Over the past quarter century, campaign consultants and elected officials realized that citizens don’t make political decisions through rational analysis of what choice is in their interest. Instead, humans make decisions primarily based on emotion, and those emotions are based on underlying values. Literature scrutinizing this has emerged from neuroscience, political psychology, political science, and behavioral economics, including Drew Westen’s Political Brain, Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, and Karen Stenner’s The Authoritarian Dynamic—to examine how decisions and identities function. The bottom line is that reason takes a back seat to gut feelings, so understanding a person’s core values is essential to knowing how to persuade them.
That’s why I’ve long been a fan of the civic research organization More in Common’s Hidden Tribes model, which segments America’s population based not on demographic metrics like gender, race, class, or income but on their beliefs. In 2017, they surveyed 8,000 Americans about their moral values and parenting styles. They probed their ideas about personal responsibility, identity, threats, and trust. More in Common* followed up with focus groups and one-on-one interviews to understand their psychological differences, moral foundations, and group identity constructs, building a bridge between the large-scale data sets produced by pollsters and the small-group insights of social science researchers. They then sorted respondents into seven clusters or “tribes,” which predict individual political views better than conventional demographic categories did. If you need to slice and dice the American electorate, this is a powerful way to do it.
As a scholar of North American regionalism, however, I’ve also long been aware of dominant regional cultures’ power over a huge range of phenomena in the U.S. As I laid out in my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, our sectional differences date back to the rival colonizing projects on the eastern and southwestern rims of what is now the U.S in the 17th and 18th centuries. These rival regional cultures settled mutually exclusive strips of much of the continent, laying down cultural norms and attitudes toward authority, honor, diversity, liberty, identity, and belonging. There are eleven “American Nations” today, and you can read about them in this summary at the research project I run, Nationhood Lab, or in shorter form, in this story from the Monthly.
Their presence has shaped our history, our constitution, and electoral politics. I’ve shown how they’ve impacted elections—the 2020, 2016, and 2012 presidential contests; the 2022, 2018, and 2014 midterms; and the 2013 and 2011 off-terms—plus per capita gun violence, life expectancy, diabetes, obesity and physical inactivity, Covid-19 vaccination rates, and attitudes about threats to democracy.
I’ve long fantasized about merging the two approaches, discovering if and how the Hidden Tribes are maldistributed across the American Nations. Thanks to More in Common and their polling partner, YouGov, I have some provisional answers I posted last week at Nationhood Lab (with some methodological details) that you can see in the accompanying graphics.
More in Common identified seven “tribes”: Progressive Activists, Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged, Moderates, Traditional Conservatives, and Devoted Conservatives. You can read about each of these at More in Common, but the bottom line is that there are two wings—Progressive Activists (8 percent of Americans) on one end, Traditional and Devoted Conservatives (a combined 25 percent) on the other—that have strong ideologies and spurn compromise, especially with one another. For differing reasons, everyone else—nearly two-thirds of the country—makes up what More in Common calls “the Exhausted Majority,” who are more ideologically flexible and frustrated that politics has become a Manichean struggle.
The graph below (and in this article) shows how the Tribes are distributed in each regional culture based on the location of approximately 7,800 of the 8,000 survey respondents. (The others either didn’t have location data or were from New France, First Nation, or Greater Polynesia, which didn’t have enough respondents to plot the tribes confidently; you can find information on the sample sizes for the rest of the nations and other details here. We also note that the 2017 survey weighted respondents nationally and in traditional Census Bureau domains but not by the American Nations model.)
The first thing you’ll notice is that the relative size of the “wings” varies considerably between outlying regions. Proportionally, there are three times as many Progressive Activists in Left Coast (12 percent) than there are in the Deep South (4 percent), which is tied with Far West for being the major nation with the largest conservative wing (at 29 percent of the population) and the largest far-right Devoted Conservative contingent (at 8 percent). In the Midlands, historically the great swing region, the distribution of the Hidden Tribes is nearly identical to that of the U.S. as a whole.
The most conservative nations—Deep South, Greater Appalachia, and Spanish Caribbean—are also the ones with the largest proportion of the Politically Disengaged. This group is considerably poorer, less educated, and less tolerant than the average American and almost invisible in local community life. The nations with the largest share of Passive Liberals—a cohort of would-be Democratic voters who less frequently participate in the political process—are the historically most communitarian ones: Yankeedom, New Netherland, and Left Coast (all at 17 percent). Moderates—politically engaged centrists—are most consequential in El Norte where, at 18 percent of the population, they are the largest single Tribe after the Politically Disengaged; they are the least present in Left Coast where, at 12 percent, they are no more numerous than Progressive Activists.
When it comes to protecting democracy, the threat is largely embodied by Devoted Conservatives, which is where the hardcore MAGA crowd is found. More in Common describes members of this tribe as: “deeply engaged with politics and hold strident, uncompromising views [and] feel that America is embattled, and they perceive themselves as the last defenders of traditional values that are under threat.” This “tribe” is substantially larger in the Deep South (at 8 percent) and Greater Appalachia (7 percent) than in Yankeedom, New Netherland, Left Coast, El Norte or Tidewater—“blue” regions all—where they comprise about 5 percent of the population. These patterns mirror what Cornell’s Doug Kriner and I found in regionally parsing a 2022 poll of Americans’ attitudes about threats to democracy.
These results further emphasize just how rapidly the Tidewater is changing. American Nations, published in 2011, described it as a regional culture that was decomposing on account of having been prevented from expanding westward in the mid-18th century (by the presence of Greater Appalachia) and then, in the 20th century, by the presence of an expansive federal government around the District of Columbia and Hampton Roads/Norfolk, site of the world’s largest naval base. By far the most powerful region in the Early Republic, the conservative, aristocratic leaders of the Tidewater sought to replicate the neo-feudal manorial society of the English countryside from which they had descended. It ultimately turned to chattel slavery to fill in the role of the serfs. It was home to the Confederate capital, but its power was already eclipsed by the Deep South by the 1860s. By the 1960s, its influence began pushing back from Arlington, Alexandria, and Fairfax County in the D.C. suburbs. That shift has accelerated, especially in the past 20 years, with Virginia—despite its large Greater Appalachian section—becoming a blue state and Biden beating Trump in the region as a whole—which includes southern Maryland, the Delmarva, and an eastern North Carolina by a staggering 19 points.)
Indeed, the Hidden Tribes data shows the Tidewater now has the second most liberal population in the country after Left Coast. It has a higher proportion of Progressive Activists (11 percent) and Traditional Liberals (14 percent) than either New Netherland or Yankeedom. It also has the smallest share of Politically Disengaged in the country at just 20 percent of the populace, almost a third less than in the Deep South or Spanish Caribbean. The Dedicated Conservative bloc is just 5 percent, the same as in the longtime “blue” regions, and there are no more Traditional Conservatives than there are in Left Coast (both 19 percent).
This is a truly astounding shift in historical terms—from the capital of an ethnonationalist, white supremacist regime to a liberal stronghold—and one that seems to be accelerating with time. And it doesn’t seem like the Midlands is absorbing the region to its north—compare the mix of the tribes, for instance—but rather creating something new from the ashes of a vanquished racial slave-and-caste system.
*Thanks to More in Common for allowing us to access their data, to their partners, YouGov, for crunching the numbers, and to John Liberty at our data partner, Motivf, for the graphic.
