As presidential campaigning enters its final weeks, results from a new survey offer a look at the fragmentation among Americans by asking about their hopes and fears.
The American Communities Project began by dividing the country into 15 large cultural, regional and socioeconomic groups such as the African American South, College Towns, Evangelical Hubs and Rural Middle America.
WKAR's Melorie Begay spoke with the director of the Michigan State University-based project Dante Chinni to learn more.
Link to American Communities Project survey.
Interview Highlights:
On some of the findings
"We ask people, do you think the country, yes or no, is the country is falling apart?... The majority, I think, in every one of these communities, says it feels like the country's falling apart."
On what the results tell us about American voters
"These are cultural differences that really are about how these people in different places see the world and that's what the election is really about. It's about two different visions for the country. It's much less about policy differences, even though the press likes to focus on those things...it's much more about just two different visions for what the country is and what the country should be, "
Interview transcript:
Melorie Begay: Before we get into the findings, the project breaks Americans into 15 different community types. How was that decided?
Dante Chinni: We work with three dozen different variables for all the counties in the country. We break these, we say communities, [but] we're really talking about counties and county types. We like to think of them as community types.
And we used three dozen different demographic variables, everything from race to ethnicity to income, education levels and kinds of employment. And then there's some religion variables in there too, so religious adherence and specific faiths that people are involved in. You'll see we have one that's just about evangelicals and one that's about LDS communities.
So it's really a way, it's we take all this data, we work with Matt Grossman, actually, at Michigan State, and he does something called a K-means clustering, and he puts all this data in with all the counties, and an algorithm essentially starts breaking these into types, like, this is a group, this is a group. This is a group. And you do that enough. We have 15. I mean, you could have probably 20, or you could have five. We do 15 because we want something that's allows for enough difference where we can see some things, but it's still manageable.
Begay: And what are some of the key takeaways from the survey.
Chinni: We have four really big findings in this survey that's really trying to understand hopes and fears in these different kinds of communities.
One is, there is some optimism for the future in America, but it's really about people's personal lives. When you ask them about the future of the country, things get much more pessimistic, to the point there's a question in [the survey] we ask people, do you think the country, yes or no, the country is falling apart. It feels like the country's falling apart. The majority, I think, in every one of these communities, says it feels like the country's falling apart.
The second finding is we tried to understand who's in different people's social groups, because these communities are very different. Do you know a Democrat? Do you know a Republican? Do you know an immigrant? Do you know a reporter, which is the question we asked, and try to understand their social groups that way.
And we find, actually, we're really surprised. There is not a lot of connection a lot of immigrants in the country. Not many people know an immigrant, or closely know an immigrant, which we think may be driving some of the myths around them.
Third, when you take all these things into account, these people have very different conclusions about where the nation is heading, basically whether or not the country's moving in the right direction, or whether it seems like off track.
And then the fourth thing we found, we looked at two big issues for the 2024 campaign, immigration and inflation. And we find that they really are hitting these communities differently. Some places are struggling much more with inflation. On others, though, mostly it does seem like people aren't doing quite as bad as we think they are.
And on immigration, we find there's a huge connection between whether or not people know an immigrant closely and whether or not they think immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, are involved in crime.
So kind of showing about how these different kinds of communities, really who you know really impacts how you see the world.
Begay: And by looking at the hopes and fears of Americans, what can these findings tell us about Americans today and how they might vote?
Chinni: It's interesting when we look at these, when we look at these communities and how people vote, like we say when we get to the issue stuff, it's interesting that everybody is saying they're very concerned about inflation. Yet when you ask them questions, you give them like, you know, I'm having a hard time being able to make ends meet or I have basically unlimited resources, very few people answer the questions that way.
Almost everybody falls in this middle territory where it's, I have some money and we're doing okay, but I wish we had more. So when I look at this inflation, even though everybody cites as a reason for voting, it’s not, maybe it’s not really the defining thing that we all think it is. There's other stuff going on.
When I look at these data, these Hopes and Fear data, what I see is, even though we all like talking about issues, and I like talking about the two at election time, the divides in the country are cultural. This is about people who see the world differently, they think the country's on the right track, or, I really am scared about the direction the country's moving in, and something needs to happen. Or I'm okay with the way things are moving.
These are cultural differences that really are about how these people in different places see the world and that's what the election is really about. It's about two different visions for the country. It's much less about policy differences, even though the press likes to focus on those things, and I understand why, it's much more about just two different visions for what the country is and what the country should be, and that's what I think shows up in these data.
