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.