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 poll finds that opposition to nearby data centers has risen sharply since January, with 41% now opposed to a facility within three miles of their home, up from 28% six months ago. The shift is especially pronounced among Democrats, though Republican support has softened as well.

Rising opposition to data centers is undeniable, especially as they become part of the conversation over rising utility costs. Attitudes towards data centers and AI continue to polarize on partisan lines, making it more likely that those data centers that do get built will go to redder, more rural territory — where regulatory barriers and the volume of opposition are both lower.

🇺🇲 More midterm forecasts coming online

The Decision Desk HQ forecast is a bit less bullish towards Democrats, giving them a 59% chance of winning the House, while Republicans hold a 60% chance of retaining the Senate — in line with other forecasts.

Kalshi’s new Midterms Hub uses prediction market odds to forecast the 2026 elections. Bettors also give Republicans a 57% edge to retain the Senate, but they’re more certain of a Democratic takeover in the House, at 83%.

📊 Pew pegs Party ID at D+4

Pew’s latest National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) shows a shift towards Democrats in party ID, with 47% of Americans identifying as or leaning Democratic and 43% Republican. A growing 10% of adults identify as true independents. That’s a shift from a tie in party ID in 2025.

This reflects in part a more Democratic midterm environment. At the same time, most of the shift since 2024 has been among leaners, with a D+1 gap in hard party ID this year versus an even split in 2024. The first year of presidential terms also tend to be good for the party in power, as voters rally around the winning party, with Republicans recording a high of 31 percent among hard partisans and Democrats a low of 28 percent. That’s the inverse of the situation in 2021, where Democrats held a 10 point advantage in party ID, 52-42, narrowing considerably to D+2 in 2022.

🗺️ Home sweet home

A very interesting chart was posted showing the states with the most residents born in state — but it appears to have been an AI hallucination. So I had Claude pull the real census numbers and make an accurate chart. The share ranges wildly from just 17% in Nevada to 74% in Louisiana.

Here’s the breakdown by county:

🇬🇧 Britons not familiar with the concept of expected value

73% of Britons would take an immediate £50,000 over a 50/50 chance to win £1 million, while just 21% would gamble for the bigger prize, which, by a factor of 10, is the higher-EV move.

🍽️ Where campaign money eats

The National Journal analyzed FEC records to see where campaign dollars are spent on dining in Washington—usually for fundraisers. Here are the top Democratic and Republican restaurants. Republicans like their steak, while Democrats love Italian food.

⚽ The dream job does exist

Coming off the World Cup, Arsenal is hiring a Research Engineer to build AI models that predict exactly what’ll happen in any given situation on the pitch.

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.

This is a stark manifestation of the political science finding that voters are symbolically conservative but operationally liberal. They embrace conservative branding and vibes, but they’re left-wing when it comes down to policy brass tacks.

There’s a certain conceit on the left that issue polling wins entitle them to win elections, but that’s not how things work in the real world. Voters remain loyal to certain right-coded ideals—capitalism, freedom, patriotism—that have stood the test of time and have built up significant brand equity.

The frustration goes the other way too. To the chagrin of conservative wonks, reverence for free markets has not translated into support for specific free market policy positions. That’s how voters can favor a free market economy by 41 points and Medicare for All by 31 points and rent control by 22 points.

At this point, it’s time to inject some common sense into our modern understanding of these debates: of course it’s possible to support price regulation that distorts markets and consider oneself a capitalist. In fact, this was once the entirety of the Democratic economic platform. It’s why Democrats would often win elections with disproportionate support from working class voters. Support for regulation wasn’t tainted by the brand of some weird and exotic economic ideology.

Thanks to the DSA, fairly popular economic ideas are now dragged down by a socialist label anathema in American politics before Bernie Sanders’ run in 2016. That’s not right-wing propaganda — the people most strongly pushing these ideas now actively embrace the socialist label, so you can’t get upset when voters notice.

This branding war is now polarizing the Democratic Party. Democratic voters split almost evenly on whether they prefer socialism (38 percent) or capitalism (35 percent). And in order to signal to swing voters that they’re not insane, moderates have to explicitly say that they’re capitalists, something which further alienates the socialist plurality in the party.

In the old days, Democrats didn’t need to make this choice. They could simply say they were for regulated capitalism. Today, that kind of positioning brands you an establishment stooge.

The thing here is that the symbolically capitalist, pro-regulation voter never went away. In fact, this group is something pretty close to the swing voter in American politics. I asked our internal AI to break down the 18% of voters who held favorable views of capitalism and supported universal rent control. It basically describes what a common-sense Democrat looks like:

🗳️ Generic Ballot (with Leaners)

This group breaks 69% Democratic / 29% Republican — a +39-point Democratic margin — compared to a much narrower +5-point Democratic margin in the full sample (49.5% D / 44.1% R). And it’s not soft: 55% say “Definitely the Democratic candidate.” This is the most striking finding — a group with favorable views of capitalism votes Democratic at a landslide clip.

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📅 2024 Presidential Vote

They voted for Harris over Trump 65% to 32% — again dramatically more Democratic than the full sample, which was essentially a coin flip (49% Harris / 47% Trump). This isn’t a newly converted group; they were already decisively Democratic in 2024.

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🧭 Who They Are (Demographics & Ideology)

Compared to the overall sample, this subgroup is:

• More male — 59% men vs. ~48% in the full sample

• Ideologically center-left — 48% liberal, 28% moderate, 24% conservative (vs. 29%/30%/39% overall) — a significant leftward skew

• Half college-educated (50%), roughly on par with the sample

• More likely to be Democrats — 50% Democrat vs. ~33% overall

• Income-skewed middle-to-upper: 37% earn $100K+ (vs. similar sample average)

The irony, again, is that many of the DSA’s stated aims are popular on paper, from universal health care to raising taxes on high earners. But they’re bound up in extremely unpopular non-economic positions: reducing the U.S. military presence overseas (-18), allowing those with criminal convictions to vote in U.S. elections (-28), abolishing police and prisons (-63) and allowing noncitizens to vote (-65). And most importantly, many of these standard-issue liberal economic positions now have to contend with the dead weight of the socialist brand (-29).

On the flip side, this is also why those on the right should not confuse the quadrants chart showing that most swing voters are culturally conservative and economically liberal with support for everything associated with Warrenomics. The voters in this quadrant still identify firmly as capitalists or free marketeers. They may want to level the playing field, but possess a strong work ethic and believe you can get ahead through your own effort and not government handouts. They think Democrats are the party of welfare cheats but still support Social Security, which they think is simply a repayment of the money they’ve put in. To them, anything even vaguely adjacent to socialism is anathema to the uniquely American ideal of getting ahead through your own hard work. Their economic ideology, such as it is, comes from their daily experiences not an economics textbook. These voters are in the middle on most things, which is why we should be wary of over-intellectualizing the shift to Trump among upper right-quadrant voters as any sort of mandate for moving in the direction of a Warren or Sanders economic agenda. The data shows that working class voters have moved right on economics as they’ve moved right politically—but they are still far from both the DSA and free market think tanks.

Policy has always sat in tension with the deeper values of the electorate. This is not new. Only the terminally online fail to understand that this common-sense middle still exists.

📊 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 a more traditional deck, there’s that too.

Here’s what stood out to me in this year’s edition:

1. Thermostatic public opinion is driving the electorate left

The Loyal Left tribe went from 16 to 21 percent, mostly at the expense of the center-left. The Liberal quadrant of the electorate is up from 43 to 47 percent. The Labor Party went from 31 percent to 34 percent in our multiparty democracy test.

This growth is coming from center-left tribes like Electability Democrats, American Institutionalists, and the Young and Disillusioned. The primaries show Democrats in no mood for compromise, and that’s reflected in how the party rank-and-file is answering policy questions.

2. Immigration hawk populism has peaked

In 2024, voters were more likely to say that they wanted illegal immigration dealt with through more border security and enforcement by a 36 point margin (versus by making it easier to immigrate legally). That margin has collapsed to 6 points.

That’s the main evidence we have from our poll for thermostatic public opinion — that’s the tendency of the public to view the policies of the in-party as overreaching and to move in the opposite direction as a check. It may also be a reflection of Trump’s success in sealing the border. Whether this situation is a result of difficulties or success, Republicans no longer have immigration as a motivator to get their voters to the polls.

That’s reflected in other parts of our survey. The “Nationalist” Party, which has immigration enforcement as its lead policy, has dropped from 30 to 20 percent support in two years, and the populist quadrant — on the left economically and on the right socially — saw its first decline ever.

3. Meanwhile, economic left-populism continues to rise

A big result from last year’s poll was the decline of traditional economic conservatism, a function of discontent with the post-pandemic economy. While this stabilized in 2026, economic conservatism still sits at multi-year lows. This didn’t have the expected political valence during the Biden Administration, when voters were angry at Democrats for the performance of the economy. But now that Republicans are in office, it’s Democrats who can capitalize on this leftward shift, and that’s fueling the rise of socialist candidates in Democratic primaries.

4. The three political tribes tilting 2026 towards the Democrats

Let’s start with this chart, where a few interesting things stand out:

Likelihood and motivation to vote in 2026 peaks at the ideological edges and is higher on the left than on the right.

Now, you don’t have to be particularly motivated or excited to vote in order to cast a ballot — that’s what the gap between likelihood and motivation is capturing on this chart.

But take a look at the gap in likelihood and motivation among the Moderate Right, which nicely captures your more culturally moderate non-MAGA Republican. They have the second lowest motivation to vote of any group. In a neutral political environment, they’d be behaving like Electability Democrats on the left, but their motivation to vote is 31 points lower. And our survey shows them shifting 14 points from 2024 to 2026.

That suggests the problem for Republicans going into the midterms is not discord on the MAGA right — it’s motivation and persuasion among Republicans NOT on the MAGA right, something Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote about back in May.

There are two additional groups where we see double digit shifts towards the Democrats, both of them potential swing groups: the New Republican Populists who are economically to the left and socially to the right, and the Young and Disillusioned, a more apolitical version of the Bernie Bro/DSA left, which swung towards Trump in 2024 but is now swinging to Democrats in 2026.

🤖 Conventional wisdom is mostly right

The Economist used GPT-5.5 to score 1,400 predictions from its leaders since 2000 and found a clear pattern: the closer a prediction hews to conventional wisdom, the more likely it is to be right. The publication’s biggest hits, such as warning early about the pandemic and the housing crash, were notable exceptions.

🇮🇱 Progressives like to talk a lot about Israel. Look who’s #1.

An analysis by Milan Singh in The Argument analyzes the content of Democratic fundraising emails and finds a telling divide: progressive insurgents talk a lot about Israel and AIPAC—much more than frontline candidates who rarely mention it at all—with some campaigns mentioning it more than half the time.

The number one spot is interesting—the erstwhile Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine. It’s really hard to imagine why Graham Platner would mention Israel/AIPAC more than any other candidate. 🤔

🗺 Redistricting shifts the House battlefield

The Downballot published updated 2024 election results for all congressional districts affected by mid-decade redistricting. The new maps tilt the median House district further toward Republicans. Before the redistricting push, the median seat was at Trump +3.1 in 2024. Today, it’s Virginia’s 1st district, at Trump +4.9. Either is winnable for Democrats in this political environment, suggesting a strong chance of a Democratic majority. The real story, as I’ve written before, is the lack of low-hanging fruit for Democrats beyond that.

🗺 VoteHub’s new campaign planner

VoteHub announced MapLab this week, a new tool that lets users model custom U.S. election scenarios by adjusting turnout, vote share, and demographics. The interactive platform is set to launch on July 15.

👫 The American mosaic

For July 4th, The New York Times published an incredibly detailed interactive visualization of American ancestry and identity.

🇺🇲 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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🇺🇲 Trump’s strongest soldiers lag run-of-the-mill Democrats in midterm motivation

We’ve been tracking motivation in the midterms for quite some time, and this month Kristen broke the numbers down by MAGA vs. non-MAGA Republicans.

MAGA Republicans are more motivated to vote, but even they lag all Democrats and leaners by 9 points in being extremely motivated to vote in the midterms.

We asked a similar question to more directly isolate the Trump factor in the midterms — getting an even wider spread. This question specifically focused on their party winning control of Congress to either stop or help Trump’s agenda. All Democrats were 16 points more extremely motivated than MAGA Republicans. Non-MAGA Republicans were 35 points less extremely motivated than Democrats.

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I want to focus less on the margin than the turnout, which was not only well to the right of 2025, but also 2024 and maybe even 2021—when Republicans won.

Republicans obviously didn’t succeed in defeating the referendum, but it showed that the fight was winnable, and more money invested early might have made a difference.

Absent a victory, Virginia provides Republicans with a rare optimistic counterpoint to the building narrative of a Blue Wave. If the fight is framed the right way, Republican voters will turn out the same or better relative to Democrats than 2024, even with an unpopular president in the White House. And if they recreate this performance even to some degree, they are virtually assured control of the U.S. S…

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🤖 The false promise of silicon samples

Following polling analysis cycle after cycle is like being stuck in the movie Groundhog Day. If there’s a polling miss, people will swear off horserace polling, but the breathless reporting of head-to-head polls always returns. Pollsters who publish outlier results or don’t weight on education are mocked, yet those pollsters persistently reappear.

This also applies to more novel approaches. In 2024, there was some buzz around a company called Aaru that promised synthetic AI respondents could be both cheaper and more predictive than real polls. The basic premise: instead of polling a real person, poll an LLM fed a diet of the latest news. Their results ended up tracking closely with the polling averages — at the time, a tell that this new AI form of “polling” was basically a copy-paste of normal polling rather than providing any sort of value-add. It ended up being just as off as the polling averages and forecasts which show…

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😡 America’s new age of discontent

Americans think the economy just plain sucks.

In 2024, you might have thought that electing Donald Trump would reset the public’s view of the economy back to what it was during Trump’s first term. After all, that’s people back then said they voted for. As I’ve noted before, there was reason to think this might work: economic perception rose sharply in the transition from Obama to Trump in 2016 and stayed pretty high throughout his first term—withstanding the shocks of the Covid pandemic.

That hasn’t happened this time.

A Reuters chart of economic approval over the last three presidencies drives the point home. Economic approval did briefly recover on Trump taking office in 2025 and then it quickly reset back to Biden-era levels. In the midst of the Iran war, it’s nosedived to a new low of 29% in their polling.

Even if inflation worries eventually subside, it seems likely that AI job loss anxiety will be next as the main narrative d…

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📊 Democrats no longer outnumber Republicans in the electorate

YouGov’s deep dive into the Cooperative Election Study — which has interviewed 60,000 Americans in every even-numbered year since 2006 — shows a consistent decline in the share of the electorate identifying as Democratic, now down to a near-even break with Republicans.

This is a trend I wrote about right after the 2024 election, except that in exit polls, Republicans actually outnumber Democrats and have since 2020. But it’s good to have a longitudinal dataset with solid subgroup breaks on party ID to do this analysis on. These trends by group confirm that the trend has been consistent across generations, with all groups getting more Republican as they get older.

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⛽ Americans don’t hate the Iran strikes. They hate what comes next at the pump.

Military action against Iran isn’t especially unpopular: in our latest omnibus, approval of U.S. military operations against Iran runs at a net -6 (43% support, 49% oppose) — better than Trump’s overall job approval (net -16) and far better than his foreign policy numbers (net -21). We also found that actual support for the strikes outpaces support for a theoretical Iran strike from January, essentially the same thing we saw before and after the Venezuela operation.

Despite the MAGA base actually being united on Iran, and the not-terrible numbers on the strike itself, Trump’s approval is at a new low. And the reason why seems pretty clear: rising gas prices from the shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz striking an affordability raw nerve. While Venezuela was a long-term net positive for U.S. energy supply, Iran is a short term net negative. Americans can be relatively deferential to a Pre…

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🫏 The Democratic Party’s moderates are hiding in plain sight

A new Manhattan Institute survey of nearly 2,600 Democratic voters finds a coalition that’s far more moderate than its loudest voices suggest. The party breaks into three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%) that takes consistently maximalist positions. Just 22% want the party to move further left while 38% want it to move toward the center. On issue after issue — immigration, trans policy, DEI, crime — the median Democrat looks nothing like the activist left that dominates the discourse.

🗳️ The 26 seats that will decide the House

DecisionDeskHQ has mapped out the 26 Republican-held districts most likely to flip in November. Five are seats Harris carried in 2024, but the main battlegrounds will be the 11 seats that Trump carried by 5 points or less. (And yes, this is all still subject to further redistricting in states like Virginia and Florida.)

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⭐ Lone Star primary takeaways

• White voters are in the drivers’ seat of Democratic primaries. Much was made of a Latino vote surge in the Democratic primary, but in fact, turnout surged more in white counties, especially in white, college-educated suburbs. That was the key to James Talarico’s victory. The education divide is increasing white liberal control of Democratic primary, jeopardizing the historic veto power Black voters have had in many primaries. Black voters came out strong for Jasmine Crockett, but she was unable to break through much beyond that to build a multiracial coalition that also included Hispanic and Asian voters, both groups that backed Talarico.

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