In his second term, Trump is driving many Americans away from authoritarian stances, but they’re doubling down on them in his core region of support, Greater Appalachia
By Colin Woodard
With an authoritarian regime attempting to consolidate power in the United States, the survival of the republic depends largely on the degree to which the American public supports for authoritarianism. Our previous polling — and the collapse in support for Trump, his policies, and allied electoral candidates — has suggested they don’t. But we thought it’d be a good time to survey not just opinions about issues, candidates, and American purpose, but the degree to which Americans in different regions of the country still hold authoritarian mindsets.
We previously performed this exercise in April 2024, at a time when Donald Trump was expected to lose his reelection bid and nearly a year before he returned to power and quickly demonstrated his autocratic plans were far stronger, organized, and staffed than in his first term. Had any of this shifted Americans’ attitudes about enforcing rules, defending traditional social conventions, and obeying authority? The answer: in several regions, yes, presumably because it’s prompted many to rethink their authoritarian attitudes and, in his core region of support, Greater Appalachia, doubling down on them.
As part of the Pell Center’s 2026 Voices of Value Survey, we asked 2,034 registered voters a a series of questions from the Authoritarianism-Conservatism-Traditionalism (ACT) model, a well-established academic test of right-wing authoritarian attitudes developed by political psychologists John Duckitt of the University of Auckland, Boris Bizumic of Australian National University and their co-authors. This model is built on evidence that right-wing authoritarian attitudes flow from three distinct, though related, ideological attitudes, described as follows:
Those with high Authoritarian Aggressiveness favor “strict, tough, harsh, punitive, coercive social control” and dislike “leniency, indulgence, permissiveness, softness” toward those who violate “social rules and laws.” Duckitt and Bizumic argued that adherent’s motivational goal likely stems “from direct, real, physical threats to societal security, safety, and well being.” In this context, Aggressiveness – sometimes also called, confusingly, “Authoritarianism” in the academic literature – is about the harsh enforcement of The Rules.
Those with high Conservatism favor “uncritical, respectful, obedient, submissive support for existing societal or group authorities and institutions” and dislike “critical, questioning, rebellious, oppositional attitudes to them.” The sociologists said adherent’s motivational goal is to maintain “social order, harmony, cohesion, and consensus in society or the collective.” In the ACT model context, Conservatism is about unquestioning submission to authority. “Conservatism captured what we labeled the ‘anti-democratic impulse’ as it predicted political intolerance and obedience regardless of whether the authority figure or movement was on the left or right,” Jarret Crawford, a professor of psychology at The College of New Jersey who has conducted experiments in the U.S. with this model, told me in 2024. “Conservatism predicted intolerance of people’s rights to protest, regardless of whether those protesters were left or right wing.”
Finally, people with high Traditionalism favor “traditional, old fashioned social norms, values, and morality” and dislike “modern, liberal, secular, bohemian, ‘alternative’ values, norms, and morality.” Such people’s motivational goal, Duckitt and Bizumic wrote, was to maintain those traditional norms. Traditionalism is about defending received conventions. Crawford said this facet captured U.S. left-right differences relating to prejudice, political intolerance, and obedience to authorities.
Here’s what our new poll — fielded from May 3-12, 2026 by our pollsters at Embold Research — found for these three “ACT” mindsets across the American Nations regions:
Across the board, the Deep South and Greater Appalachia had the highest proportion of people holding authoritarian attitudes, with Deep Southerners topping the charts for wanting rules harshly enforced (i.e., Aggressiveness) and unquestioning obedience to authority (Conservatism), while Greater Appalachian people had strongest showing for wanting people to comply to existing conventions (Traditionalism.)
On the other end of the spectrum, people in the Left Coast were far and away the least likely to support harsh rule enforcement or unquestioning obedience to authority, while New Netherlanders — those living in the Dutch-founded area around Greater New York City — were the least bound to received conventions. El Norte is also resistant to all three types of authoritarian thinking,
As in our 2024 survey, Yankeedom was the third most authoritarian region, despite only being above the overall US baseline in harsh rule enforcement. (Puritan roots run deep, apparently.) The Far West wasn’t far behind. Tidewater, the Midlands, and Far West occupied the middle ground. Several smaller regions – First Nation, the New France enclave in Louisiana, Spanish Caribbean’s South Florida section and Greater Polynesia’s Hawaiian Islands — did not have enough respondents to ensure accurate results, so were not included in the analysis. (For most of the other regions, n= between 100 and 400.)
Here’s how the numbers on the charts were calculated: our pollsters categorized the percent of people in each regional segment who had High, Middle, and Low scores in each of the ACT categories. For each “nation” as well as the U.S. at large we subtracted the Low percent from the High percent to give a “Net High percent.” We then compared this figure to the total U.S. net High percent to show the relative levels of A, C, and T for each nation (and to do so in a way that allowed side-by-side comparisons of the three factors.)
So what’s it mean?
First, most of the regional cultures had very similar results as compared with our April 2024 poll, usually within the margin of error. That makes it even more remarkable to see the sharp shift toward authoritarianism in Greater Appalachia, which has seen a whopping 15 point shift in aggressiveness — that’s rules enforcement — compared to the national average and and a staggering 27 point jump in obedience to authority (i.e., Conservatism.) That’s truly remarkable, given the region’s strong cultural and historical resistance to authority. Apparently Trump’s authority is a different matter. (The region’s relative ambivalence to observing traditions remained unchanged.) This occurred even as Deep Southerners became slightly less authoritarian across all thee metrics.
The other notable shifts were in New Netherland, Tidewater, and El Norte, all of which saw a double-digit shift away from authoritarian mindsets in two of the three ACT metrics. The Midlands’ 20 point relative drop in Aggressiveness — the desire for harsh rule enforcement — is particularly notable, suggesting real regional unease with the “rules” and enforcement under Trump’s rule. This, coupled with Midlanders’ 12 point shift away from authoritarian attitudes about total obedience to authority, likely spells trouble for Trump’s allies in places like Iowa, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, where Midlanders usually play the kingmaker’s role.
To dive into the weeds a little more: on national level, white people have higher authoritarian scores on all three ACT dimensions than Blacks, Hispanics, or Asian people. This is also true in every region we included in the analysis. When you parse by race and region together, the most authoritarian part of the U.S. population are Deep Southern whites, whose net score is 35 points higher than the US overall average for aggressiveness, 20 points higher for conservatism, and 8 points higher for traditionalism. But because whites are only 52 percent of the population the the Deep South, that region falls behind Greater Appalachia, which is 68 percent white.
Men are also notably more likely to be authoritarian than women, and older generations get progressively are more authoritarian, save for the oldest bracket in the survey — those 65 and over — whose members are a bit less authoritarian in all three categories than the Gen X-ish segment (50-64 year olds.)
Bottom line: Trump’s authoritarianism is shifting attitudes away from authoritarian mindsets across the country, and especially in the key swing regions of the Midlands and El Norte. The only exception: the stronghold of his support, Greater Appalachia.
The Voices of Value survey was fielded by Embold Research May 4 to 12, 2026. It gathered responses from 2,034 likely voters in the United States, and had a modeled margin of error of 2.2 percent.
Nationhood Lab, based at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, is an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces threatening the federation.
Thanks to John Liberty at Motivf for his graphics, the Pell Center’s Katie Sonder for guiding the Voices of Value poll, and our colleagues at Embold Research for fielding it.
— Colin Woodard is the director of Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy