In the key swing regions, El Norte and the Midlands, majorities blame the collapse on Donald Trump, while people of color in two regions say we’re already a dictatorship
By Colin Woodard
The Pell Center’s spring Voices of Value poll found what is, if you stop and think about it in the wider lens of history, some shocking facts: a plurality of Americans now say the United States is not a democracy, while 61 percent of Democrats and nearly half of independents say we’re now living in a dictatorship.
My colleague, Katie Sonder, shared those topline national results last month, but here in the eve of a historic election, I’ve been digging into the regional differences on these and other questions we asked about threats to democracy and tolerance of authoritarian behavior via the American Nations model. What I found were broadly shared concerns with democratic erosion and strong opposition to most types of authoritarian election interference and unconstitutional behavior that extended across all the regional cultures, but with significantly higher concerns over Trump’s authoritarian ambitions in El Norte and the Midlands than elsewhere, and marked differences between white Americans and American people of color in Yankeedom, the Deep South and New Netherland.
Pluralities of registered voters in three regions say the U.S. is no longer a democracy – Greater Appalachia (49-47), Left Coast (48-46), and Yankeedom (49-47) – along with outright majorities in the Midlands (50-45) and El Norte (53-44). This includes a majority of white people in the Midlands (51-46), El Norte (50-46), and Left Coast (51-41), and a majority of people of color in every region except the Far West and Left Coast. (Note: this national survey did not have a sufficient number of respondents from the least populous regions – New France, Spanish Caribbean, First Nation and Greater Polynesia – so they are not included in these findings.)
In no region did a plurality of respondents say the U.S. is a dictatorship, but majorities of people of color did in El Norte (54-41) and New Netherland (47-45), and nearly so in Deep South (47-48). The racial split is to be expected, as the Trump administration fits the academic description of an ethnonational authoritarian movement, and Trump and JD Vance have made explicit arguments in favor of a blood and soil definition of American identity that excludes many people of color. (This same poll also established these sorts of assertions are staggeringly unpopular.)
The May 2026 poll also asked Americans to choose the top three of eighteen threats to U.S. democracy (or a nineteenth option, that there are no such threats.) The top choice of respondents in the Midlands and El Norte was “Donald Trump,” which bodes poorly for Republicans’ prospects in next week’s midterms in Texas, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Trump was also seen as the greatest danger by people of color in El Norte, the Midlands, Far West, Greter Appalachia, Deep South, and Yankeedom. Among white respondents, Trump wasn’t the number one choice in any region, but it did make number two – after “money in politics” — in the Midlands, El Norte and Left Coast. Again, this is terrible news for Republicans, electorally speaking.
Many civic organizations will be disappointed to learn that “political polarization” was only the ninth most chosen concern nationally, and near the bottom of the list among residents of El Norte, Far West, the Midlands and New Netherland. (They’re right, in my opinion, as “polarization” is a symptom, not a cause of the rise of authoritarianism, for reasons laid out recently by Johns Hopkins University’s Lilliana Mason in the Journal of Democracy, a leading peer-reviewed journal in this field.)
Some encouraging news: we asked a series of questions about whether respondents would support of oppose various authoritarian actions by leaders of their own party. Respondents in every region condemned most such actions by staggering 45- to 87-point margins, including efforts to ignore court rulings, censoring media sources that attack your party more than the opposing one, reduce the number of polling stations in opposition areas, changing election rules to disadvantage the other party, or being more loyal to the party than election rules in electoral disputes.
But in authoritarian actions relating to citizenship, that unanimity weakened. Greater Appalachian respondents were evenly split, 47-47, on whether to endorse “stripping U.S. citizens of their citizenship and deporting them if they are determined to be a threat to the country.” Those in Yankeedom (47-49) and Deep South (43-52) were tepid in their opposition, and pluralities of white people in Greater Appalachia (50-45) and Deep South (49-44) actually supported such behavior. White residents only narrowly opposed ICE officers regularly conducting surveillance and arrests at “schools, hospitals, places of worship and social service locations” in Greater Appalachia (48-51), Deep South (47-50), and Yankeedom (44-53).
On these questions, one revealing comparison was the difference between the attitudes of white people in Yankeedom and the Midlands. The latter were much more likely to oppose these two types of authoritarian actions, a finding consistent with that region’s deep historical roots as a culturally pluralistic “nation of immigrants” as opposed to the Yankee’s assimilative “melting pot” model.
The Voices of Value survey was overseen by Pell Center Associate Director Katie Sonder and fielded by Embold Research May 4-12, 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.
–