The Myth of a Sorted Electorate

Many demographic groups are more scrambled than ever.

A few years back, YouGov asked 1,000 Americans to estimate the percentage of U.S. adults who are members of 43 different subgroups. On average, respondents thought that 20 percent of Americans had household incomes over $1 million. The reality is less than 1 percent. They also guessed that 21 percent of Americans are transgender (reality: 1 percent), 27 percent are Muslim (reality: 1 percent), 41 percent are black (reality: 12 percent), and 30 percent are Jewish (reality: 2 percent). Just a hair off-base!

No matter the minority group, Americans vastly overestimate their share of the U.S. population. We are, to put it bluntly, pretty awful at understanding what our fellow citizens look like. We also tend to get caught up in demographic trends—overemphasizing direction at the expense of the actual numbers.

Nowhere are these mistakes more apparent than in political analysis. In the wake of Trump’s 2024 victory, pundits were quick to crown Republicans as the working-class party. And directionally the claims are correct. Trump’s vote share with non-college voters jumped up, as did his share with voters making less than $50,000 a year. These trends, of course, are incredibly consequential. It’s exciting and informative to explore how and why political coalitions are changing. But an incessant and singular focus on direction crudely flattens the complexities of the vast American electorate.

Since November, much of the coverage of working-class politics would have you believe it’s darn near impossible to find a blue-collar Democrat these days. But Kamala Harris still won 43 percent of the non-college vote—that’s more than 38 million working-class Americans who voted for the Democratic presidential candidate! And if income is your preferred class definition, the gap narrows even further: Harris won 48 percent of voters making less than $50,000; Trump won 50 percent. This is not to say Democrats are secretly the party of the working class. But the label is far more muddy than many of us assume.

The sweeping ascription that “working class = GOP” has had fascinating downstream impacts on class identity. According to Pew, a majority of college-educated Republicans say “working class” describes them extremely or very well (compared to 39 percent of college-educated Democrats). Six in ten upper-income Republicans also now call themselves working class—more than the share of lower-income Democrats who say the same.

These overestimations do go both ways. As educated voters move left, we tend to picture anyone with a degree as a bleeding-heart liberal. But plenty of college-educated Americans still proudly cast their ballot for Donald Trump. The 2024 electorate was one-third college-educated whites and Trump won 45 percent of them—good for 23 million votes.

Hyperbolic punditry (to which we all fall victim, myself included) presents an American electorate easily sorted into buckets. Working-class voters here. College-educated voters over there. The reality is far more complicated—and that’s a good thing. In fact, neither Harris nor Trump cleared 60 percent with most major demographic groups. No age group was separated by more than ten points. No income bracket was separated by more than eight points. White, Latino, Native American, and Middle Eastern voters were all within 15 points.

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To be sure, a 55-45 gap is still sizable. If white voters had shifted just a few points to the left, for example, we’d be approaching the 100th day of a Kamala Harris presidency. But too often we mentally exaggerate relatively narrow majorities for the sake of political simplicity—a black-and-white narrative that occludes huge swaths of the electorate.

We get ample analysis of Obama-Trump working-class voters or Romney-Harris suburbanites, much of which is indispensable to our understanding of politics in 2025. But what about the flip side of the coin? The 12 million college-educated women who voted for Trump? The 6.5 million white evangelicals who voted for Harris? Too often these voters are ignored because political trends are moving in the opposite direction.

On the other hand, recent electoral shifts have also contributed to our demographic heterogeneity. Trump earned a higher share of the black vote (16 percent) than any Republican candidate since at least Gerald Ford in 1976 and a higher share of the Latino vote (43 percent) than any Republican since George W. Bush in 2004. He also dramatically narrowed the gap with young voters. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, won more white voters than Obama in 2012 or Hillary Clinton in 2016. She also held up incredibly well with senior citizens, even as much of the country lurched rightwards.

This demographic depolarization is more good news for the political health of our country. Democrats should have to fight to win black and Hispanic votes, just as Republicans shouldn’t write off these constituencies as lost to the other side. The same goes for Gen Z, union members, suburbanites, or any number of closely divided subgroups.

Whether the parties can make effective, broad-based appeals to a heterogeneous electorate is another question. Democratic leadership remains disproportionately responsive to progressive degree-holders at the expense of the members of the working class who still vote blue. And GOP leadership ignores the third of Republicans who say they are not supporters of the MAGA movement.

While party elites play catch-up, we can still do our best to resist lazy narratives. Even in a polarized age, the American electorate resists simple categorization. This complexity should be celebrated—not brushed aside.