American Snapshot—2026
What we can learn from the Pew Research Center's new political typology that includes nine distinct groups
Every year or so, one of the big polling outfits comes up with a new political typology intended to move us beyond the simplistic red/blue partisan dichotomy that dominates so much commentary about politics in the U.S. The reason that dichotomy dominates the way it does is obvious: Because America has a two-party system, and we’re quite narrowly (and deeply) divided. That reality leads us to think in terms of either/or: Either you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a Trump supporter or a Trump hater, a conservative or a liberal, a reactionary or a progressive, a red American or a blue American, and so forth.
At the most macro level, this dichotomous way of thinking is accurate. The 2024 election was Trump v. Harris. Either/or. 49.8 percent voted for the first, 48.3 percent voted for the second. That’s 98.1 percent of the more than one hundred fifty million people who voted. Studies have shown that had every eligible person voted that year, the outcome would have been very close to the same, with Trump probably expanding his margin somewhat. So there we are: Two countries, red and blue, narrowly divided, either/or.
But what if we had a multiparty/proportional system of representation? How would voters cluster then? That’s what pollsters are trying to determine when they propose more granular political typologies. This doesn’t mean an America with a multiparty/proportional system would produce these precise partisan alignments. Not at all. Many factors would contribute in different ways to producing different sorts of clusters. Yet if the typology is valid, the fault lines would still be there within the other clusters, at least in potential. And that means the typology promises to tell us something useful and informative about ourselves. It holds a mirror up to the electorate and tells us one plausible way to think about what’s bringing us together and pushing us apart.
The Politics of the Engaged
All of that by way of preparing for an examination of the political typology the Pew Research Center dropped last week. It breaks the electorate into a total of nine groups.
Right Anchor 1: No Apologies Right (9 percent) (highly engaged and partisan)
Right Anchor 2: Faith-First Conservatives (12 percent) (highly engaged and partisan)
Left Anchor 1: Leftward Progressives (7 percent) (highly engaged and partisan)
Left Anchor 2: Loyal Liberals (11 percent) (highly engaged and partisan)
Unconventional Right (12 percent) (less engaged, less partisan)
Pragmatic and Polite Right (11 percent) (less engaged, less partisan)
Order and Opportunity Left (18 percent) (less engaged, less partisan)
Left-Out Left (12 percent) (less engaged, less partisan)
The Tuned-Out Middle (9 percent) (least engaged, least partisan)
(Here is a quiz you can use to place yourself in one of these groups.)
The first four of those nine (38 percent of the electorate) contain voters who tend to be highly politically engaged, with 21 percent leaning right and 17 percent leaning left. These are voters who follow the news closely, think in consistent ideological terms, and are strongly wedded to one or the other party.
Then there are another four groups whose members make up 53 percent of the electorate. They are less politically engaged and blend partisanship with various off-sides commitments, making them imperfectly wedded to the two parties.
Lastly, there is a final group, adding up to 9 percent of the electorate, whose members are the true swing voters. They are highly disengaged from politics, unhappy with both parties, and inconsistently blend, and move among, different policy positions over time. These voters display no coherent partisanship at all.
Now, let’s dig down into the individual groups.
