Echelon's quadrants are an SOS for economic conservatives

Thermostatic public opinion, a reversal on views of the Congressional parties, New England moderates, the realignment is global, challenging the idea that ChatGPT rots your brain

No. 366 | July 11th, 2025

🗣️ Public Opinion

Echelon Insights’ annual political quadants are out. Here’s the interactive tool where you can break down with the results yourself.

We get at these by asking a series of social and economic questions — with a third establishment vs. populist dimension added this year (more on that soon!).

And this year, the position of economic conservatism continued to deteriorate, to just 36% of the public who could be considered right of center on economic policy issues, to 64% who are left of center. That’s driven by Republicans continuing to move to the center on economic issues, as shown in this animated density plot by Echelon intern Ben Aizenberg:

Economic conservatives have dropped from 39 percent in 2024 to 36 percent in 2025. In 2021, 47 percent of the voting public was in the economic conservative bloc.

Voters agree with the liberal position across 8 of 9 economic issues. Only on two questions is it really close — on alignment with the idea that “Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard” and “The fact that some people in the U.S. are rich and others are poor is an acceptable part of our economic system.”

In a sense, this is not too surprising: people are symbolically conservative but operationally liberal — holding conservative views on the 30,000 foot values questions (hard work, what kind of economic system we want) but then supporting tax increases on the wealthy and every spending program under the sun.

But this year, support for those bedrock values started to crack — with faith in hard work declining from a net 22 point advantage to net 6 points.

This doesn’t stop Republicans from winning elections, of course. It’s not news that a significant share of Trump voters fit into the populist quadrant — left on economic issues, right on social issues. But it does underscore how much the foothold that fiscal conservatism once had has eroded — especially as these issues have taken a back seat under Trumpism, with its relentless focus on winning the culture war.

It is these issues that Elon Musk seeks to revive with his America Party, but he faces an uphill battle because true economic conservatism represents a small minority of the electorate — and shrinking.

Along with the quadrants, we also released our Multiparty Democracy question. Labor retakes the lead — after the Nationalists leading for the first time last year.

In this alternate system, the Nationalist Party has overtaken the Conservatives as the main right-wing party, but has lost some steam from this time last year.

Some of our quadrant results also reflect thermostatic public opinion — a backlash against the policies of the incumbent party. We see that more clearly in a shift back to the center on immigration, and to some extent on entitlement programs, a focus of the OBBB debate. And today, Gallup is out with a report showing the same thing, showing people much less concerned about illegal immigration than they were just last year. See the long-term trendline for whether voters think immigration should be increased, decreased, or kept the same:

While it’s easy to interpret this as a thermostatic shift left, it’s also a reflection of the fact that, objectively, border security is now much less of a problem than it was a year ago.

Under Trump, illegal crossings at the southern border have plummeted to near zero. At a minimum, the growth of new illegal immigration has stopped. Contrast this with a year ago, when it was easy for even those on the left to concede that the situation had gotten out of control. Now, it’s easier for those people to go back to their previous position on the issue. And pro-immigration sentiment is not (yet) at levels recorded during Trump’s first term. So far, it looks mostly like a reversion to the mean thanks to the problem being handled.

Polling from The Economist/YouGov highlights a striking new dynamic since the election: Republicans are now more satisfied with their Congressional leaders than Democrats are with theirs.

🇺🇲 2024

Analysis from Split Ticket identifies ideological moderation as the reason behind New England’s Congressional Democrats’ electoral success, in spite of the party’s failings at the Presidential level.

👫 Demographics

The Washington Post’s Department of Data column examines minority voters in New York, Toronto, and London. Their data shows that the realignment is not just about Trump: it’s global.

Derek Thompson mulls over the societal implications of the significant drop in partying and drinking in the U.S., a trend particularly pronounced among younger Americans.

🗽 NYC Mayor

Nate Cohn explains that Zohran Mamdani’s win is a reflection of the Democratic party’s shift left in recent years. He also uncovers voter file data debunking the myth that Mamdani did well among Trump-trending minorities in New York City. Democratic primary voters voted for Harris by 89-6 — with much of that 6 concentrated in the Orthodox community which voted as a monolith for Cuomo.

While Mr. Mamdani may have appeal among some of the Democrats in New York who swung toward President Trump last November, those voters did not drive his victory: Kamala Harris had an 89-6 lead among Times/Siena poll respondents from October 2024 who subsequently voted in the mayoral race, based on their voter records, compared with a 66-24 lead among the registered Democrats who sat out the primary.

Although the sample of Trump ’24-Democratic primary ’25 voters is so small that I shouldn’t look at it, I must note that a majority of them were Orthodox Jews. Whether they’re actually a majority or not, the actual results make it obvious Mr. Cuomo did indeed win many Trump voters in Orthodox enclaves like Borough Park and South Williamsburg, where he sometimes won nearly 10 times as many votes as Ms. Harris did last November.

Jane Rayburn, pollster for the Mamdani campaign, appeared on The Downballot podcast to discuss how her firm, Workbench Strategy, helped assess the electorate and how she knew his message was connecting with voters

🗺️ Data Visualization

The New York Times reported on China’s increasing commitment to ocean research and its future military implications.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

Ethan Mollick of One Useful Thing re-interprets the MIT Media Lab’s “Your Brain on ChatGPT” study, arguing that it’s not AI itself that can impair our thinking, but how we prompt and use it. And of course, the rub is that the default prompts most people use aren’t helpful for learning. You need more advanced prompts that force deeper thinking and asking it to act as a tutor so that you can actually learn.

🔵 The Democrats

In The Liberal Patriot, Juan David Rojas explains why Barack Obama was so much more successful at courting working class voters than the current Democratic Party establishment.

“Why then did so many working-class voters prefer Obama to the self-described most “progressive president in American history”? The mundane reality is that the former president’s record on issues such as energy policy and immigration appealed to a broad swath of American workers. In contrast, the policies and rhetoric of Biden and Kamala Harris resonated overwhelmingly with college-educated professionals—and alienated many of Obama’s working-class voters.”