Americans have more in common than our political conversation suggests.
That is the encouraging conclusion of political scientists Stephen Ansolabehere and Brian Schaffner, writing recently in The New York Times. Their evidence comes from two decades of surveys of more than 700,000 Americans.
Asked to name the most important thing that happened to them in the past year, Trump voters and Harris voters gave the same three answers in the same order: a medical problem, household finances and the death of someone close. They are often more similar demographically than we imagine. And when Ansolabehere and Schaffner asked voters about 44 policy proposals, the average Harris voter and the average Trump voter agreed roughly half the time.
The authors attribute our misperceptions to politicians, the news media and social media algorithms. Close that perception gap entirely and a harder question remains: If Americans have so much in common, why does our politics feel as if everything is at stake in every election? With the midterms seven weeks away, that question deserves an answer.
The problem isn’t that Americans have too little in common. It’s that our political system requires them to agree about too much.
Start with those 44 policy questions. Agreement on half sounds reassuring. But political disagreements are not fungible. Two voters can agree on background checks for gun sales, more border security and expanding Medicaid, as large majorities of Harris and Trump voters do.
But suppose one believes that displaying the Ten Commandments in a public school appropriately acknowledges America’s religious heritage, while the other believes it is government imposing religion on their child. Or one believes abortion is the taking of a human life, while the other believes forcing a woman to continue a pregnancy violates a fundamental right. Or one sees broad gun ownership as an essential constitutional liberty, while the other sees restrictions on guns as essential to protecting children and communities.
The authors note that the remaining disagreements cluster on hot-button issues: immigration, assault rifles and abortion. They suggest that differing priorities should make compromise easier. Give ground on what you care about less. Win on what you care about more.
That is how people bargain over tax rates and highway spending. It is not how they handle questions of morality, identity or fundamental rights. No one will trade what they consider a human life, or a fundamental right, for a lower deficit. Those disagreements cannot be measured by counting them.
And our political system does not weigh every agreement and disagreement equally. It filters them.
Look at what the campaigns talked about in 2024. The Wesleyan Media Project found that through late August, two of every five pro-Democratic ads in House races mentioned abortion. More than 60 percent of pro-Republican House ads mentioned immigration.
Those choices make political sense. Campaigns talk about the issues that make people vote, donate and volunteer. Then another force kicks in: The people who care most intensely about politics have disproportionate influence over it.
In its 2014 study of political polarization, the Pew Research Center found that the most ideologically consistent Americans made up 21 percent of the public but 41 percent of campaign donors.
That creates a powerful feedback loop. The issues on which Americans disagree most intensely motivate the people most engaged in politics. Those people exert disproportionate influence on candidates and parties. Candidates and parties emphasize those disagreements to mobilize voters. And national elections determine which side gets the power to impose its answer on everyone.
Politics isn’t an average of everything Americans believe. It is disproportionately a contest over the things they cannot agree about.
And similarity is not the same as trust. Americans can share families, occupations and concerns and still distrust one another. According to a 2025 Pew analysis of the General Social Survey, 46 percent of Americans said in 1972 that most people could be trusted. By 2018, that figure was 34 percent. Pew’s own recent survey found the same.
That matters when losing an election means handing people you distrust enormous power over questions you consider fundamental.
Our response has been to try to change how Americans behave. “Listen to one another.” “Stop demonizing the other side.” “Get off social media.” “Find common ground.” “Elect better leaders.”
Those efforts are worthwhile. They also leave untouched the political structure that intensifies the conflict.
Imagine two people who disagree profoundly about religion, abortion, guns, immigration, education and the role of government. Give them one enormous institution and tell them to fight every four years over who runs it.
We should not be surprised when the fight gets ugly.
So we are asking the wrong question. Instead of asking how to make 340 million Americans agree about more things, we should ask how many things 340 million Americans actually need to agree on to live together as one people.
One answer is to substantially decentralize American political power by reorganizing the United States into an American Union. It would consist of two sovereign democratic republics — one predominantly red and one predominantly blue — while retaining the institutions Americans have powerful reasons to preserve together: common defense, a common currency, an integrated market, freedom of movement and our shared inheritance.
Two modern constitutions — one reflecting predominantly red preferences, the other predominantly blue — would be drafted and presented to voters, with states ultimately choosing whether to join either constitutional system and, if so, which one.
Such a reordering would not create two populations of people who think alike — nor should it. Both republics would contain substantial political minorities, competing parties and shifting coalitions. But each would be more politically cohesive than the nation is today and better able to resolve the questions that now divide Americans most intensely.
An American Union would not require us to give up on the idea that Americans are one people. It would begin with the recognition that being one people does not require being governed identically.
For more than two centuries, we have accepted that principle through federalism. Massachusetts and Mississippi do not have to make every policy choice the same way. But today the questions that most bitterly divide us have become national ones, and presidential elections decide who wields enormous federal power over the entire country.
An American Union would change those stakes. Neither side would need to capture Washington to stop the other from imposing policies it considers intolerable. Each republic would govern itself, while both preserve the institutions and relationships Americans continue to share.
And here is the paradox. Evidence that Americans have more in common than we think is usually offered as a reason to leave our political structure alone. It is better evidence for an American Union.
If Americans were truly two hostile peoples with nothing in common, preserving a union between them would make little sense. But that is not who we are.
We work together. We marry one another. We worship together. We attend the same schools and universities. We buy and sell to one another. We watch the same movies, listen to the same music and worry about our children, our parents, our health and our bank accounts.
Those are powerful reasons to remain part of something called America. But they are not reasons to require that every important political question have the same answer for everyone.
Ansolabehere and Schaffner end their essay with Patrick Henry’s declaration in 1774: “I am not a Virginian, but an American.” Fourteen years later, the same Patrick Henry led the fight in Virginia against ratifying the Constitution, warning that it would create a consolidated national government.
Two hundred fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, we assume that being one American people requires us to settle our deepest political disagreements through one national government. It doesn’t.
We do not have to govern one another on everything to remain one people.
Governing one another on fewer things is how we stay one.
Jordan Karp is a lawyer and writer based in New York with a keen interest in American political culture, institutional reform, and civic life.
