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The Public Mind is a book about American politics told through survey data, election returns and campaign finance records. Each chapter asks one question, answers it with figures, and ends with what the data cannot show. The first volume follows how party identity absorbed ideology, feeling, social groups and issues. The second asks what left and right mean and what lies beneath them, in the United States, Europe and beyond. The third reads the political map of counties, neighborhoods and money.

41 of 91 chapters are written, all of them drafts that are still being checked. The other 50 are planned: each shows the question it will ask and the data it will use, and states no result.

Three ways in

1. Read in orderBegin with the introduction, Party, belief and the political map, and follow the book part by part.
2. Start with the map5 chapters that read the vote through the county map.
3. Take the grand tour15 chapters, one from each part.

All chapters lists every chapter with its data and status. Explorers are interactive tools that sit beside the parts, and Reference holds the data sources, glossary, figure gallery and methods.

A figure from the book

The three volumes

Volume 1

The great sorting

How closely party identity came to line up with ideology, partisan feeling, social groups and issue positions in the United States, 1948 to 2024.

1. Part I

   The sort

   Party identification and ideological labels became more closely aligned, including within birth cohorts, and party gaps on different issues opened on different schedules.

   3 written, 4 planned

2. Part II

   Partisan feeling

   Warmth toward one's own party moved little while warmth toward the other party fell, in every group examined.

   2 written, 2 planned

3. Part III

   The party coalitions

   Who votes for each party changed along education, income, race, gender and age.

   6 written, 1 planned

4. Part IV

   Issue by issue

   Each issue has its own partisan gap, its own timing and its own demographic profile.

   5 written, 3 planned · Issues explorer

5. Part V

   Race and racial attitudes

   Racial attitudes changed on different schedules by kind of item and became part of partisan and ideological identity.

   2 written, 2 planned

6. Part VI

   Trust, science and democracy

   Confidence in institutions sorted by party, institution by institution, while stated support for democracy held.

   4 written, 4 planned

Volume 2

Ideology, values and religion

What left and right mean, the values and dispositions beneath them, and the religious divide, in the United States, Europe and about 100 countries.

1. Part VII

   What left and right mean

   The left-right label has different contents in different countries and a loose fit with what people want.

   2 written, 4 planned

2. Part VIII

   Values beneath politics

   Basic values and dispositions lean left or right modestly where left and right are structured, and differently elsewhere.

   2 written, 5 planned · World values explorer

3. Part IX

   Religion and morality

   The religious line in politics runs through attendance rather than denomination, most steeply in the United States.

   2 written, 3 planned

Volume 3

The political map

Counties, neighborhoods, hardship and money: what the map of the American vote records and what it cannot show.

1. Part X

   The nationalized map

   County swings collapsed onto one national number, and the county vote now follows composition.

   3 written, 2 planned · Elections, 1976 to 2024 explorer

2. Part XI

   Below the county line

   A county margin is an average over precincts that are often far more lopsided than the county.

   1 written, 1 planned · Neighborhoods explorer

3. Part XII

   Demographic axes of the vote

   Education, income, ethnicity and rurality each relate to the county vote differently from what the raw correlation suggests.

   4 written, 3 planned

4. Part XIII

   Hardship, health and the vote

   Different kinds of hardship relate to the vote in different directions, and some relations vanish once race and education are held fixed.

   2 written, 6 planned

5. Part XIV

   The money map

   Campaign donors are concentrated in a few hundred college-heavy counties, and their pool sorted before the electorate did.

   2 written, 5 planned

6. Part XV

   Place and opinion

   Within a party, where someone lives says far less about their views than which party they belong to.

   1 written, 5 planned

Rules of evidence

Survey estimates are weighted, and each one carries a confidence interval and the number of respondents behind it. Hover over or focus any number in the text to see its estimand, interval, sample size, weights and source. No number in the prose is typed by hand. Each is printed from a data file that the analysis writes, so a number in the text cannot differ from the number in the figure through a transcription error. The file does not check that a sentence names the right population, denominator or interpretation for that number, and those are reviewed separately. A figure's "Show data" table lists the exact values behind every mark.

The language is descriptive. A chapter says that one group is more likely than another, or that a gap widened, and does not say that one thing caused another unless the design supports it. Maps describe the composition of places. A county that votes one way says nothing about any one voter in it.

The grain ladder

Every chapter is labeled with its grain, which sets what a claim can be about. Two units can differ inside one chapter. The unit of estimation is what each row of the data is. The unit of comparison is what the chapter sets side by side once the estimates are made.

A chapter labeled Countries compares countries, but it estimates first within each one. It computes a correlation or a gap among the respondents of each country and then sets those estimates side by side, so it describes how a pattern varies between countries and does not say that a country as a whole holds a view. A row is a country only where the chapter says so. Donor records describe the people who gave, who are not a sample of all Americans.

A pattern across places can differ from the pattern among the people who live in them. This is the ecological caveat, and the book states it wherever a chapter moves from one grain to another. Where the same question is asked at two grains, the chapters point to each other under the heading "Same question at another grain".

Survey mode breaks

Three surveys changed how they collect answers, and a change of mode can move an estimate without any change in opinion. The American National Election Studies added a web mode in 2012. The General Social Survey moved to a mostly web mode from 2021. Nationscape interviewed an opt-in web panel rather than a probability sample. Figures that cross a break mark it on the chart and, where the data allow, show the estimate by mode.

How to read a figure

Each figure has a title that states its finding, a subtitle that says what is plotted, and a source line that gives the dataset, the years and whether the estimates are weighted. Lines and bars are labeled directly. Shaded bands are confidence intervals. Color is never the only cue: the same information appears in labels, in the hover text and in the data table.