race could move a market several points.

• Generative AI makes it easy for these fake firms to cook up plausible-sounding websites and polling releases.

The underlying driver of all of this is an online political hobbyist class so thirsty for polls that they’ve tolerated a steady erosion in the quality of polling over the last several cycles just so they can get their data fix. This comes against a backdrop of rising costs driving many traditional media outlets withdrawing away from sponsoring high-quality polling.

As a result, the polls in any given race can range from costing a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. More expensive polls tend to be more accurate, but they’re not 10 or 100 times more accurate than the cheapest ones. That means you tend to get a decent share of fly-by-night operators in the polling averages. A few wrong turns later — and a warped new set of incentives — and you get outright fabrication.

🗳️ Nate Silver is bullish on Dems

Nate Silver is out with his FLIPR model that’s more bullish on Democrats taking the Senate than the rest of what’s out there. I’ve written that I think it’ll be very hard for Democrats to flip many seats in Trump Country, but when Silver talks, I listen.

Silver also has a thoughtful response to my piece on Tuesday about summer polls overestimating Democrats. He and others have alluded to the fact that midterm polls under Trump have tended to be more accurate, but that’s only true at the end. During the summer, they are still too Democratic, as I show in this unlocked chart.

🔮 Prediction markets may just be the blind leading the blind

Fake polls can be used to manipulate prediction markets—but analysts are finding ways these markets are systematically biased against certain types of candidates where there might be decent alpha in betting in favor of them. (Note: As a pollster, I do not participate in prediction markets.)

First, Noah Wyhof-Rudnick finds a pro-incumbent bias in these markets, regardless of party.

The markets also appear to markedly underestimate female candidates — but only in Democratic primaries.

I used to be far more into monitoring vote drops on election night than I am now. But a couple of recent examples — the California and Wisconsin primaries — brought home for me just how unsophisticated traders were being on election nights. And the direction of their errors were all in favor of the progressive candidates.

In California, Election Twitter kept touting an unsustainable rate of improvement in late drops for Tom Steyer when the drops themselves were showing his base was too geographically narrow to be able to make the top two. But the spin helped his odds of making the top two rise to almost 50%, something I had pegged at a 10% chance at best. (Full disclosure: I was paying close attention since I poll for Steve Hilton.)

In Michigan, early drops gave Abdul El-Sayed a 99.9% chance of winning, but this dropped to as low as 90% as it tightened later in the evening. Some eagle-eyed Haley Stevens traders probably made some bank here.

In Wisconsin, Francesca Hong was trading at 74% when I concluded she had effectively no chance.

📈 The daily household costs that have risen faster than inflation

The Economic Security Project’s interactive dashboard shows the changes in economic pressures over time on the national or state level. While mortgages have only risen 3% since 2019, the costs of other everyday expenses tracked have risen far beyond the rate of inflation.

🍳 This is your brain on AI

Bruce Mehlman highlights EEG measurements showing that writing an essay with AI is neurologically comparable to drunk driving at twice the legal limit. While the quality of an AI-assisted essay probably won’t suffer, the impairment is also shown to compound and persist.

Democrats look like they’ve had a good chance in red states before. A July 30 - August 3, 2020 Quinnipiac poll showing a tied race for South Carolina Senate race between the late Lindsey Graham and Jaime Harrison kicked off a trend of neck-and-neck polls that continued almost until the very end. Graham would eventually win by 10. In 2022, Democrat Tim Ryan led in the vast majority of polls conducted in Ohio over the summer until being bested by JD Vance by 6 points. The same pattern repeated itself in Ohio in 2024 when Brown led in all but two pre-October polls in his race against Bernie Moreno.

In the last few election cycles, we’ve seen a pattern of Democrats looking competitive in red state Senate contests during the summer only to fade by election day. I wanted to test if this was a consistent pattern, not just the selective memory of a Republican.

3,312 polls over the last four election cycles in the old FiveThirtyEight archive confirmed the pattern. In each of those four cycles, the Democratic candidate’s margin was overstated. The average polling error across all polls was D+3.7, and 73% of polls released overstated the Democrat relative to the election result. Again, that’s across more than 3,000 polls, so that’s hardly just statistical noise.

And the pattern is most pronounced during the summer, right where we are now. Polling error peaks at 5.9 points too Democratic sometime in late July, and doesn’t start coming down until late August, before settling into an average error of D+2.6 on election day.

But this isn’t all.

There’s a dramatic difference between midterm and presidential cycles. In the Trump era, Senate polls in presidential years have been biased towards Democrats, and they remained biased until the very end. Polls in midterm years ended up pretty accurate by election day, but were very biased in the summer.

Here’s what this analysis of 3,000-plus polls with 11 charts breaking down this phenomenon reveals — from midterms vs. presidential cycles, which states and with which demographics the errors are worst in, and what you as a consumer of polls need to know.

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🗳️ Michigan’s Senate primary was a win for El-Sayed but a disaster for pollsters

The highly-anticipated Michigan Democratic primary ended up in a photo finish between Abdul El-Sayed and Haley Stevens. The pre-election polls showed El-Sayed with a solid double-digit lead. What happened?

Yes, primaries are harder to poll than general elections. Because there are smaller ideological differences between candidates, primary voters are much more up for grabs than general election voters. That makes the races themselves more volatile, with last-minute shifts the rule rather than the exception. It’s also harder to weight primary polls. We don’t have reliable targets for the things most correlated with primary vote choice — ideology or what kinds of candidates the voter has voted for in the past (recalled primary vote is notoriously unreliable, unlike general election vote).

While it’s true that the Michigan polling error was well within range of a normal primary polling …

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🗺 How redistricting is shaping 2026

It’s a theme that we’ve returned to again and again: only a handful of seats will decide control of Congress and with this year’s re-redistricting, districts have been purposefully engineered to reduce the number of seats Republicans need to spend money defending.

Cook Political’s new PVI ratings are out showing relatively safe Republican districts (R+5 or more) as an all-time high, Democratic safe seats inching up, and swing seats plummeting. As we’ve said before, it’s not about taking Democratic seats and making them Republican. It’s about taking swing seats and making them Republican. But swing seats aren’t fully dead yet: Realignment post-2020 increased the number of competitive districts; swing seats in the Cook formulation were at an all-time low after 2018. But they did take a hit with this redistricting cycle, plunging them near Trump 1.0 lows.

One response to redistricting was that Black voter turnout surged in Southern…

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Nate Silver’s chart showing voting behavior by education level and income struck a chord on X this week, as all debates about the relative status of highly educated people inevitably do on that platform. And the reason is that is tracks closely with our intuitions about the “downwardly mobile” — people who are highly educated but who don’t earn much money. Those voters are the most Democratic in the country.

And the most Republican? The working class voter who never went to college but is middle class or even wealthy.

This isn’t just a story about two distinctive groups of people. Obviously, education is correlated with income, and so higher-income people tend to be more Democratic now. But you can probably tell a story across the electorate of the relative winners economically in each cohort voting Republican and the relative losers voting Democratic. More data on that soon.

📊 Americans are turning against data centers

A new POLITICO/Public First…

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The first come from our annual Political Tribes survey, which show voters leaning strongly to the left on an array of economic policy positions, a leftward tilt that has gained steam in recent years.

And then there’s our polling from this month, where any version of a capitalist economic model is viewed more favorably than any version of a socialist or social democratic economy.

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📊 Happy Tribes/Quadrants to all who celebrate

Echelon Insights’s 2026 Political Tribes came out yesterday. Built on answers to questions about social issues, economic issues, and trust in institutions, the tribes have been updated for 2026. The most left-leaning tribe gained five points, while other groups in the left and center fell.

As in previous years, we provide different lenses for uncovering the tribal alignments of American voters: the tribal cluster analysis, our political quadrants, and the multiparty democracy question we’ve run since 2019.

Before I get to some of the conclusions from this year’s study, I’ll put in another plug for the Tribes interactive feature on Echelon’s website, which includes 2D and 3D visualizations of the tribes, full quadrants data going back to 2021 with the ability to filter and isolate very specific subgroups, and for the first time, trendline data on all questions asked as part of the tribes/quadrants studies. If you prefer…

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🇺🇲 America at 250: What Americans think

Happy 250th birthday to the United States of America, the country the data tells us remains No. 1 economically and militarily. Many have predicted its decline, but in recent decades every challenge from a would-be competitor, whether Japan, Europe, or China, has eventually lost steam. Numbers aside, it is a pretty great place. More than the official celebrations, the World Cup visitors marveling at our material bounty and natural beauty remind us of that.

The political decisions made in 1776, with their healthy aversion to centralized power, allowed America to fully reap the economic bounty of another product of 1776: the capitalist system envisioned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Centuries of entrepreneurial immigration have reinforced that advantage. Together, these factors formed natural antibodies to the socialist influence that sapped the vital spirit of many European countries. Two and a half centuries of pol…

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🇦🇴 The DSA is now the big city default

The Democratic Socialists of America’s victories in Congressional primaries feel seismic because they come on the heels of a string of major victories in big cities, including a DSA-backed candidate winning the Washington, D.C. mayoral primary, a DSA candidate making it to the runoff in Los Angeles, and Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City. By the end of the year, the mayoralty of the country’s three largest cities may be in the hands of hard-left progressives.

If you’re thinking this is a workers’ revolution — not quite yet. Support for these candidates came from wealthier, better educated — and whiter — precincts. Even the race the DSA was not supposed to win — Darializa Avila Chevalier’s win against Adriano Espaillat, came in a Harlem-based precinct that’s seen a lot of gentrification in its Manhattan-based parts. Meanwhile, moderate Ritchie Torres saw no real challenge in a South Bronx district that’s still the poo…

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The Resistance was fundamentally united by a belief that the system worked—and in the Obama era it in fact did for liberals. The system had come a long way in solving the major representational challenges of modern America, electing the first Black President and elevating the first female major party nominee. RBG sat on the Supreme Court, issuing her scathing dissents. Whatever the problems with the system, they could be …

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🇺🇲 Split Ticket’s new House model

Split Ticket’s model for The Argument finds Democrats with a strong advantage in the House (86% chance of majority) but Republicans favored in the Senate (56%).

Rather than opining extensively on this model specifically, I’d recommend you have a listen to Split Ticket’s Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini on the GD Politics podcast.

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📊 Where unlikely voters differ the most from likely voters

Marquette Law School poll’s Charles Franklin has published a great summary table breaking down views on various topics between the likely, registered, and unregistered electorates.

You may have heard me harp on this before: polls can look really different depending on whether you’re interviewing all adults or just likely voters. Usually, a poll of all adults will show Trump approval in the 30s while a poll of registered or likely voters is more likely than not to show it in the 40s.

What’s really interesting is not how the overall number shifts based on the inclusion of different respondents, but what these marginal groups themselves believe. So I fed this table to Claude and it had it run an imputation to find what the unlikely voter in Marquette polling thinks, be that registered but not likely voters or unregistered adults. These numbers are just estimates based on the rounded table, and may be noisy, …

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🤠 Do Democrats have a shot in Texas?

The Texas Senate race is set after Donald Trump ousted his second incumbent Republican Senator this month. Nate Cohn makes the argument that a blue Texas blue Texas isn’t just a dream for Democrats anymore — using current national polling, you can get to a place where it’s a better pickup opportunity for Democrats than Ohio or Alaska based on demographics alone:

Or consider another example: Imagine we adjusted the results of the last presidential election by shifting each racial demographic group’s support to match the latest Times/Siena poll results. Based on the poll’s findings, Texas would be expected to tilt Democratic in this national political environment. Interestingly, the other red states Democrats are targeting in their pursuit of Senate control — like Ohio and Alaska — would still remain red in this exercise, even though each voted more Democratic in 2024 than Texas. That’s because Democratic gains among nonwhite vot…

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🗳️ Here’s just how much gerrymandering has wiped out competitive seats

I keep making the point that gerrymandering isn’t just about winning seats for your party. It’s also about taking competitive seats off the board. Now with South Carolina wrapping up its redraw, we’ll soon be able to close the books on the 2026 redistricting wars and know where the dust has settled.

Redistricting alone won’t be enough to protect the Republican House majority, but a new interactive visual from The Intersection shows exactly how valuable the redistricting campaign has been in narrowing the playing field. The tipping point seat in the House (based on 2024 presidential vote) moved from Trump +3.1 AZ-1 to Trump +5.1 PA-10. If the election were being held today, Republicans would be favored to lose either one. But Democrats doing 4 points better nationally than in the tipping point seat would yield them a meager five extra seats. Under this scenario, where a Democratic wave crests in…

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🏭 The new politics of American business

The team at Echelon released a report this week on the voter coalitions supporting and opposing 13 key industries. You can download the full report here.

Applying our political tribes framework to views of American business, we found 7 “tribes” with distinctive belief systems that guide their support or opposition to various industries. We think these are pretty revealing about the dueling impulses within each of the major coalitions, and also about the mindset of conflicted swing groups. Here are what those tribes look like:

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It’s the 400th edition of The Intersection! Here’s what was covered in past centennial editions:

• No. 100 — December 13, 2019: Blue Wave in the UK — Boris Johnson’s landslide victory

• No. 200 — December 17, 2021: Americans prefer suburbs, Democrats’ second post-2020 Latino postmortem

• No. 300 — January 19, 2024: Trump’s Iowa victory

Thank you for your support as we chronicle the evolution of data-driven politics. Here’s to the next 100.

🏛️ VRA Section 2 is effectively a dead letter. Are Dems out of good redistricting moves?

The Supreme Court’s long-awaited decision in Callais v. Louisiana has come down. As expected, it renders the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 a dead letter — but stops short of eliminating it entirely. But the standard of proof is so high that it will do nothing to stop a bonanza of Southern redraws, creating maps that could look something like this:

And Democrats could well counter with the following in states that they control, entirely eliminating Repub…

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