Self-identified MAGAs are not evenly distributed across America’s regions, with six times as many per capita in the Deep South compared to New Netherland
By Colin Woodard
We know a lot of things by now about Tump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. Researchers have documented that its members are overwhelmingly white, male, Christian and middle class. Half are retired, and almost as many are over 65. MAGA approval is statistically associated with racism, opposing social equality, and Christian Nationalist beliefs. But, we were wondering, where do they live?
As part of the new national Pell Center Voices of Value survey, we asked likely voters about their ideology — MAGA, conservative, moderate, liberal or progressive — and had our pollsters at Embold Research identify which American Nations region each respondent comes from. That allowed us to calculate the proportion of likely voters who consider themselves MAGA by regional culture. As you can see from the results in the map at the top of this post, the concentration varies significantly by region.
There’s a massive six-fold difference between the MAGA-ist region, the Deep South (18% of voters), and the most MAGA-phobic, New Netherland, the Dutch-founded area around what’s now Greater New York City (just 3%.) While it’s not surprising that a “red” region is more MAGA than a “blue” one, notice that two other, more Democrat-supporting regions — Left Coast and Tidewater — have more than double the proportion of MAGA voters than New Netherland does. And Yankeedom, generally Democratic, has almost as high a proportion (14%) as Trump’s electoral stronghold of Greater Appalachia (16%), and more than the Midlands (10%), where Trump and his Democratic opponents have essentially fought to a draw over the past three presidential cycles. has been essentially a tie. (Our poll didn’t have enough respondents from the three enclaves — New France, First Nation and Greater Polynesia — to conduct the exercise.)
Given that MAGA is more than 80 percent white — and whites only constitute 52% of the Deep South’s population — we were curious what the figures looked like for just white voters. This map shows the percentage of whites who identify as MAGA:
MAGA’s share of white Deep Southern voters hits a whopping 25 percent, significantly higher than Greater Appalachia and Far West (both 18%). Yankeedom reaches third place, with 15%, a higher proportion than that of white voters in either the Midlands or El Norte. Yankeedom, it turns out, has a relatively strong MAGA movement, even if its stuck in the minority. (New Netherland, a relatively small region, didn’t have enough white respondents to include in this slide.)
Notice that, on a regional basis, there’s no clear correlation between racial diversity and white MAGA support; Greater Appalachia and, especially, Yankeedom have white supermajorities and pretty high MAGA concentrations; Deep South and El Norte are very diverse and have very different profiles. Also, there doesn’t appear to be a clear link with the presence of immigrants at the regional scale, as you can see by eyeballing this map from our geography of immigration package:
It may be that, at a local level, MAGA is thicker on the ground where immigration and/or racial diversity are higher, but it’s not the case on a regional basis.
We’ll be sharing more details from the Voices of Value survey — which was in the field in May 4 to 12, 2026 — in the coming days and weeks. The survey was conducted by Embold Research for the Pell Center and had 2034 respondents, all eligible and self-identified likely voters. The modeled margin of error was 2.2 percent. You can find cross-tabs, the methodology statement and more at the bottom of the survey’s homepage. Pell Center associate director Katie Sonder directed the survey.
— Thanks to our polling partners at Embold Research for the data crunching and to our friends at the culturally-minded geospatial consultancy, Motivf, where Aimee Trehey created the MAGA maps you see herein.
— Colin Woodard, author of American Nations, Nations Apart and other books on U.S. history, geography, nationhood and politics, is the director of Nationhood Lab.