Many Americans fear that the country is coming apart.
Approximately half of Republicans and four in 10 Democrats said in 2024 that a civil war in their lifetime was at least somewhat likely. That fear arises from an increasing sense that the people on the other side have become something different from us — dangerous and even a threat to the American way of life, whatever you think that is. That framing is now the familiar refrain of political commentary in the United States.
We have been hearing about partisan animosity for so long that it is hard to see our country through any other lens. But before accepting that irreconcilable differences are a fact of our contemporary politics, try a thought experiment. You are an American who voted for Kamala Harris or for Donald Trump in 2024. You randomly meet one other voter for your candidate and one voter for the other side. Which of the two do you have a lot in common with? Well, it turns out you actually have a lot in common with both.
We have been interviewing Americans about politics through the Cooperative Election Study for two decades — more than 700,000 respondents in all. Over the past few years, we started doing something new. We asked a question that wasn’t about politics at all: What is the most important thing that happened in your life during the past year? We did this because we were tired of seeing our respondents merely as data points fueling an increasingly tired conversation about political polarization. We wanted to do something that would help us see them as human beings, learn about their triumphs, their struggles and even the more mundane happenings in their lives.
We didn’t realize how surprising our findings would be.
For Trump voters, the three most common answers were a medical issue, something related to household finances and the death of a family member or friend. For Harris voters, the three most common answers were the same three, in the same order. The parallels are striking. Asked the same question, a Trump voter wrote, “My father passed away in January 2024,” and a Harris voter wrote, “I lost my father Christmas Eve night.” A Trump voter said, “Lost my job due to shutdown,” and a Harris voter said, “I was laid off from my job.”
In both red and blue America, it is the universal experiences relating to life, death and economics that dominate what people remember about their year.
The similarities go beyond the problems people are facing and the landmark events they are celebrating. When it comes to their social identities, Harris and Trump voters also look more alike than the conventional framing suggests. To demonstrate this, we ran a simple experiment. We compared randomly selected Harris voters with other randomly selected Harris voters, and we did the same among Trump voters. Then we compared Harris voters with Trump voters. According to our calculations, two Harris voters share the same race or ethnicity about half the time. A Harris voter and a Trump voter share the same race or ethnicity 46 percent of the time — nearly as often. Trump voters are more racially homogeneous, so they share the same race or ethnicity about two-thirds of the time.
On religion, on educational attainment and on sexual identity, Harris voters are actually more likely to share one of these traits with a Trump voter than with a fellow Harris voter.
We can see this when we look at the most competitive swing state in recent years. The typical Harris voter in Pennsylvania was a suburban white heterosexual Protestant without a college degree. The typical Trump voter in Pennsylvania was also a white suburban heterosexual Protestant without a college degree. But if you selected another Harris voter in Pennsylvania, he or she also would be less likely to be Protestant than if you selected another Trump voter.
This dynamic is largely driven by the Democratic Party’s significant racial and religious diversity and the Republican Party’s relative homogeneity. Any given Harris or Trump voter is more likely to be Protestant than anything else, but there is only a one-in-four chance the next Harris voter will also be Protestant, whereas there is a 50-50 chance the next Trump voter will be. A similar dynamic exists for race, and it means that we can find many shared identities with our political opponents, often even more than with people on our own side.
These similarities matter even more if they encourage political agreement, and we see evidence that they do. On the issues, Harris and Trump voters agree much more often than the conventional framing would suggest. In the 2024 survey, we asked respondents their positions on 44 different policy proposals, including the most important controversial legislation before Congress and the most contested executive orders. An average Harris voter took the same position as an average Trump voter on roughly half of them. Large majorities in both groups support background checks for gun sales, more border security and expanding Medicaid coverage.
The disagreements that remain are real, and they are certainly not trivial. They cluster on the hot-button issues that have dominated the past decade of American politics, such as how to treat undocumented immigrants who are already in the country, whether to ban assault rifles and whether to place restrictions on abortion access. But the assumption that Trump and Harris voters live in entirely different policy universes is not supported by what they told us.
And these disagreements are certainly not new. When we asked about the issues of the day in our 2008 survey, Obama and McCain voters agreed about 45 percent of the time. Americans have been told for at least two decades that they share less and less, while the data show the actual overlap holding roughly steady.
It is true that the two sides often have different issue priorities. In 2024, Trump voters prioritized issues like immigration, budget deficits and taxes, while Harris voters saw abortion, climate change and health care as more important. But if anything, this should make it easier to compromise, by giving up something on an issue you care less about to get something on an issue that matters more.
So why does the country feel more divided now than it has in decades? The gap is not in what Americans actually share; it is in what they perceive they share. Political scientists call this the “perception gap.” More in Common, a nonpartisan research organization that studies social division, has measured the gap: Americans estimate that roughly twice as many of their political opponents hold extreme views as actually do. One reason for this is that politicians, the news media and academics like us tend to highlight how Republicans and Democrats are different from one another. Social media algorithms, which reward outrage and amplify the loudest voices on each side, sharpen the contrast further.
There is also something deeper at work here. Psychological research shows that we are often more attuned to differences in the very situations where things are more alike. In fact, it is because we are so alike that we become so fixated on what is different.
In 1774, in the same Philadelphia in which John Adams worried that the colonies were several distinct nations, a Virginian rose at Carpenters’ Hall and made a different argument. “The distinctions between Virginians, Pennsylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders are no more,” Patrick Henry said. “I am not a Virginian, but an American.” He was overstating the case, but he was choosing to see what made Americans like one another.
As the nation celebrates its 250th birthday, it is worth taking a moment to highlight the fact that Democrats and Republicans have strikingly similar lives, look more demographically alike than the way we talk about politics implies and agree as much as they disagree. The next time you find yourself talking to someone from the other side, try starting the conversation by asking the question we asked our respondents: What is the most important thing that happened in your life during the past year? The answer is quite likely to be one you could have given yourself.
Brian Schaffner is a professor of civic studies at Tufts. Stephen Ansolabehere is a professor of government at Harvard. Their upcoming book is “American Mosaic: Who We Are and How We Vote.”
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