Transcript: Jason Mangone

An interview with the executive director of More In Common U.S.

As tensions mount within the United States — and between the United States and Canada — it has never been more important to understand each other. My guest on the program this week is the head of a depolarization non-profit and his latest research paints a nuanced and complex portrait of Trump voters and the cultural attitudes and policy positions that energize them.

Jason Mangone is the executive director of More in Common U.S. Its latest report is Beyond MAGA: A Profile of the Trump Coalition.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: I have really admired the work of More in Common, and I think depolarization is more important now than ever — both within your country, but also between your country and mine. We’ve seen these trade tensions heighten, and I think it’s crucial that Canadians understand what is going on within the Trump coalition. And [that we] not paint all of our neighbours with the same brush. The American journalist Amanda Ripley was recently on this show. She mentioned your latest report, and a listener wrote in requesting that we have you on. So, we’re thrilled that you were able to find the time. We’re going to talk about this report, Beyond MAGA. Before we do that, I want to touch on the concept of “the exhausted majority” from your 2018 Hidden Tribes report — something that I think will resonate with a lot of people here in this country as well. Can you walk us through what that is?

JM: So, the first study that we did in the U.S. is called Hidden Tribes, which was meant to show a deeper understanding of how Americans understand themselves and the world. All too often, we talk about ourselves, at least at the level of analysis, as nothing more than mere demographic units that are ultimately coloured blue or red — which is a far cry from how human beings actually understand themselves in the world.

Anytime we enter a new country, we do what’s called a values-based segmentation, where we ask questions about people’s core beliefs and segment them into tribes that are more aligned with those beliefs, as opposed to demography or politics at the base. In that initial study, which is called, as you pointed out, Hidden Tribes, we found seven tribes in America. And the middle four of those tribes, which are about two-thirds of Americans, are what we refer to as “the exhausted majority.”

By shorthand, they’re basically the two-thirds of Americans for whom politics doesn’t really matter all that much. They are often more open to compromise than folks in what we call the wings, which are the outer third segments to the right and to the left. They also don’t feel terribly represented in our politics. The reason we said exhausted is because you’ll often hear this term “silent majority.” They are not just quiet because so much of our conversation is driven by the more extreme wings. They are actually exhausted by it. Politics, public life, is tiring for them. It’s exhausting. Because, over the course of their normal lives, they don’t think about it all that much. And politics has become a nasty business, and so they, in general, tend to avoid it.

TH: I certainly relate to that, even though I swim in this soup every day. The Beyond MAGA report — it looks at the 77 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump in this last election. You’re asking who they are and what they believe. What you have found here, in terms of a picture, is far more complex than what is traditionally presented in the news media. Can you give us a brief snapshot of the methodology here, so that people understand how you arrived at these conclusions?

JM: I’m sure we’ll have time to talk about the segments of the findings, but I’ll answer really narrowly about methodology here. We did about six waves of surveys across nine or so months. We surveyed about 19,000 Americans, including about 11,000 folks who voted for President Trump. We also did a couple dozen focus groups, as well as dozens of one-on-one interviews with each of the types of Trump’s voters that we identified.

You’ll often hear us talk about what’s called a segmentation. And all a segmentation is, is you ask a set of behavioural and attitudinal questions and then group people based on their responses to those questions. You can segment people statistically using any set of questions. One of the things that More in Common always does in its segmentations is we never include demography in our segmentations. The theory being that people understand themselves as deeper than these demographic units, as I talked about.

And so, we group people based on their responses to these behavioural and attitudinal questions, which helps us to arrive at the four segments that we talk about in this report. In this particular case, as I mentioned, surveys of about 19,000 Americans, including about 11,000 folks in President Trump’s coalition.

TH: As you say, you’re moving beyond conventional categories — age, religious affiliation, income, race, gender. You write in the report that “today there is perhaps no label as misunderstood as Trump voter, no tagline quite so distorted as MAGA.” You go into these four different parts of this coalition. I want to start with the first one. Let’s start with the MAGA Hardliners. That’s 29 percent. Sketch out a profile of this voter for us.

JM: In general, I think this is the type of Trump voter that people stereotype towards and confuse with the entirety of the coalition. As you mentioned, they are about 29 percent, so just under 30 per cent of the coalition. They are older and whiter than the rest of the group, more or less evenly split between men and women.

The shorthand for how I think about MAGA Hardliners is they feel like our country is in the midst of a struggle between good and evil, and they feel like God and President Trump are firmly on their side. They are a little bit more open to conspiratorial thinking. They feel like there are elites who control our politics.

And then, a couple other telling statistics. One is that they also feel some sense of community out of their politics. Politics is a weird place to put community. One of the ways that we can point to and say that is that, relative to our other three segments, they are the most likely to say that most of their friends share the same political views as they do. So, they get community out of being a part of this coalition, this movement.

The other thing that I would say is that, yeah, this is the group most aligned with President Trump. Despite the fact that they are the oldest of the four segments that we identified, they are also the likeliest to post about politics on social media — which seems a little bit odd because we don’t associate the oldest cohort with being the people that are active politically on social media. With that being said, it actually is continuous with many of our findings over time, which is more or less that the most hardened partisans are the most likely to be open to sharing about politics online.

So, a phenomenon we see often is that groups on the edges of our politics dominate the political conversation, and in particular, the online social media political conversation.

TH: The second part of this coalition is Anti-Woke Conservatives. This is 21 percent. What did you learn about that group?

JM: They are the most secular, the wealthiest, and also the most civically engaged cohort. This group — the name of the segment tells it all — they are very energized by the idea that progressive agendas that they didn’t sign up for have come to dominate all of our institutions. And they support President Trump because they see him as standing up against those institutions.

Unlike MAGA Hardliners, who are quite religious in their politics, Anti-Woke Conservatives are the most secular group. For them, their critique of the left isn’t so much religious as it is rationalist. One quote that I constantly come back to here is, in focus groups with Anti-Woke Conservatives, it wasn’t uncommon for us to bring up the concept of wokeness and for folks to use the terms “stupidity” and “ridiculousness” interchangeably with the idea of wokeness.

They look at a country where open borders, crime, and homelessness have, in their minds, become a serious problem, and maybe even a crisis, and they don’t see our current institutions as being capable of coping with those problems. In their minds, those institutions are looking the other way because progressivism tells them to, as opposed to managing those problems head-on. They see that as dumb, misguided. And so, they want a strong figure who will stand up and solve those problems.

TH: This next group that I wanted to discuss surprised me. It’s not a group that you see represented in the media. This group is younger, they are female, they are diverse, they are low-income. That is the 30 percent that are Mainline Republicans. What did they have to say?

JM: This is particularly true of President Trump’s coalition, but as party membership declines on both, frankly, the left and the right, and the share of independents grows — and in President Trump’s coalition, more independents voted for him than voted for Vice President Harris in 2024 — we hear about these trends constantly, how party loyalty doesn’t matter as much to individuals as it once did. And yet, there are still a lot of people that have been Republicans for a long time, and that’s the Mainline Republicans. They believe in familiar conservative priorities, things like keeping our communities safe, keeping the economy strong, keeping the borders secure. And they view President Trump as the best available expression of those values.

It’s in the name, but they are the most likely of our four groups to identify as both a Trump supporter and a Republican, as opposed to just a Trump supporter but not a terribly strong Republican. This is a group of folks who believe in familiar conservative priorities, have probably voted Republican for most of their lives, have believed in Reagan, have believed in Bush, have believed in McCain, have believed in Romney. President Trump has been the leader of the Republican Party for the better part of the decade now.

One other quick thing I want to point out about this group — I think about 13 percent of this group are Hispanic Americans. And so, relative to other groups, this group also has a lot of immigrants that are a part of it.

TH: I want to talk about the immigration issue in a moment and how that all breaks down. But first, let’s go to the Reluctant Right — 20 percent. I want to read a quote from the report: “This group tend to avoid political conversations with friends and family, both because they dislike confrontation and because they often find themselves holding the minority position.” I know people that would describe themselves this way. Tell us about this Reluctant Right faction within the coalition.

JM: Again, these monikers — the purpose of these short names is to give you some insight into who the groups are. And the Reluctant Right are just that. They are the most ambivalent cohort of President Trump’s voters.

Again, another take that we would often hear in focus groups is, “I don’t really care all that much about politics, but my brother or my sister or my mom said, ‘This is the way that you need to vote in this election,’” and so they did. Relative to other voters, they have the lowest ongoing approval of President Trump. They also give him the lowest scores on policy. But when they had a single choice to make between President Trump and the alternative in 2024, they supported President Trump.

Some of their support is waning at this point. About a quarter of this group says they are experiencing some regrets about their vote choice, or regret it entirely. But at that moment in 2024, they felt like President Trump was a better expression of their values than Vice President Harris was.

TH: Let’s dig into immigration, because this is a lot of the news that we’re getting up here in Canada from the U.S. I just want to point out, before we get into that, that this coalition disagrees on a lot of key issues, from leadership and faith to immigration and wokeness.

When we drill down on immigration, you write, “While undocumented immigration is a top priority for most Trump voters, they differ substantially on how far the administration should go at tackling it.” You also write, “The centrality of immigration to the 2024 election and the Trump administration’s agenda has led to assumptions that Trump voters hold uniform views about immigration. It is often asserted, for example, that they share the motivation of preserving a white Christian America in the face of demographic changes and embrace once-fringe ideas such as the Great Replacement Theory. Likewise, it is often assumed that Trump voters will support any and all of the administration’s plans for enforcement, detention, and deportations.” I do think this summarizes the perception up here in Canada, generally speaking. Why is that not accurate?

JM: One of the statistics that I like to point to regularly, as a baseline of our understanding of how President Trump’s voters think about immigration, is that we often ask questions on what are called zero-to-100 warmth scales. To try to paint the picture for audio listeners, we say, “Rate on a zero-to-100 scale, where zero equals complete coldness and 100 equals warmth.” So 100 is like, “You’re my mom,” and zero is like, “You punched my mom,” if that makes sense. “Where do you rate this group of individuals?”

As a coalition, President Trump’s voters give a warmth score of 71 to legal immigrants. And by the way, the country as a whole — the U.S. average — is about a 72. The specific numbers on a zero-to-100 scale don’t matter all that much. The point is, when you’re into the 70s, you feel pretty good about someone else, and their warmth score mirrors that of the country as a whole.

Where President Trump’s voters differ is their feelings of coldness toward illegal immigrants. [It’s] also worth noting that Trump voters’ warmth scores toward legal immigrants are slightly higher than their warmth scores toward members of the MAGA movement, for what it’s worth. Those aren’t narrowly related things, but it offers some context into how they feel about legal immigrants.

Listen, each type feels a little bit differently. But President Trump’s voters looked at what was happening at the border over the course of President Biden’s administration and they just said, “This is out of control. We do not have any sense of who is coming into our country. You could tell me that we do, but with this many people coming through and the scenes that I see on my television, there’s no way that we have complete accountability over who is coming in. And it’s ridiculous that you’re not naming that problem and trying to solve it.”

So, in general, Americans aren’t so motivated by more or less immigration. What’s very energizing to them politically is a sense of control over who is coming in. In general, President Trump’s voters are okay with legal immigration and they want secure borders.

The coalition falls along pretty predictable lines when you ask about the most extreme enforcement measures, whether that’s rounding up immigrants using the military or deporting immigrants without hearings or to third countries. MAGA Hardliners tend to support it. Mainline Republicans, and especially the Reluctant Right, do not at all.

Last thing that I would say — over the last few weeks in the United States, we obviously had some tragic events happen in Minneapolis. President Trump is politically savvy. He knew that his administration went too far, even for his coalition, and he pulled back. Last week he fired Kristi Noem. I don’t make that point for politics. I make that point to suggest that Americans, in general, are okay with legal, procedural immigration. They do not want disorder, and they want a sense of control over who is coming.

TH: Another thing that gets focused on a lot in our media is the erosion of democratic norms. What did you see when you looked at the question of upholding democratic norms?

JM: In general, I think there are two things going on on these questions. One is, in general, when you ask these questions at a pretty high level of abstraction — for instance, “President Trump should test constitutional norms because Congress can’t get anything done” — there are fairly high levels of support among MAGA Hardliners and Anti-Woke Conservatives, with support starting to diminish among Mainline Republicans and the Reluctant Right.

Then, when you ask more specific questions related to democratic norms — for instance, “Should President Trump ignore Supreme Court orders to get things done?” — those levels of support drop off. Again, MAGA Hardliners support it more than Mainline Republicans and the Reluctant Right, but relatively few numbers of any of these cohorts do. So, rule one: In general, the more specific you get in asking questions about democratic norms, the less likely people are to support breaking those norms.

The second point that I would make is that there are competing impulses. There is both a majoritarian impulse within the coalition of overcoming our differences, seeking compromise, solving our problems, working together, and also an impulse that “the left is an existential threat to America and my side must win at all costs.” The unity- and compromise-driven side of the coalition has more voters behind it. The “my side must win at all costs” side has a lot of energy behind it. It’s an energetic minority of the coalition.

If you look at history, yes, President Trump tested constitutional limits on January 6, 2021, and we’ve held. Our institutions have been strong enough to hold in the face of testing limits. But I want to be very, very clear — this is on a knife’s edge, and it’s unclear which direction it will go.

TH: One of the things that really stands out is a big point of agreement [in the coalition], that “America is in crisis, the political establishment has failed, and the other side holds them in contempt.” What a powerful statement. What does that mean for the United States that so many people in the Trump coalition feel that way?

JM: I mean, there are a lot of ways to interpret that paragraph, so I’ll offer what my interpretation is. I forget what page of the report it’s on, but we asked Trump voters, “Do Democratic politicians respect people like me?” Basically, no — we knew that would be the case. We also asked, “Do Americans who voted for Democrats respect people like me?” That was also no, by majorities of the coalition. That was a little bit surprising, because our hypothesis in asking that question was that President Trump’s voters wouldn’t feel respected by Democratic elites, but would be able to find common ground with other Americans and feel respected.

My answer for what is going on is that more and more Americans are prioritizing politics as a part of their identity. And politics is a really, really bad identity to prioritize in a pluralistic society, because politics is ultimately zero-sum. Someone wins, someone loses, a bunch of other people lose. And as that becomes more and more habituated, we’re likelier to look at each other with skepticism and with cynicism.

I would say, as you get down into one-on-one interviews, even with — I was talking to a MAGA Hardliner from a city in northern New Jersey, from Paterson, which is an industrial city in northern New Jersey — and I said, “Do you hate Democrats? Do you have trouble getting along with them?” His response was, “No, man, this is Paterson. I’m surrounded by Democrats. Run-of-the-mill Democrats who are in my streets? No, I just get along with them. I don’t care. It’s fine.”

And so, I am both concerned by responses to those survey questions and also very strongly holding out hope that Americans will muddle through, as they always have, if nothing else because politics kind of sucks and there are much better avenues at which to throw your attention and energy.

TH: One last trend I wanted to ask you about is this emerging new traditionalism among the young, which I found fascinating, and the return to religiosity, as part of that. Walk us through what you found there.

JM: I think the best way to think about this is as an emergent counterculture. In order for something to be a counterculture, it needs to be rebelling against the dominant culture. And so, in an era in which the predominant culture has become increasingly more progressive, it’s not terribly surprising that there would emerge a conservative counterculture. So, that’s a starting point.

A few of the ways that we asked questions were increased levels of religiosity, increasingly buying into the idea that men and women have specific roles to play, also openness to pushing against norms. On all of these sorts of questions, younger Trump voters tend to have more conservative views than older Trump voters. Also worth noting that younger non-Trump voters tend to have more conservative views on these questions than older non-Trump voters. So, there is something going on among the young.

It’s unclear where this is going to shake out. These are all young people — in our questions, it was all people younger than 35. Older than 35, we categorized as older. Younger than 35, we categorized as younger. And young people change their minds. What I thought about politics and life in my 20s and 30s is different than what I think about now in my 40s.

The way that I read that stuff is there are really open questions about what is the best way for me to order my life. Just to take one of those questions — yes, younger Trump voters are more open to the idea that there’s a specific role for a man and a woman to play in a family, where a man should earn the money and a woman should stay at home with the kids. What I think is going on at a deeper level there is, “I want to live a life, I want to have a family, and that’s really hard to do when the only way to afford a life is to have two full-time working parents. You cannot pay enough attention to the family that you want to raise.” So, I just think that there’s an openness to having more conservative viewpoints on this question than may have been the case in the last 10 or 20 years.

The last thing I’ll say, just because it’s my favourite question in the entire report, is: “Do you think it’s more rebellious to be atheist or to be religious?” Younger Trump voters, as well as younger non-Trump voters, both say that it’s more rebellious to be religious than it is to be atheist. Again, I think that this is an interesting way to get a window into what the emerging counterculture is.

TH: I found that question fascinating as well.

JM: I love that one.

TH: Yeah, in part because of my own trajectory. I grew up on the progressive left, in very activist circles. My own views, at least on the social side of this, have changed as a result of contact with a lot of these things. So, I find it a fascinating question. Just lastly, Jason, I wanted to ask you if you could reflect on polarization in the United States for a moment and how it impacts your life. I know you come from a military background. You are extensively engaged in public service at the local level and the national level. Why do you do this work? What does it mean to you?

JM: I was very lucky to be shaped by a series of institutions — to have the values, ethics, and morals that I do. It began with my family, with my church, a particular all-boys Catholic school that I went to. It continued through the military, and now having a family of my own and going to the church where I grew up.

Having those sorts of habits of virtue handed down from one generation to the next used to happen organically and was contingent upon having automatic trust in those institutions that you were a part of — to say, “It’s obviously a good thing for these institutions to shape the character that I have.” None of those things feels obvious anymore.

If we’re going to continue to live in a democracy where we don’t rely on a government to tell us what the best life is, it requires both systems and structures that make it easier for people to buy into those institutions, and also having trust that those institutions are worthy of shaping our character.

I see that as a massive risk to our social cohesion and just a massive risk to happiness and understanding what it is to live a good life.

So, for me, the reason I do this work is, frankly, to make it likelier that my kids come to view the world in these terms that I was able to do almost by default. I had no other choice than to be shaped by these series of institutions, and it’s not obvious to me that that’s going to be the case for future generations.