Beyond MAGA: What Trump’s Coalition Really Looks Like

Archon Fung: Thank you. Hey, you’re listening to Terms of Engagement. This is season two, episode three. I’m Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.

Stephen Richer: And I’m Stephen Richer. I’m the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I’m now a senior fellow at the Ash Center.

Archon Fung: And as always, in compliance with Harvard University’s institutional voice policy, we are speaking as individuals and not on behalf of Harvard or the Kennedy School.

Stephen Richer: Yeah. So I’m really excited to talk about today because this is a topic that happens to be of particular interest to mine. So breaking down the Trump coalition, defining what MAGA is. But before we get to that and before we introduce our guest, anything that you wanted to bring up, Archon? I mean, obviously, lots of lots of major national events going on right now.

Archon Fung: There are. I just wanted to do one news item, which is just kind of recapping Minneapolis and the shooting of Alex Pretti. Of course, I think everybody who’s listening to the show knows that he was killed about a week ago. Very sad in the immediate. And I just kind of, commenting on this, because of the head-spinning kind of different public narratives. Immediately after the event, very senior Trump administration officials just hours afterwards justified the shooting in no uncertain terms. Stephen Miller said a would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and official Democrat account sides with the terrorists. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem publicly explicitly labeled the event as an act of domestic terrorism. and said that Pretti intended to inflict maximum damage on law enforcement officials. Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino said that Pretti intended to massacre law enforcement and violently resisted arrest. And then about a day later, two days later, close video analyses by the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Washington Post and open source analyst Bellingcat, which came out first, contradicted these claims pretty strongly. They did not find that Pretti acted aggressively or struck officials. He was holding a cell phone in one hand and the other hand was open. He was illegally carrying a six hour handgun in a waist holster for which he had a concealed carry permit. One federal officer disarmed him, that is, removed his handgun, just a moment before another federal agent shot Pretti. And then another federal agent joined in shooting him with ten shots in all fired. Just in the last day or so, reporting has it that Bovino has been reportedly reassigned away from Minneapolis and border czar Tom Holman has been sent there to take charge. And then reportedly there may be some drawdown of the three thousand federal immigration forces that are now in Minnesota.

Stephen Richer: Yeah, it seems like this is maybe a turning point in terms of ICE’s involvement in major metropolitan areas, but maybe not. Actually just in Phoenix, just last night, there was a major operation at fifteen different bars, they’re called Zips, I don’t know if that’s a national chain, so I don’t know if they’ll continue on. But the president said that they were going to be reviewing everything that has happened in Minneapolis and that that could signal a change in policy. Big events going on. I’m coming to you guys today from Washington, D.C., where it is also snowing or at least there’s snow on the ground. And so things are a bit stuck in static mode here. But the show goes on, as they say. And as I mentioned, this is really exciting for me today because I’ve thought a lot about the MAGA coalition, the Trump coalition. And we are in luck because More in Common, a nonprofit organization, recently produced a exhaustive major study that reflects months of work and lots and lots of interviews and lots and lots of surveys. And to discuss it with us, we have one of the authors of the report. Mr. Stephen Hawkins. And so we’re going to bring him in a minute. And then we would also just say that, as always, we really appreciate your input. Please put your questions into the chat and then we’ll integrate them into the conversation at digging into what the Trump coalition is. So Stephen Hawkins has served as the Global Director of Research for More in Common since the organization’s founding in 2016, overseeing studies on the psychology of political division in nine countries. Prior to joining More in Common, Stephen conducted public opinion research for Fortune 100 companies, United Nations agencies, electoral campaigns, and political movements. Stephen speaks frequently at national and international conferences, has taken caller questions on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, and appears regularly on public radio to discuss politics and polarization. Most importantly, he holds a Master’s in Public Policy degree from the Harvard Kennedy School. And actually, even more importantly, he spells his first name correctly with a P-H. So thank you very much, Stephen, and welcome, Stephen Hawkins.

Stephen Hawkins: Thank you so much for having me. It’s an honor to be hosted by another Stephen with a P-H, really. It’s a rare privilege.

Archon Fung: And at the Kennedy School. Great.

Stephen Richer: Yeah, go ahead, Archon.

Archon Fung: Yeah, so Stephen R. and I both are very familiar with the work of More in Common and have been big fans for a really long time. But some of our listeners might not be. So, talk a little bit about your organization. More in Common seems like tough going these days with the nation being so polarized. So very briefly, what are you guys trying to do and how are you trying to advance the mission of achieving “more in common”?

Stephen Hawkins: Sure. Well, the first thing to know is we’re, as you reflected in my reading in my bio there, Stephen, we’re an international organization. So we have about 75 employees now and we’re working in the US, UK, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, Brazil, expanding to Australia this year, getting to do some work in Ireland. So we have a model and we’re expanding it across different geographies, all of which have varying levels of concern about polarization and division. And the model that we use is one that draws a lot on social psychology. So what we do is we bring the tools of social psychology to public opinion polling, and that allows us to get a lot more depth out of our picture of what our divided societies look like and what motivates the different component parts of our divided societies. And so in each country, what we do is a segmentation study where we look at underlying psychology and values and then use that to segment people into these different pockets that make up the divided societies and what we typically find is that there’s a small polarized set of wings in each country that are ideological, highly engaged and then we have a lot of people who are maybe more ideologically flexible and more politically disengaged and understanding the different values that underlie each of those groups really helps us to understand how we can engage them, how we can communicate them, how we can make progress on issues that aren’t polarized. And just to better understand what is a really central challenge of almost all of our societies right now, which is division and polarization. And then the last thing I’ll just say is, we’re also leaning into intervention work, and so that can take two forms. So what I just described is a kind of descriptive work, but the intervention or prescriptive work that we do takes two forms, and one of them is working directly with political parties, working directly with the nonprofit world, with philanthropy as consultants, and so we have helped, for instance, in the United Kingdom, we helped the political parties understand public sentiment towards Ukrainian refugees, we helped understand the needs of Ukrainian refugees coming into the UK, and then we helped legislators to avoid the conflict that could have emerged around the refugee population coming to the UK and instead meet the needs of tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees coming in, so we work directly with legislators and parties to solve problems. And the other type of intervention that we’re interested in is interventions that directly take on this challenge of affective polarization specifically. And affective polarization refers to emotion. And so one’s affect is how warm or cold people feel towards others. And we’ve developed some interventions that show you can markedly reduce people’s hostility towards the other side through certain interventions. I’m happy to get into them more.

Stephen Richer: Okay, so welcome, Stephen Jones. We’ve got another Stephen with a P-H in the chat. Really, I’m glad we’re strong in numbers today. But so Stephen Hawkins, take us to this report, which you guys have called Beyond MAGA: A Profile of the Trump Coalition. Who was involved in this? How did you do this? And why did More in Common decide to allocate a significant amount of time and resources to this project?

Stephen Hawkins: Sure, so how did we do it—it’s a mixed method study, so we collected, we’re now in our seventh wave of data collection, so we’ve been doing roughly monthly polling since April of last year to understand the coalition. That allows us to get longitudinal data so we can see how things change. It also allows us to stay topical because this is been a year where things that seem like major year-defining stories can fall out of the headlines within days and we’ve even seen that in this month.

Stephen Richer: Yeah, if i can just pause you there real quickly, I’ll even note, I was so impressed because I was reading the report which just came out just very recently and it had, it had text on, I think recent events in Minnesota, even. So you guys integrated even very contemporary stuff into the report. Sorry for interrupting.

Stephen Hawkins: No, no, that’s right. We collected data this month in January and we’ve gone back into the field, so we now have data also on the interventions in Venezuela and feelings towards ICE and feelings about Minnesota coming out soon. So yeah, so those are the quantitative surveys that we did. Those are online polls. We conducted those ourselves. One interesting methodological note for those who are interested in quantitative work is, we specifically designed the composition of the Trump voter sample to reflect the best available information on exit polling data from 2024, so that we have a composition that reflects exactly who showed up. And so it has the composition of that older skew, that more white skew. It shows the Latino turnout, for instance, that was the defining feature of Trump voters. So that’s that was one decision we made. And then we did dozens of focus groups, and we have an online panel as well where we have about two hundred people who engage with us in qualitative exercises and where we can test questions and ask them things on a kind of rolling basis. So we got those three methods together, and that gives us a lot of good angles on what’s going on: a longitudinal piece, a conversational piece that’s more intimate and then just a huge volume of data. We also did national sampling so that we could compare of course the Trump averages to what the general American public thinks and not just be limited to that perspective. And then, you asked Stephen, why did we choose to do this?

Stephen Richer: Why dig into the Trump coalition in the first place? Why was this important to More in Common?

Stephen Hawkins: I mean, I think you could argue that this is the most important political population on Earth right now because it’s, you know, there, if you look at our report, Donald Trump’s average grade at the national level is an F on every issue, but among Trump voters on average, he’s getting B’s and his main popularity has sort of fallen from maybe 45% approval to be 40-41% now, but this population is undergirding President Trump’s confidence with the decisions that he makes about national domestic policy and about how he conducts us on the foreign stage. And so understanding the dynamics within this group is crucial to understanding Trump’s psychology, motivations and our entire political system.

Archon Fung: 30%, 40%, 45% of it. So without further ado, let’s get to the headline of the report, which is in this graphic. Colette, if you could show the graphic, I think it’s figure 0.2 from the report with the four different types of Trump voters, the four categories that you constructed and here they are and I think we should, you know, spend a little bit of time talking about that. So, I’m interested, Stephen R., you’re much closer to the American right and maybe even to Trump world than I am, how did these categories strike you? Did you think, oh yeah, they nailed it or?

Stephen Richer: I would have thought MAGA hardliners was a more significant percentage of the Trump coalition. I thought that MAGA as a movement constituted maybe 20% to 25% of the American population. But here it’s obviously, as it’s defined, 29% of the Trump voting coalition. I do think it’s important, though, any sort of regardless of whether the numbers are two or three percentage points different, I think it’s important to acknowledge that the Trump voter is not monolithic. And this spells that out very clearly. I liked some of the delineations. For me, I can very much understand the Anti-Woke Conservatives. I have a lot of friends who were in that camp who voted for Trump. And then I also know a lot of the reluctant, right? The one that’s a little bit harder for me to sort of envision who that is was, as this report termed it, the mainline Republican.

Archon Fung: Oh, interesting. So, Stephen H., if you could address that, the mainline Republican. And the part that I had a little bit of difficulty wrapping my mind around is, what’s the distinction? It seemed like there’s a fair amount of overlap between the MAGA hardliners and the Anti-Woke Conservatives. But I think I’m just misunderstanding it. So if you could explain a little bit more.

Stephen Hawkins: Yeah. So, just to take one step back, the way we did this analysis is, it’s a cluster analysis approach. So there’s a supervised part to it, and an unsupervised part to the statistical analysis. So the way that we did this is we took things that matter about Trump voters or things that we thought mattered about in terms of, perceptions of Trump, engagement with his campaigns and with him, and with just the political discourse, perceptions of how he should engage with the Constitution, relationship to religiosity and things like that. We put it into a segmentation analysis and then these emerged as four distinct groups from that process. And so then we, we use those use that as a classification method and then looked at the distinctions and then named the groups that way. To take your questions in reverse order, the biggest distinction between MAGA hardliners and Anti-Woke Conservatives has to do, I think, with religiosity and degree of conviction in Trump as an individual. The MAGA hardliners are very likely to say that God saved Trump’s life so that he could make America great again, and that supporting President Trump is part of living out my faith. That’s overwhelmingly true of that group. Whereas among Anti-Woke Conservatives, there’s a more pragmatic relationship with President Trump, where he’s more of an instrument of opposition to what they don’t like as opposed to a kind of vessel for this kind of divinely blessed mission. So that’s what I would say is the main distinction between them. There’s an educational difference too and a class difference too. The Anti-Woke Conservatives tend to be a bit more educated and a bit more affluent. The mainline Republicans…

Archon Fung: Stephen, can I ask? So, in the current public debate, one axis is, or a set of categories is between MAGA and America First, right? With the distinction America First is not so personalistic to Trump, it’s kind of nationalist public policy and ideology. How does America First fit in? I mean, maybe the top three would all be quite America First, but only the MAGA hardliners associate so closely with one person, President Trump?

Stephen Hawkins: Well, let me answer that with just one specific question, which is on immigration. So we asked this question, and I’m going to paraphrase here, but you can find this in the report in our immigration chapter, where we basically have said, which do you agree with more, that it’s patriotic for America to have an immigration policy that is welcoming towards others, or that it’s patriotic for America to have an immigration policy that focuses on American citizens first?

Archon Fung: Gotcha.

Stephen Hawkins: And that question, the first time we asked it, split the country exactly in half. It was actually fifty-fifty. And, but among Trump voters, it’s overwhelmingly in that latter category, including among the Reluctant Right.

Archon Fung: Okay.

Stephen Hawkins: So there is, I think that the America First idea is less integrated into the identities of Trump voters, but I think it’s a pretty strong unifier in the sense that they believe that if we’re working with globalist institutions as they’re termed, we’re not working towards our interests and all government policy should be geared towards US interests.

Archon Fung: Super helpful. Thank you.

Stephen Richer: One of the questions I often find myself asking is, is the Trump coalition a coherent ideology that stands for something? Because I’m struck by even just these bullet points and by much of the report that it defines itself by what it is most against or what bothers it the most or that it is locked in a epic battle of civilization where good is on one side and evil is on the other, and it defines itself very much by evil. What does it stand for, if anything, and is that the main gravity for it, or is it more against?

Stephen Hawkins: Such a good question. One thing I’ll say, and part of the response I’ll give is that when we asked what emotions people feel when they think about the fact that President Trump is president, they mostly say hope. That’s the number one most common emotion. And relief. And when we ask them to describe President Trump in terms of roles, and we gave a lot of options, like an avenger of people who’ve been wronged, the number one most selected was a builder to fix broken systems. And so, from the perspective of Trump voters, there are a lot of problems in society. America is in decline. It’s in decline in moral terms and economic terms. And President Trump is playing a positive, constructive role that makes them hopeful about the future. And so, Stephen, to your question, I think they themselves believe, Trump voters, Trump voters believe that President Trump has a mission that is positive and that he’s seeking to live it out. And at the same time, I think that it’s hard to imagine Trump thriving as a personality and as a figure and as a leader in the absence of conflict, because it seems that the conflict is a big driver of and connector of his voting base to him. So, yeah, does that make sense? What are your opinions on that?

Stephen Richer: Well, I think that most people view Trump as, or many of his main supporters, view him as a general. And to your point, generals are only appropriate where there is war, where there is conflict.

Archon Fung: Yeah, that’s a great analogy.

Stephen Richer: But I guess, yes, the builder thing did come through clearly in the report. And maybe that’s something I’m not as attuned to. You did point out, though, another thing that I consistently hear from the Trump world, from MAGA world, which is, they don’t paint the rosiest picture of the status of the United States. And I think that it is a reaction to the sense of decline, the sense of problem. And I asked some students when we’ve studied MAGA, do you think that’s more predicated on economic decline or on social decline? And I suspect that the answer is a bit of both, but I guess I’ll pose that same question to you.

Stephen Hawkins: Yeah. I mean, we do see both. And we see this in a very general way. I mean, we asked this question, have America’s morals and values gotten better or worse in recent years? And it was 77% or 78% of Americans with almost no differentiation between Trump voters and Harris voters. When we ask whether the American dream has gotten more or less attainable for this generation, it’s overwhelmingly less attainable that people perceive it. And so that’s both a social dimension of decline and an economic dimension of decline that people are perceiving simultaneously. And then the other is, we’ve just seen so much decline in trust in our institutions. And that’s been happening since the late sixties, but it’s still a very strong defining feature of our moment. And so, I think it’s pretty general, the sense of decline.

Archon Fung: Except, you know, the Mainline Republicans feel that much less, right? It’s just on this second bullet under Mainline Republicans, least likely to say that America is in decline, which definitely separates them from the Hardliners, the Anti-Woke and the Reluctants.

Stephen Hawkins: Yeah. But still, two in five, so still, you know, a majority. Well, yeah, you’re right. No, that’s a good point, Archon. Yeah. And I think part of that is with the Mainline Republicans, it’s a heterogeneous group, which might be, Stephen, why it’s a little bit harder for you to think of a person who leaps to mind if it’s that group. And it’s a generationally diverse group, it’s a racially diverse group and it’s less politically engaged. So it’s kind of a catch-all category of people who are identified as more conservative but aren’t defined by their politics as much. And yeah, with that lower engagement and with the intergenerational and younger, especially that younger component, I think we see some of these more positive perspectives than than we do in the other groups.

Stephen Richer: Okay, reminder that if you have a question, put it in the chat and we’ll work it into the conversation. Stephen, we began by saying that it’s important to understand that this is not just a one coalition, this is not just one person who is you know, committed to President Trump come hell or high water. This is different groups. What do these four groups agree on and where are their fractions?

Stephen Hawkins: So, one point where there’s pretty high agreement is that there is a problem with what’s referred to as ‘wokeness,’ which I think is an interesting subject for us to get into.

Archon Fung: Definitely. Let’s dive into that in a moment. But keep going.

Stephen Hawkins: Yeah. Another is that there’s that there’s a sense of crisis in the country that precedes Trump coming into office around open borders, around crime, decline of safety in cities, homelessness, those are some of the things that connect them. And then also a sense that President Trump respects people like them. That’s true, at least for the first three. The Reluctant Right are less confident of that. And then we talked about this perception of general decline that they’re feeling in terms of morality is also a thing that connects them and so I think, when you put those things together, you have a group of people who see the trajectory of the United States as just generally headed in the wrong direction, with a bunch of urgency, with the crises that they’re referring to, combined with a figure in President Trump whom they believe respects them in a context where they feel disrespected, which brings us back to that ‘wokeness’ point. So I think when you put all those pieces together, it helps clarify.

Stephen Richer: Where do they disagree before we get to the woke part?

Stephen Hawkins: So they disagree, one, on whether Trump, on Trump’s attributes. So if you ask the Reluctant Right, how did they describe Trump, they’re much more likely to give critical views. On the whole, they give him Ds, Cs, some Fs in terms of their overall perception of him. So the Reluctant Right were the, you know, hold your nose, vote for the lesser of two evils voter and so they’re never going to be the ones with the Trump sign in their yard and they basically keep their politics to themselves. And then I think it’s worth underscoring this religiosity point again, also because it’s somewhat unique to the United States among major Western democracies now that this is such a throughline but the evangelical and Maga Hardliner component of Trump’s base is really crucial here because one of the things we’re seeing is, Americans say that their American identity is hugely important to who they are, especially on the right. Their Christian or religious identity is hugely important to who they are. And then with the MAGA Hardliners, they say that being MAGA is a huge part of who they are. So you have this convergence of identities that really make supporting Trump an expression of who they are. And that’s just, when you go back to the Reluctant Right, like they’re, you know, all of those things to much lesser degree. And so, or almost to no degree. And so, the degree to which this current moment and supporting this president is just an expression of who you are as a person varies a lot over the…

Archon Fung: And for the MAGA Hardliners, for some of them, even an expression of what you think God wants, right?

Stephen Hawkins: I mean, yeah. Yeah, the specific item was God saved Trump’s life so he could make America great again. Yeah.

Archon Fung: Yeah, right.

Stephen Richer: Okay, so whoa.

Archon Fung: Yeah, let’s dive in because this was one of the takeaways from your report for me is, I’ve got to take the whole woke criticism a whole lot more seriously than I currently do because it’s big.

Stephen Richer: So, is Trump simply the product of Archon and his peers at the faculty of Harvard?

Archon Fung: Maybe. Yeah. So, Colette, if you could throw up figure 3.5, I think it is. It’s the “ruined American education, news and entertainment.” And I mean, that’s astonishing. That is a high level of agreement. So, let’s dig into it. It’s on me, right?

Stephen Hawkins: I mean, you know, I don’t want to give you all the credit, but yeah. There is a sense that there is a kind of coordination between entertainment, academia, certainly, university settings. And I think what happens here when we have these conversations about ‘wokeness’ is, for those two large groups, or for the MAGA Hardliners, the Anti-Woke in the center of your screen there, this is a subject that they have listened to podcasts about, they’ve heard on the news, they talk about with their friends, they have a conceptualization of what it is. If you get to the Mainline Republicans and the Reluctant Right, they can’t describe it in one sentence. They just maybe have a story of, it seems like they’re putting race into everything now, or it seems like the schools are always talking about gender now, or isn’t there some man who’s competing in women’s sports? It’s just these discrete things that they came across maybe on social media, but it doesn’t animate them. But for the MAGA Hardliners and the Anti-Woke Conservatives, they would be able to conceptualize it and they would say that there’s a coordinated effort among progressives, among institutions, to advance a progressive agenda that is in their, in their view, critical of America, critical of white America, white people, critical of Christianity and wants to celebrate diversity specifically by lifting up minority perspectives, minority groups of religious and racial types and celebrating women. And that it’s kind of a, it’s kind of a pointed effort at white men and at white Christian men and at America. And so they feel, I think there’s layers to it, right? There’s one, there’s the element which is just kind of disagreement with the ideas. Like if the idea was just brought up in conversation, oh, maybe we should do this, there would be some disagreement. But the compounding effect is the sense that these ideas are being imposed from above by elites who have contempt for me. And so that is what generates a feeling of maybe even humiliation and what gives a kind of energy to this ‘wokeness.’ And the last point I’ll just make is one of the interpretations we draw about President Trump is that he’s a blasphemer. And that’s kind of an old-fashioned word and it has a religious context. But a blasphemer is somebody who violates religious norms and says things which are against the religious code in a black and white way. And when a population has stopped trusting their religious authorities, blasphemers have an important role because they are the ones that are publicly rejecting the pieties of the society. And that can be an energizing kind of fun, punk energy, which connects people to each other and connects them to the blasphemer.

Archon Fung: Yeah. So, as a Chinese kid who grew up in Oklahoma, I really want to, in my own head, separate two parts of “woke.” One, which I’m very sympathetic to, and the other much less sympathetic to. And the part I’m really sympathetic to is… There’s all these like college educated, sometimes PhD having politicians and policymakers who don’t know anything about my life telling me what to do and how to do my job. And I’m super sympathetic to that, I think Stephen may be a little bit, Stephen R., less so. But the part I have very little sympathy for is, we’re going to go to George Washington’s house and take down the plaque that he actually owned slaves, or we’re going to redo the Smithsonian exhibits because they’ve been too hard on the legacy of racism and chattel slavery. And, we got to forget about the civil rights movement. I guess part of what I’m hearing you say is, Archon, you can’t take those two things apart. They’re bolted together. Or can you take them apart in the MAGA coalition?

Stephen Hawkins: Well… It’s a great question and that we have asked specifically whether people believe, Republicans believe, that we should teach Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks as examples of fighting for freedom and equality. And 93% of Republicans say, yes, we should.

Archon Fung: Okay.

Stephen Hawkins: And so I think that there’s some a much broader base of support, I’m glad you brought this up, because we did a study called History Wars where we look specifically at the level of alignment that Americans have about teaching America’s history specifically as it relates to racism, segregation, Jim Crow. And there’s a very wide set of, a wide agreement among Republicans, that the good needs to be taught with the bad. And we found that there was a lot of misperceptions about the degree to which that was true. I think with the energy we see on the right for pulling down statues or pulling down, changing the Smithsonian’s, my suspicion is that comes from more of a fringe group of white nationalists that’s not well-represented in the average amount from voters. The thing that I would think is much more pervasive is people often, unprompted, bring up in focus groups a frustration with teaching gender ideology, meaning teaching a new concept of sex being distinct from gender, and gender just being assigned at birth and gender being fluid and things like this. And I think that’s the one which we would see much higher levels of concern about than the teaching of slavery, which seems to be uncontroversial among Republicans.

Stephen Richer: So we’ve got a number of questions and one that I think is important to a number of these definitions and conversations is from Mergin. Forgive me if I’m saying his name wrong, Mergin. Level of education. How important is that to the definition of the four different groups and to really, sort of, like, I guess, some of the things that they care about as well?

Stephen Hawkins: So, on a technical level, these groups are not configured on the basis of any demographic qualities. We only looked at behavioral and attitudinal attributes as inputs for the segmentation model. So we didn’t break people apart based on education. Now we do see that there is meaningfully higher education among Anti-Woke Conservatives relative to MAGA Hardliners. But notice that they have a lot of the same hostilities, especially towards illegal immigrants, towards ‘wokeness’, towards Democrats. And where they differ is in religiosity and the degree to which they’re supportive of Trump. So, we didn’t look at education as a primary dimension of analysis in this study. Yeah, I would be interested if either of you have done that. I don’t know, Stephen, if you’ve done any research on that and if you have thoughts on it.

Stephen Richer: Well, I thought it was funny almost that the highest level of education was among the Anti-Woke Conservatives. And that’s maybe the people who’ve had the most interaction with academia were the ones that was motivating them the most. But then, just generally speaking, I’m consistently struck by how different it looks from the Republican coalition of fifteen years ago, where I think you said that of the MAGA Hardliners, about 1 in 4 held a bachelor’s degree. And, so really, and then you describe some of them, and I remember one story in particular was of a man who could just fix stuff. He was really good with his hands, but lived, you know, a very sort of, you know, humble lifestyle. And that just how much this has captured of the working class America.

Archon Fung: Yeah. And that’s, for people who are professional political scientists, I think one of the amazing general shifts about what being on the left and being on the right means in the United States and in many Western democracies, is it’s become an educational polarization, much, much, much more than it was, 20, 30 years ago and so, one of the strongest predictors of whether you’re voting left or right party is level of education now, which absolutely, and it’s flipped, right? The left used to be the party of the less educated working class, and now it’s much more the party of the college educated and and highly educated. Oh, go ahead, Stephen R.

Stephen Richer: Well, I was going to ask, R Leavitt asked about social media, how, just sort of, what factor does it play in these coalitions? What factor does it play in the Trump movement? And I guess to the broader point of More in Common, what factor does it play in the polarization of the United States?

Stephen Hawkins: Yeah. So, we see that MAGA Hardliners are the ones who are most likely to have accounts on Truth Social, for instance. And we see that there’s a lot of consumption of podcasts and YouTube content among Anti-Woke Conservatives and MAGA Hardliners that come specifically from Trump-aligned personalities such as Ben Shapiro and Candace Owens and the now deceased Charlie Kirk. One thing we also looked at was younger generations. We specifically wanted to pull out millennials and Gen Z to see how they were different from other voters. I think it was a majority of them said that social media content played either a major or a defining influence in shaping their political viewpoints. So this would be people basically under the age of about 41 who are who are saying that. So we know it’s pervasive in consumption, and we know that it’s prominent in the formation of people’s ideas. We also know, this is kind of a general comment, and maybe you guys know more about this, but just that the algorithms in social media are towards holding people’s attention, and that probably creates a moral hazard problem where there’s a an incentive towards incendiary content and conflict-oriented content as opposed to explanatory or reconciliatory content. And so, it’s just a problem I think the entire world is now trying to cope with is that in this competition for people’s attention and for advertising dollars, we’re generating conflicts needlessly in order just to fight for the next five seconds of someone’s eyeballs.

Archon Fung: Yeah, good. Hey, so AFQ3 asked, what are some of the biggest wedge issues between this group? And I think we’d be remiss not to show your report card slide, which is, we mentioned it a little bit, but let’s bring it up for the audience. Figure 4.4, which displays some of the wedge issues for sure. Right. So. Do you want to walk through this a little bit? And I’m just like, one of the most striking things, of course, is the A’s on MAGA Hardliners, which really differentiates them from not just U.S. average, but many of the other specific Trump coalition groups in your report. What’s surprising about this?

Stephen Richer: January 2026. I want to point that out. So, this is just very recently.

Stephen Hawkins: Very recently, prior to the killings of, or the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but conducted in the first week of January all the same. You can see that immigration is really the highest performing issue where it’s the only one where there are two categories where he gets A’s. One thing which is interesting is if you look, there’s a little bit more commonality by column than there is by row. And what that means is people have a kind of general feeling or intuition about Trump. And so they kind of, sort of, converge towards a similar score, no matter what the issue is, as opposed to having very different ideas of his performance. That’s a little bit…

Archon Fung: Which means your categorization strategy is paying off, I think, right?

Stephen Hawkins: Yeah. Say that again?

Archon Fung: It means your categorization, your cluster method is paying off.

Stephen Hawkins: Yeah, it shows that it matters, right? And that it helps explain the divisions. The tariff policies and economic policy, I think, is a concern. If you look down there at health care, his lowest score is on health care, where obviously there’s a huge debate about the preservation of the Affordable Care Act subsidies and the cost that that could incur on the population if they’re not renewed. So I think those are two big wedge issues, is whether you trust this administration on health care, trade, and the economy. I also think…

Archon Fung: Foreign policy has kind of been delivering on an America First agenda, right? So it makes sense to me that that would be pretty highly rated for, yeah.

Stephen Hawkins: I think so. I think one question which we dug into a little bit, but which is just too, which the quant could not really give us a lot of insight into is around the Epstein files, where there’s like some sense that he’s hiding something. There’s some sense that there’s a motivation, but it, there was a lot of commentary that the Epstein files would be the thing that would sort of tear Trump away from his MAGA base. We don’t see that. We see that it’s actually far kind of more distant in people’s minds than the media or news reports might make it out to be. But I do think there’s still some lingering uncertainty about how much fallout there could be if this administration continues to block the real release of the, or the full release of the Epstein files.

Stephen Richer: Hannah asked about the numbers and Hannah, if you just search for ‘More in Common: Beyond MAGA report,’ it’s an 89 page document and it has a lot of the methodology and the numbers and so you can see how they came to these to these grades. But I think this is not a very favorable scale in that it looks a lot like letter grades in college, although apparently those letter grades are no longer really given in college. But 0-59 is an F.

Archon Fung: Right, right. Yeah, go ahead, Stephen.

Stephen Richer: Can I, I’m going to ask you the question that I ask of everyone who studies, from an academic or social scientist perspective, the Trump coalition and the MAGA movement: Did this research, I don’t know what your previous perspective was on this movement, but did this research make you more sympathetic at all?

Stephen Hawkins: You know, I didn’t meet anybody who I really disliked over the course of the whole focus groups and interviews. And I met some people who I found really fascinating: young, smart conservatives who are of the variety, we probably don’t have time to get into it too much, but we’re asking questions about post-liberalism and whether the basic premises of pluralism makes sense for a thriving society, et cetera. So I learned about new emergent factions within the conservative world that I didn’t know about. And I didn’t hear overt expressions of bigotry from anybody or anything like that. But, it’s just clear that we’re living in two very different information environments. And so whereas before, maybe ten years ago and when we were writing Hidden Tribes, we focused a lot on how people were kind of living in a common reality, but their different value systems meant that they interpreted things differently. We’re now seeing further and further that people are living in separate realities and have different value systems. And so it didn’t encourage me about our prospects of convergence or depolarization. Not particularly.

Archon Fung: Yeah so, that’s, I wanted to ask about whether the report gives you insight into opportunities to advance the More in Common mission, right? So the Hidden Tribes report said, ‘Hey, look there’s this big group,’ everybody should read that, by the way, it was an extremely influential report a few years ago that said that there’s this big group, the exhausted majority, I think it was, right? And if we could figure out a politics, if political leaders could appeal to them, that would create more unity. Here, that report card strikes me. If you’re Hakeem Jeffries or a Democratic Party leader, this is a big opportunity for you to peel off the Reluctant Right. But that’s not the More in Common mission, is not winning elections, it’s creating a better America. So, are there insights into how to do that now that we understand more about the kind of richness and categories in the Trump coalition?

Stephen Hawkins: Well, we asked this binary question where we said, which do you think you want more, for your side to dominate and control the country and just defeat the other side? Or do you want to find common principles and work together to solve problems? And we found that it was about 8 out of 10 Trump voters and about 8 out of 10 Americans who prefer the latter, they want some reconciliation and defining of common principles. The problem is that we also found that among Trump voters, they feel that both Democratic politicians and Democratic voters don’t respect people like them. And so when we think about what keeps people to supporting Trump, it’s not simply one question. It’s what keeps them to Trump, and it’s also what repels them from leaving Trump. And what repels them from leaving Trump is that the alternative is to enter into a space where they feel that they would be disrespected or are actively disrespected. And so, I think the first question is how can we create more fora and venues of common respect and common decency where the conversations that are so crucial about our future, and maybe that don’t really sit along ideological axes, like a conversation about AI and what that’s going to do, it would be, for instance, a great intervention, if we could create respectful context where people from both sides of the question could, both sides of the aisle could discuss it together.

Stephen Richer: And that was my main takeaway reading this, was more than public policy or more than political philosophy, this coalition is held together or is typified by people who feel a lack of respect from establishment politicians, lack of respect from Democrats in particular. And for whatever reason, and sometimes I miss the translation, they feel that President Trump has that respect for them. And so just, yeah, I sort of knew part of that, but this was a stark reminder for me. So thank you for that.

Archon Fung: Yeah, great. We’re about out of time, but huge thanks to Stephen H. and your colleagues at More in Common for basically a one-year lift to produce this report. And my understanding from the intro is that this is the first of three, and you’re going to do one on kind of the Democrats or the Left, and then I guess one in the middle or independents in some way, so…

Stephen Hawkins: That’s right. We’re going to turn to the exhausted majority next and really focus on reexamining the hidden tribes and the exhausted majority. What we did well with the original Hidden Tribes was we defined a group, but what we left undone was any kind of direction about how it could be coalesced or how it could be surfaced and what the commonalities are that people want to see compromise around, for instance. So we’ll be working on that. And then, finally, we are going to do, yes, a similar parallel report, but on the Left, to see what the factions are on the Left, which I think will also be very interesting to see the emergence of figures like Mamdani and what that means about a traditional Left versus a more socialist Left and progressive activists. So, that’s all coming up in the rest of the year.

Archon Fung: That’s great.

Stephen Richer: We’ll have to have you back on when those come out, but thank you very much for making time. Please check out the report again, Beyond MAGA, More in Common, Stephen Hawkins, as well as a number of other staff at More in Common put a lot of work into this, so thanks very much to all of you who joined today, thanks very much to Stephen. Archon, take us home.

Archon Fung: Yeah, just thanks to our production team, Colette, Courtney, Evelyn, and Dana. And tune in to us, tune in next time, in a week. We’re same time, same place, noon Eastern time on Tuesday for Terms of Engagement. Take care, everyone. Thank you.