The 7 types of U.S. voters
🗳️ T-1 day until what’s shaping up to be one of the closest elections in U.S. history
Issue #199: a hike with George H.W. Bush + doing hard things
By Harris Sockel
If all you do is read headlines today, you may end up believing two things: (a) America is divided, and (b) there are two types of voters: red and blue.
That’s why this essay by Kathleen Murphy felt, to me, like coming up for air. Murphy cites a 2018 project by the nonprofit More In Common which identified seven finer-grained voter types. You can take a quiz to learn which one you are:
- Progressive Activists (8%): “Government should make the world fairer.”
- Traditional Liberals (11%): “Government is about tolerance and compromise.”
- Passive Liberals (15%): “Eh, I believe in individual freedom but don’t think the government does very much.”
- Politically Disengaged (26%): “I’m just trying to get by. I don’t care about all this.”
- Moderates (15%): “Activists are out of control. All I want is law, order, and peace.”
- Traditional Conservatives (19%): “The America I remember is slipping away.”
- Devoted Conservatives (6%): “Don’t tread on me.”
The middle four groups (traditional and passive liberals, moderates, and the politically disengaged) represent two thirds of voters. Two-thirds! Surveyors discovered they believe in most of the same things: safeguards for reproductive rights, protections from discrimination based on identity, and more stringent gun background checks. They believe in compromise and are tired of hyper-partisanship.
If that’s you (which, statistically, it probably is), this week, try not to get caught up in the dominant story focused on extremes. Loud people and ideas will always win in a media environment that capitalizes on attention. The hidden truth is that, at least in a few fundamental ways, we tend to agree on more than we think.
A pre-election palate cleanser: Hiking the sequoias with George H.W. Bush
“When I received a phone invitation to hike with President Bush through the Giant Sequoias…,” writes Michael Hodgson, “my initial reaction was, ‘Right, who is this, really?’”
Thirty-two years ago, Hodgson was one of six nature journalists invited to traipse with the president through the forest before he signed a proclamation ordering the preservation of California’s Giant Sequoia. It’s the tallest tree in the world — some can grow 279 feet tall, roughly half the height of Seattle’s Space Needle.
Hodgson’s favorite memory: Watching then-Secretary of State James Baker and his wife “eagerly smelling the bark of a Jeffrey pine,” seemingly the only members of the group fully aware of how special it was to walk through a silent forest surrounded by 3,000-year-old redwoods.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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