Who's more extreme in America today?

The centrist dead zone, the left keeps moving left, leaving the door open to a Congressional bid in 2030, X is not real life, the "mansplaining" every pollster knows, something I never realized

No. 390 | February 2, 2026

↔️ Who do voters see as extreme—or in the middle?

The perceived ideology of politicians is always a fascinating question, with Donald Trump seen as more moderate than his Democratic rivals in each of his winning presidential campaigns. But recent YouGov data has Trump viewed as the most polarizing figure in America, with 50 percent calling him far-right, more than the 42 percent who call Bernie Sanders far-left.

Some interesting characteristics of this data beyond just the individual data points: First, party leaders pay an extremism penalty. They tend to be viewed as more extreme than if they were a backbencher with the same political positions. And second, the center is an exceptionally unstable place. Only a handful of politicians are genuinely perceived as centrists. And that’s usually because they’ve fallen dramatically out of favor with the bases of their own party (Liz Cheney, Andrew Cuomo), rendering them unable to win a primary election and thus elected office.

Here’s a chart of the net left-right scores for each politician, excluding respondents who don’t know, which makes the point about the center pretty dramatically. With the exception of John Fetterman and Susan Collins, no national politicians perceived as truly centrist are in office today—and both of those will face tough re-election battles.

More evidence for the meme Elon Musk likes to share: people in the U.S. on the left have consistently moved further left since 1988 while the right has remained in place.

The cartoon version:

Legislatively, though, things can play out differently. VoteHub’s new Trump Score shows House Democrats siding with Trump more than Republicans breaking with him. But measures like this are susceptible to what kinds of votes occur and when. If you’ll remember, Trump had somewhat of a honeymoon period early in 2025 where Democratic opposition to him was not as strong. It’ll be interesting to see what this looks like in 2026.

🗺️ The most insane district of the gerrymandering wars just dropped

As visualized by State Navigate, here’s the new VA-7, stretching all the way from Arlington directly across from the monuments to Augusta County in the west. This would be my district. Should I run for it in a Red Wave year and serve a term until the next redistricting cycle? It was D+8 in 2024.

📱 X (and also Reddit) is not real life

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X), it’s become the most conservative-coded news source, with users who voted for Trump 55-35. Reddit is the most liberal-coded of all those that The Argument tested, 53-36 Harris. Cable, Facebook, and podcasts/YouTube lean right, TikTok, broadcast TV, Instagram, and newspapers lean left.

📣 The survey research evidence for “mansplaining”

Mansplaining is when men will explain how the world really works, even when they’re not the most informed on a subject. There’s evidence for it in survey research in the lower percentage of men who will say they’re unsure on any given question. The Argument ran the numbers and found that women say they “don’t know” 5% more often on average than men across surveys.

🏠 Visualizing housing costs in your neighborhood

An open source application on GitHub depicts the stark differences in the housing market at the ZIP code level.

🎰 Prediction markets are mostly sports betting, cont’d

Our friends at Paradigm have a new dashboard visualizing all market activity on Kalshi and Polymarket.

👫 Who’s marrying who

A massive chart of how often different groups of people marry someone from the same or different racial or ethnic groups.

🤖 The web is getting more productive

Because of AI coding tools like Claude Code, the number of new websites and iOS apps is rising.

🏛️ Once you see it you can’t unsee it

Something I never realized in 25 years of living in D.C….