Four takeaways from the 2026 Political Tribes

Conventional wisdom is mostly right, one candidate's obsession with Israel, how redistricting shifted the tipping point seat, new VoteHub tool, the American mosaic

No. 408 | July 10, 2026

📊 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…