Explore the American electorate in 3D

Pew finds a Republican advantage, a surprising vacation home hub, Europe’s deadly aversion to AC, airport data, LDS community, men would rather shock themselves than sit quietly (and go to therapy)

No. 368 | July 25th, 2025

🗣️ Public Opinion

At Echelon Insights, we’ve spent years studying how voters align—not just by party, but by deeper values and belief systems. Our 2025 Political Tribes framework identifies eight core voter segments, each defined by their views on three key dimensions: economic conservatism, social conservatism, and attitudes toward the political establishment. From the anti-establishment left to the rising populist right, these tribes offer a more nuanced map of American politics than traditional labels allow.

In this latest update, we draw on fresh post-2024 election data to show how these groups are shifting. Non-college voters continue to migrate across traditional partisan lines, and groups like the “Middle American Optimists” and “New Republican Populists” illustrate the evolving coalition on the right. Our deck outlines how these tribes behaved in the 2024 election and what their demographic and attitudinal profiles reveal about the future of political competition.

To bring this data to life, our team built a 3D interactive visualization that plots each voter across the three ideological axes. Each point represents a real survey respondent, color-coded by tribe and enriched with demographic details on hover. Users can explore the clusters, identify overlaps, and examine how diverse or homogenous each tribe really is.

We explore the distribution of these political tribes across the country’s political parties. And while hardcore ideologues make up only a third of the Republican and Democratic Parties respectively…

...those who reliably vote are more ideologically cohesive. The “Hard Right” dominates the most reliable Trump voters, while making up less than 1 in 5 of the least reliable Trump voters. That points to the core problem with trying to build around new voting blocs: they simply don’t participate in party politics as much.

On our webinar about this yesterday, one reason I speculated that we might be seeing higher levels of ideological diversity in the GOP — namely, Republicans moving to the left on economic issues — is that they are now the bigger tent. This week, the Pew Research Center released its annual National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS), which provides new benchmark estimates on topics ranging from Americans’ party affiliation to Internet usage.

And for the second year in a row, Republicans are the largest party. As I wrote late last year, this is an historically exceptional outcome.

Pew’s gold standard study also includes breakdowns by gender and age that confirm a sharp shift to the right among young men:

👫 Demographics

Brian Potter of Construction Physics examines the distribution of vacation homes across the U.S. To the surprise of people along the coasts, the largest concentration of vacation homes is in the upper Great Lakes.

📰 Data Journalism

The FT’s John Burn-Murdoch shows how Europe’s lack of AC is deadly. It’s estimated to cause 60,000 excess deaths over and above U.S. levels — more than the level of excess deaths vs. Europe from gun violence in the U.S.

The Washington Post’s Department of Data researches which American airport is the busiest. And while Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson has the most passengers, Denver takes the crown as the busiest in any given hour — which likely explains my once missing a flight there thanks to the hellish security line. The article also explores the phenomenon of “banking” — alternating periods of arrivals and departures to more efficiently enable connections.

Alex Bass, a former Echelon colleague, has a phenomenal Substack called Mormon Metrics. In his latest piece, he analyzes the implications and causes of why LDS Enclaves (as designated by the American Communities Project) have an unusually strong sense of community.

🤖 Artificial Intelligence

This immersive visualization shows how transformers – the core architecture behind modern LLMs – convert words and phrases, along with their meanings, into mathematical representations (called embeddings) to predict the most likely next word in a sentence.

😂 Humor

People would rather lose money and give themselves electric shocks rather than sit in a room quietly.

Almost three times as many men did this behavior as women.