Editorial

11 Facts That Will Change How You See US Politics

By Alex Buscemi, Editorial Manager at Builders

If you get your sense of America from cable news or your social feed, you'd be forgiven for picturing a country split down the middle into two furious mobs who agree on nothing. It's a gripping story. It's also mostly wrong.

The real America is calmer and more complex, painting a far more hopeful picture than the one sold to you for clicks.

Here are eleven facts that scramble the usual narrative and might just change how you see your country — and the neighbors who call it home.

1. Most Americans agree on more than they think

On issue after issue, from healthcare to immigration to housing, Americans share a surprising amount of common ground, according to a recent USA Today study. Here are just a few examples:

On healthcare, 86% of Americans support letting the federal government cap prescription drug prices based on what other developed countries pay (90% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats support the idea)
On immigration, 83% support pairing mandatory E-Verify for employers with an expansion of legal work visas when workers are needed (Democrats 84%, Republicans 82%)
And on housing affordability, 83% support tax incentives for builders to construct or repair homes affordable to working families (Democrats 88%, Republicans 80%)

Even in our most divisive debates, Americans are considerably less divided than they believe. We're not a nation split in two. We're a nation that's been convinced it's split in two, which is a different and far more fixable problem.

2. Congress is more polarized than the people it represents

The country isn't nearly as divided as the people running it. Researchers describe ordinary Americans as far more moderate than their representatives, while politicians in Washington are "highly ideologically polarized", voting in two tight, barely-overlapping blocs. This is because of institutional incentives: primary elections dominated by ideologically driven base voters, partisan fundraising, and pressure from activist groups and the media that reward politicians for taking staunch partisan positions — even when most of the voters they represent hold more moderate or mixed views.

3. Nearly half of Americans are independents

Despite constant talk of a red team and a blue team, the single biggest group of American voters belongs to neither. A record 45% of U.S. adults identified as political independents in 2025, the highest Gallup has measured since it started tracking in 1988, with an equal 27% each calling themselves Republican or Democrat. Yet in roughly 15 states, closed primaries bar those independents from voting in the congressional and state primaries that decide most races, shutting out more than 18 million voters before the general election even begins. The "two Americas" framing leaves out the largest America of all.

4. Americans vastly overestimate how extreme the other side is

We don't just disagree with the other side. We hallucinate a cartoon version of them. More in Common calls it the "Perception Gap," and it's stark: Democrats and Republicans often imagine almost twice as many people on the other side hold extreme views as they actually do. For example, Republicans guessed that about half of Democrats think "most police are bad people," but the real figure was 15%. Likewise, only 21% of Republicans deny that "racism exists"— under half the 49% that Democrats assume. And the twist that should give us all pause: the people who follow politics most closely have the widest perception gap, not the narrowest. Being extremely online is not the same as being informed.

5. Most political violence comes from individuals, not organized movements

When we picture political violence in America, we tend to imagine disciplined extremist groups. The data points somewhere messier. The U.S. intelligence community's own assessments find that lone offenders and small cells—not organized groups—are the most likely to carry out domestic attacks, and the most lethal political violence of the past decade has overwhelmingly come from lone actors tied to no group at all. The report points to a familiar culprit behind much of that surge: the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and violent rhetoric that has motivated many of the attackers.

6. Negative partisanship drives more votes than positive support

Ask yourself honestly: are you voting for your side, or against the other one? For a growing share of Americans, it's the latter. Political scientists call it "negative partisanship," the tendency to be motivated more by fear and loathing of the opposing party than by any love for your own. It's a big reason campaigns spend so much energy making you terrified of the other guy rather than excited about theirs. And the more that fear defines our politics, the more we come to see the "other side" not as people who disagree with us, but as dangerous villains.

7. Local elections shape your daily life more than national ones, and far fewer people vote in them

Your kid's education, your property taxes, your police, the pothole on your street, all of that is decided far more by local officials than by whoever's in the White House. And yet turnout for local races is dismal. Nationwide, local elections often see voter participation rates that are half — or even less — than those in presidential contests. We pour our passion into the race that affects our daily lives the least, and skip the ones that affect it the most.

8. Most Americans don't follow politics closely

If your entire social feed seems consumed by politics, take heart: it's not a representative sample. The majority of the country pays only occasional attention to political news, and a good many happily tune it out altogether. The loudest, most politically obsessed voices, the ones shaping your sense of "what everyone thinks", are a small and unusually combative slice of the population. Most people are just trying to get through the week.

9. The biggest issues are often not culture-war issues

The media loves a culture war because outrage is good for ratings, and it’s easy for online commenters to weigh in. But culture war issues, like the casting of Lupita Nyong'o as Helen of Troy in The Odyssey or the “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” commercial, aren’t keeping us up at night. When you ask Americans which issues they prioritize, the answers are stubbornly practical: the cost of living, decent jobs, health care, and safe neighborhoods. The issues that dominate our feeds and make us hate each other aren’t usually the ones we care about most.

10. Most elections are effectively decided in the Primaries, not on Election Day in November

96% of House districts are "safe," meaning they are solidly Democratic or Republican and have been for decades (a problem exacerbated by gerrymandering, which lets those in power redraw district lines to favor their party). That makes the November general election a formality: the real contest is the primary, where each party picks the candidate who then coasts to victory. The Senate is a bit more competitive but still largely locked: only about 8 of the 35 seats up this cycle are considered competitive. And further down the ballot, it's the same or worse: roughly 80% of state legislative seats in recent years were either uncontested or safe. Wherever one party dominates, the election that matters is the primary, where a small, often more ideologically extreme sliver of voters turns out, handing us nominees who don't reflect what most people actually want.

11. Most Americans want politics to be less toxic

The exhaustion you feel is nearly universal. A majority of Americans believe democracy is stronger when citizens can disagree respectfully, and they're sick of the venom. The catch is that most of us feel alone in wanting it, while assuming everyone else is spoiling for a fight. We're a country full of people wishing the other people would calm down, without realizing the other people are wishing the exact same thing.

So what do we do with all this?

Taken together, these facts tell a story the outrage machine would rather you didn't hear: we are less divided, less extreme, and less doomed than advertised. The furious, hopelessly split America on your screen is real in the sense that the anger is real, but it's a funhouse-mirror version of the actual country, distorted by algorithms, campaigns, and pundits who all profit when you believe your neighbor is the enemy.

The good news is that a distortion can be corrected. Talk to people instead of feeds. Vote in the primaries and the local races, not just the presidential main event. And the next time someone tells you the other half of the country is a lost cause, remember the numbers. On the “other side” sits a person who probably wants what you want, thinks you're more extreme than you are, and is just as tired of the noise.

We have a lot more in common than we've been led to believe. Maybe it's time we started meeting the neighbors again.

You've read the facts. Here's how to act on them.

This summer, the Builders BBQ is an invitation to do exactly what these facts point toward: fire up the grill and invite over your neighbors, including someone who sees the world a little differently. Rediscover the thing every one of these numbers keeps insisting is true: that you and the person across the table have far more in common than we've been led to believe.

👉 Host a Builders BBQ

Alex Buscemi can be reached at abuscemi@buildersmovement.org

Art by Matthew Lewis