The Library
Politics & Polarization
22America Now Holds One Election, Not 3,100: The Total Nationalization of the County Swing
In 2024, 87% of counties swung within 5 points of the national swing — up from 21% in 1976 — and only 86 counties flipped parties, versus 1,565 a half-century ago.
From Denomination to Devotion
The religious fault line in American voting did not fade — it rotated. The mid-century divide between Catholic Democrats and Protestant Republicans has given way to one between the devout and the secular.
Information Doesn't Cool the Argument. It Sharpens It.
Across the ANES 1972-2024, the partisan gap on policy and racial attitudes is widest among the most politically knowledgeable Americans — every year, and by a growing margin. Information sorts; it does not depolarize.
One Country, Two Timelines
ANES, GSS, and county returns show the American South did three things at once: it realigned on party and the vote, converged on economics, and grew more distinct on religion and culture.
Partisanship Ate the Thermometers
For sixty years Americans have rated social groups on a 0–100 scale. Which dividing line organizes those feelings used to be race. Now it is party.
Rich Counties Still Lean Republican — Once You Control for Diplomas — and Ethnicity, Not Education, Drove the 2016-24 Shift
In a county-level horse race income loses to education in every cycle — and conditional on education, richer counties are reliably MORE Republican — while the map of where education fails to predict the Trump-era shift is almost entirely a story of Hispanic and immigrant America.
The Abortion Sort
Across the ANES 1980-2024, abortion traveled from a cross-cutting issue on which the parties were statistically tied to the clearest single marker of party. What had been a three-point gap became one of more than fifty.
The Diploma Divide Is a Culture Divide
The college education gap on economic redistribution has collapsed to near zero while the gap on cultural attitudes held — by 2008-24 the cultural gap is about three times the economic one. The Brahmin Left being born in real time.
The Economy Is a Partisan Mirror
Ask Americans whether the economy got better or worse last year and they will mostly tell you who sits in the White House. The gap between the parties' answers has roughly doubled — and it snaps shut and reopens at every inauguration.
The Flip Counties Felt It First
In the places that voted for Obama and then Trump, people rated their lives about like everyone else's. What sagged, years before 2016, was where they thought their lives were headed.
The Great Divergence — Political Identity of U.S. High School Seniors, 1976–2023
For four decades, American boys and girls finishing high school described their politics in almost the same terms. Then, around 2016, the two lines split — and never came back together.
The Great Sorting — How Americans Re-Sorted Into Two Parties
For most of the twentieth century, a college degree marked you as a Republican. Today it is one of the sharpest predictors that you are a Democrat. Seventy years of survey data tell the story of a coalition turned inside out.
The Income Ladder Flipped: America’s Richest Voters Are Now Its Most Democratic
Across 230,000 CES presidential-vote reports, the classic income gradient — poorer means more Democratic — inverted between 2008 and 2024, and the $150k+ bracket is now the most Democratic income group in the country.
The Office Ladder of Defection
Americans once happily voted for a president of one party and a congressman of the other. Over fifty years that split-ticket structure first widened, then collapsed into a straight party line.
The Party of Science Switched Sides — and Then COVID Tripled the Gap
Fifty years of GSS data show Republicans went from the most science-confident party to the least, with the partisan gap exploding from 7 points to 28 after 2020 while the military gap collapsed to zero.
The Purple County Is a Lie
Drop below the county map, to the 181,149 precincts where ballots are actually counted, and most of America's "moderate" places dissolve into deep-blue and deep-red neighborhoods that never meet. The country is more sorted than the choropleth admits.
The Unpacking
For a generation the Big Sort ran one way: Americans piling into landslide neighborhoods where they never met the other side. Below the county line, between 2016 and 2024, it went briefly into reverse — and the Democratic city did most of the unpacking.
Two Shocks, One Mirror
A Black president and a killing in Minneapolis were supposed to bend the arc of American racial opinion. The survey record says one barely registered — and the other moved the country sharply, briefly, and only on one side of the aisle.
Voting Against the Grain
About four in ten partisans live in a county that votes the other way. Pick one of the four kinds of partisan and watch how — and where — they break from their party at the ballot box.
Who Censors Whom
For half a century the GSS has asked whether unpopular speakers should be allowed to speak. The question is no longer which party is more tolerant but tolerant of whom.
Whose America Is Thriving? Whoever Just Won.
Ten years and 3.5 million interviews show partisans' life evaluations crossing twice — once when Barack Obama took office, and again, in the opposite direction, when Donald Trump did.
Your County Can’t Change Your Mind: Party Beats Place 8-to-1
Pooling 200,000+ CES interviews from 2013-2021, a Democrat in a Trump+20 county holds policy views nearly identical to a Democrat in a Biden+20 county — while disagreeing with their Republican neighbors by 40+ points on almost everything.
Happiness & Well-Being
13Deaths of Despair vs. Felt Despair
Lay a decade of Gallup feelings over the county map of suicide, drug, and alcohol deaths, and the measure that tracks mortality best is not sadness or worry — it's physical pain, followed by the belief the future holds nothing better.
Does Community Substitute for Connection?
Putnam's heirs promised that civic fabric lifts everyone. Three and a half million Gallup interviews ask the sharper question: does it lift the people who need it most?
Fifty Years of American Evenings
Since 1974 the GSS has asked the same four questions: how often do you spend an evening with relatives, with friends, with neighbors — or at a bar? The answers trace a half-century in which company grew rarer and screens grew brighter.
Happiness Moved Inside Borders
Between 2006 and 2019 the world got happier and nations grew more alike — yet inside 39 of 42 countries, the gap between the happiest and unhappiest citizens widened.
Smiles and Ladders: Where Good Days and Good Lives Come Apart
Rwanda has some of the world's best days and its worst self-rated lives. Lithuania, the reverse. A map of where good days and good lives come apart.
The Loneliness Geography
Loneliness and depression have opposite geographies: one is young, single, and urban; the other is rural and deprived. A ZIP-code-level map of American isolation.
The Plateau Is in the Tail, Not the Mean
The legend that money stops buying happiness at $75,000 was computed on this very survey. Plot the whole distribution of well-being instead of its average, and the plateau moves: it belongs to the unhappiest Americans — and to feelings, not judgments.
The Stress Decade: How the World's Days Got Heavier, 2008–2019
Between 2008 and 2019 — before anyone had heard of COVID-19 — the share of humanity reporting a stressful day rose by ten percentage points. Enjoyment never moved.
The Thin Cushion: Money Softens Few of Life's Blows
Fifty years of American survey data say wealth softens remarkably few of life's blows — and for some, the well-off fall further.
The Two Clocks of Growing Old
As people age, the mind's agitations — stress, anger — fall to lifetime lows, while pain and sadness climb. And whether old age is calm or anxious is sorted, above all, by money.
The U-Curve of Happiness Is Breaking — at the Young End
For two generations, happiness sagged in midlife and recovered with age. In the 2020s the curve snapped at its left end: the young are now the unhappiest Americans.
The U-Curve, Redrawn
The famous U-shaped happiness curve — high in youth, low at midlife, rising again in old age — is real, but mostly a privilege of the rich Anglosphere. Across much of the world, life-evaluation simply falls with age.
What a Year of Life Costs
In Cincinnati, ZIP codes one year of life apart differ by about $18,000 in median home value; in San Francisco, $141,000. The housing market already prices life expectancy.
Health
12A Day on the Plate — How America’s Children Eat, Move, and Grow
What 5,610 survey records reveal about how young Americans eat, drink, move, and grow — and the quiet inequalities hidden inside the averages.
Four Subway Stops, Twenty-Four Years
Within a single American county, life expectancy at birth can differ by more than two decades. A tract-level tour of New York and Chicago.
Reading the Population’s Vital Signs — Mental Health at the Emergency Room Door
Every month, more than 6,900 emergency departments tell the CDC who walked in — and why. Mental health leaves a trace in that stream. Here is how to read it without being fooled.
The Coefficient Zoo
Fifty-one regressions per health behavior, 306 small models in all: five behaviors fall with income in every state, but binge drinking rises with it almost everywhere. Money doesn't buy abstinence; it changes the vice.
The Curve That Bent — U.S. Drug Overdose Deaths, 2018–2024
For six years the rate of drug overdose death in America rose almost without pause. In 2024 it fell harder than it had ever risen.
The Flat Line
In deprived neighborhoods people see the doctor just as often — and get far less prevention. The health system manages disease where it could prevent it.
The Great Unwinding: Stress Is the Only Emotion with a Retirement Party
Between 55 and 70, the emotional weather of American life transforms: stress collapses, worry recedes, enjoyment returns. Stress, it turns out, is the only emotion that gets a retirement party.
The Slope Factory
We fit the deprivation–life-expectancy regression separately in 266 American metros. Every single slope came back negative. Many small models, one law.
The Starting Line
In 2018 an American infant's odds of dying varied threefold by state — from 2.8 per 1,000 in New Hampshire to 8.4 in Mississippi — and rose with the deprivation of the county it was born into.
Wear and Tear
You would expect the map of American disability to be a map of where old people live. It is not — disability nearly doubles from the most to the least advantaged neighborhoods, while the elderly are spread evenly across both.
Where It Is Deadliest to Be Poor
Rich Americans live about as long no matter where they live. Poor Americans' lifespans depend on their address — and the places that stretch them are not the places with the most doctors, but the places where fewer people smoke.
Within Reach — Four Decades of How Available U.S. Teens Think Drugs Are
Every year, American high-school seniors are asked a simple question: how hard would it be to get each of these drugs, if you wanted some? Four decades of answers trace the rise and fall of whole drug eras — and end on a striking, broad retreat.
Consumer Finance
2Feeling Rich Is Not the Same as Being Rich
Across 147 countries, money reliably buys the feeling of financial sufficiency — and the feeling never tops out. But whole regions feel far richer, or poorer, than their income says they should.
The Peak and the Plateau — A Decade of American Financial Well-Being
For a decade, Americans felt steadily better about their money. Then 2022 took it back — and the recovery never came.
Society & Belief
16An Index Autopsy
We rebuilt a deprivation index from scratch with PCA — no housing costs — and compared it to the canonical ADI. They agree on the gradient and disagree violently about New York.
Does Generosity Pay — Everywhere?
Across 155 countries, people who give — money, time, or a hand to a stranger — rate their lives higher and feel better day to day. The link holds in rich countries and poor ones alike, and is strongest for giving money.
Does the Ring Still Matter?
For fifty years, married Americans have reported being happier than everyone else. The gap has barely budged — and most of it survives even after you account for who tends to marry.
Keeping Up With the County
Same paycheck, richer neighbors: across 2.1 million Gallup interviews, living among wealthier people lowers life evaluation for the middle and barely touches the rich — while the poor are unbothered or slightly lifted.
Out of Place — The Geography of the LGBT Well-Being Gap
Daily distress runs high everywhere, but how poorly LGBT Americans rate their lives widens where the county turns Republican and rural — and in those same hostile places, far fewer people disclose being LGBT at all.
Raised Poor, Locked Up
For boys raised by poor families, the odds of growing up incarcerated rise with neighborhood deprivation — and, on the very same streets, fall heavily by race.
Reading Is a Girls' Country
Across 12,360 school districts, girls out-read boys in 99.9 percent. Math is contested ground — and which side wins tracks the district's affluence with eerie regularity.
Religion's Conditional Dividend
Across 143 countries, people who call religion important rate their lives higher and feel better day to day — but mainly where life is hard. As nations grow richer and safer, the religious advantage bends toward zero, and in the wealthiest places it disappears.
The Born-Rich Premium
What does a rich birth buy? The Opportunity Atlas prices the class premium neighborhood by neighborhood — and it varies twofold across America.
The Company You Keep
Twenty-one billion Facebook friendships, one question: which kind of social capital actually predicts whether poor children rise? Cross-class friendship does. Volunteering, clubs, and tight-knit networks barely register.
The Eight Americas
A k-means clustering of 81,000 census tracts sorts the country into eight kinds of neighborhood — ten years of life expectancy apart at the extremes, each with its own version of an American life.
The Ninety-Year-Old Map
Federal appraisers graded American neighborhoods A through D in the late 1930s. Lay those grades over the 2020 census grid and life expectancy, children's adult incomes, and homeownership still sort by the colors.
The Optimism Gap
Across 2.46 million Gallup interviews, Black Americans expect their lives to rise far more than white Americans do at every income level — and the gap is widest among the poor, even though white Americans rate their current lives higher.
The Paradox That Didn't Hold
In the 1970s American women called themselves happier than men. A famous study watched that lead vanish. Extend the data eighteen more years and the decline doesn't continue — it dissolves into noise.
The Places That Beat the Model
Five census facts predict almost half the variation in neighborhood upward mobility. This story is about the other half — the counties whose poor children climb five or six percentiles higher than their demographics predict, and the sunbelt boomtowns that fall just as far short.
The Vanishing Cradle
America's birth count fell off a cliff when the pandemic hit and, four years later, still has not climbed back. But the baby bust was not one story — some counties lost a quarter of their newborns while a few exurbs gained two-thirds.
Guns
1Half the Deaths, a Sliver of the Map
Half of America's gun homicide deaths occur in neighborhood clusters housing about one in ten Americans. Concentration depends on where you draw the box.