As support for secessionist movements increases, it’s vital that political leaders reduce the divisions that threaten to tear the US apart. More
The United States government has been shut down for nearly a month, yet another indication that the political system has become deeply dysfunctional.
President Donald Trump has blamed the Democrats and called their negotiating strategy a “kamikaze attack.” Democrats are keen to stand their ground, hoping that the fallout is worse for Republicans. While each side casts blame on the other, it is Americans who suffer.
But the shutdown is just another episode in a series of polarization-fueled events that are leading Americans to lose faith in their government. Every nation has it limits, and one wonders how much America can take before the pressure to divide into separate countries becomes too great.
Consider the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, which raised the specter of polarization-fueled conflict in America. Mentions of “civil war” surged online, fears grew over rising political violence, and the Trump administration vowed to crack down on left-leaning groups.
These are merely the latest examples of the mounting pressure on the American political system. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that 64% of Americans think the country is too politically divided to solve the nation’s problems. The same poll showed that only 42% of Americans held that position in 2020.
In other words, nearly two-thirds of Americans think the system is broken, and the number is growing fast.
Calls for a national divorce
It should come as no surprise, then, that some are calling for radical solutions like a national divorce.
On Sept. 15, 2025, five days after Kirk’s killing, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that America needs “a peaceful national divorce. Our country is too far gone and too far divided, and it’s no longer safe for any of us.”
National divorce is the term used to describe the splitting of America into two parts: a red America and a blue America. Secessionist movements like Yes California and Red-State Secession have for over a decade been calling for a national divorce along political lines. And a 2023 Axios poll found that as many as 20% of Americans see national divorce as a solution to political polarization.
As a political scientist who studies secessionist conflict, I’ve found that the national divorce argument is commonly used as an analogy with marital divorce. Just as two spouses may be extremely ill-suited for one another, and far better off if they separated, the same can be said of red and blue America. They no longer see eye to eye on a range of issues, from reproductive rights to the environment and gun control.
If they seceded from one another and formed their own countries, the argument goes, then they could establish policies that would ensure the future they wanted.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., called for a ‘peaceful national divorce’ in September 2025.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
But as I show in my new book, there is no way to disentangle red and blue America without tremendous violence. Additionally, a large and increasingly ignored percentage of Americans hold moderate views.
There is no doubt that polarization in America is a problem that is getting worse, but a national divorce is simply not the solution.
And yet America’s leaders continue to lead their country toward that outcome. The deployment of National Guard troops to blue cities, the polarization-enhancing consequences of competitive gerrymandering in states like Texas and California, and the spectacle of government shutdown are eroding the public trust. By continuing with policies that amplify polarization and erode the public trust, America’s leaders are fueling the calls for a national divorce.
How much can the country take?
The trend toward heightened polarization in America is not irreversible, but there are limits to how much the country can take before secession becomes a serious project. Some of the limits can be identified in advance.
First, it’s important that the country’s leaders take the pulse of America. If 20% of Americans favored national divorce in early 2023, what is the percentage now? That kind of sentiment can increase surprisingly fast.
Between 2006 and 2014, for example, Catalonian support for independence from Spain increased from 14% to 45%. If something like 50% of Americans concluded that America didn’t work and was better off broken up into smaller parts, then the country could tip rapidly into a secessionist crisis.
People hold up signs during a memorial for Charlie Kirk on Sept. 21, 2025, in Glendale, Ariz. After Kirk’s killing, Trump administration officials vowed to crack down on left-leaning groups.
AP Photo/John Locher
Second, high levels of secessionist support make the country vulnerable to trigger events that convince Americans that secession is the answer. The polarization-inspired assassination of prominent leaders can lead to a cycle of recrimination. Upcoming elections are also a concern. If they are closely contested and the losing side is unwilling to admit defeat, then the bedrock of democracy is broken. Both triggers can accelerate polarization and the turn to secessionism.
A third threshold moment is when a prominent leader decides to champion the cause of a national divorce.
Should someone like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott or the sore loser of a 2028 election conclude that the system is rigged, and secession is the only solution, then the entire project gains legitimacy.
It was that kind of elite conversion to the secessionist cause that energized the movement in places like Scotland and Catalonia.
The U.S. is a robust country and the longest-running democracy in the world. Americans have more in common than they realize, and the country can be a positive force in the world.
But without decisive action by political leaders to reduce the polarization that threatens to tear the country apart, the United States is at risk of turning from one country into two. More
The states are high, so the Trump administration is trying to change voting laws, while both sides gerrymandering to give them an advantage. More
Donald Trump is clearly concerned about the midterm elections that loom next November, which look to be a referendum on his administration. All seats in the House of Representatives will be up for grabs as will one-third of the Senate. Losing control of the House would severely crimp the US president’s ability to govern the way he has for the first nine months of his second term.
Trump has already voiced some unease about the election. In a recent interview with the One America News (OAN) network he stated: “The one thing that I worry about is that… I don’t have the numbers, but the person that wins the presidency always seems to lose the midterms”.
There’s a clue to the president’s apprehension about the numbers from the 2024 general election results. Despite winning the popular vote in 2024, the Republican vote in the House fell by 0.2 percentage points, as a result the GOP (the Republicans) lost two seats, leaving them with a majority of only five seats.
Trump knows from bitter experience what could happen if he loses control of the House. The Democrats made a net gain of 40 seats at the 2018 midterms after which the House impeached Trump twice.
So the president and his Maga coalition are well aware of how important it is to retain control of Congress.
The president is already taking steps that could tilt the midterms in his favour. Shortly after being sworn in as president in January 2025, he rescinded Joe Biden’s executive order that aimed to expand voting access and voter registration.
In April Trump ordered the Department of Justice to launch an investigation into the Democrats’ top fundraising platform ActBlue, after allegations it had allowed illegal campaign donations. The Democrats denounced the move as “Donald Trump’s latest front in his campaign to stamp out all political, electoral and ideological opposition”.
In August, Trump announced he wanted to ban mail-in-voting for the midterms. Three in every ten ballots cast in 2024 were mail-ins and are historically thought to favour the Democrats. But the US constitution mandates that the states control their elections. Congress has the power to pass legislation banning mail-ins for federal elections, but it is thought unlikely that such a measure would pass the Senate.
History has shown that the party occupying the White House usually performs poorly in the subsequent midterm elections. Three recent polls, Economist/YouGov, Morning Consult, and Emerson, show Democrats edging ahead in the generic congressional vote.
But precedent and political polling may count for little over the next year, as America’s democratic system is tested by extraordinary events and challenges.
Redistricting
There are already moves by mainly, though not exclusively, Republican controlled states to carve out additional congressional seats (referred to as redistricting) to bolster the party’s chances of retaining their majority in the House of Representatives. In three states – Texas, Missouri and North Carolina – Republican legislatures have redrawn constituency lines to the party’s electoral benefit, resulting in a notional seven new GOP-leaning congressional seats.
Changing electoral boundaries could affect the election result.
Alan Mazzocco/Shutterstock
After the Republican-controlled North Carolina legislature voted through a new congressional map that may provide the party an additional seat in next year’s midterms, Trump posted on Truth Social that this provided the potential for “A HUGE VICTORY for our America First Agenda.”
Democrats have responded to these events by launching their own redistricting plans, with Virginia becoming the latest blue state to announce proposals to redraw electoral boundaries that could give the party two or three additional seats.
It is, however, the largest state in the union – California – which serves as the base for Democrats counterbalancing moves. California Governor Gavin Newsom is asking his state’s voters to decide on proposition 50. If passed this would authorise state lawmakers to create new electoral wards that could favour Democrats. Academic analysis has estimated that the move could provide up to five additional Democratic seats in Congress.
This action has been endorsed by former US president Barack Obama, who stated the Democrats strategy in California gives the national party a “chance… to create a level playing field” in next year’s elections.
Partisan gerrymandering is nothing new in US politics. But what is new, according to Benjamin Schneer, a Harvard-based expert in political representation, is the scale on which this is being done. He believes:
Gerrymandering can be done more effectively now because we have fine-grained data on the population and on how people are likely to vote, and computing techniques to design maps in clever ways. Put all that together with intense polarization and that creates a perfect storm where gerrymandering can flourish.
Voting rights
The 2026 midterms would also be affected in a seismic way by an impending Supreme Court decision relating to a central pillar of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA). Section 2 of the act “prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, colour, or membership in one of the language minority groups”. The court is now weighing whether Section 2 is constitutional.
People vote in Louisiana: changes to voting rights laws could affect the outcome in 2026.
Allen J.M. Smith/Shutterstock
The case relates to a lawsuit in Louisiana where it was required under the VRA to redraw its congressional map to ensure two majority black districts. This is now being challenged in the Supreme Court. If successful it could weaken the voting power of minorities and result in congressional districts being redrawn throughout the American south.
This would be a major blow for the Democrats. Analysis by the BBC projects that this could “flip more than a dozen seats from Democratic to Republican”. Findings from the Economist go further, suggesting “Republicans could eliminate as many as 19 Democrat-held districts in the House of Representatives, or 9% of the party’s current caucus.”
The 2026 midterms will be hugely consequential. They will decide what party controls the US Congress for Trump’s last two years in office and therefore the extent of his power until January 2029. They will also serve as the unofficial start of the 2028 presidential campaign and determine whether it is the Republicans or Democrats with the political momentum heading into this historic election. More
Well-known flaws in conventional polling methods may be creating the incorrect perception that many Americans think political violence is justified. More
A series of recent events has sparked alarm about rising levels of political violence in the U.S. These episodes include the assassination of political activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025; the murder of a Democratic Minnesota state legislator and her husband in June 2025; and two attempts to kill Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Some surveys have reported that a large number of Americans are willing to support the use of force for political ends, or they believe that political violence may sometimes be justified.
My research is in political science and data analytics. I have conducted surveys for almost 25 years. For the past three years, I have studied new techniques that leverage artificial intelligence to conduct and analyze interviews.
My own recent surveys, which use AI to ask people about why they give their answers, show that the surprisingly high level of support in response to these questions is likely the result of confusion about what these questions are asking, not actual support for political violence.
Law enforcement officials lead a procession as pallbearers carry caskets after a funeral ceremony for Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, on June 28, 2025, in Minneapolis.
Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
A failure to communicate
Why would multiple surveys get the answers to this important question wrong? I believe the cause is an issue called response error. It means that respondents don’t interpret a question in the way the researcher thinks they will.
As a result, the answers people provide don’t really reflect what the researcher thinks the answers show.
For example, asking whether someone would support the use of force to achieve a political goal raises the question of what the respondent thinks “use of force” means in this context. It could be interpreted as violence, but it could also be interpreted as using legal means to “force” someone to do something.
Such response errors have been a concern for pollsters ever since survey research began. They can affect even seemingly straightforward questions.
What did you mean by that?
To avoid this problem, I used an AI interviewing system developed by CloudResearch, a well-known survey research company, to ask respondents some of the same questions about political violence from previous surveys. Then I used it to ask what they were thinking when they answered those questions. This process is called cognitive interviewing.
I then used AI to go through these interviews and categorize them. Two short reports that summarize this process as applied to both polls are available online. These analyses have not been peer-reviewed, and the results should be considered very preliminary.
Nonetheless, the results clearly demonstrate that respondents interpret these questions in very different ways.
Nuance matters
For example, in my survey, about 33% of Democrats agreed with the statement that “use of force is justified to remove President Trump from office.” However, when asked why they agreed, more than 57% gave responses like this: “I was not thinking physically but more in the sense that he – the president – might need to be ‘fired’ or forced out of office due to rules or laws.” Still others were envisioning future scenarios where a president illegally seizes power in a coup.
Once you account for these different interpretations of the question, the AI only coded about 8% of Democrats as supporting use of force in violent terms under current conditions.
Even here, there was substantial ambiguity – for example, this type of response was not unusual: “The language ‘use of force’ was a bit too broad for me. I could not justify killing Trump, for example, but less extreme uses of force were valid in my eyes.”
Similarly, 29% of Republicans agreed that “use of the military is justified to stop protests against President Trump’s agenda.” However, almost all of the respondents who agreed with this statement envisioned the National Guard interceding nonviolently to stop violent protests and riots. Only about 2.6% of Republicans gave comments supporting use of the military against nonviolent protests.
Almost all those who agreed that use of the military was justified expressed thoughts like this: “I see the military coming and acting as a police force to stop or prevent the demonstrations that become violent. Peaceful protesters must be allowed to exercise their right to free speech.”
People prepare to march in a ‘No Kings’ protest against Trump administration policies in New York City on June 14, 2025.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
When is political violence justified?
Even questions that explicitly ask about political violence are open to wide interpretation. Take, for example, this question: “Do you think it is ever justified for citizens to resort to violence in order to achieve political goals?”
The lack of a specific scenario or location in this question invites respondents to engage in all kinds of philosophical and historical speculation.
In my survey, almost 15% of respondents said violence could sometimes be justified. When asked about the examples they were thinking of, respondents cited the American Revolution, the anti-Nazi French Resistance and many other incidents as a reason for their responses. Only about 3% of respondents said they were thinking about actions in the U.S. at the current time.
Moreover, almost all respondents stated that violence should be a last resort when all other peaceful and legal methods fail.
One respondent illustrated both problems with one sentence: “The (American) colonists tried petitions and negotiations first, but, when those efforts failed, they resorted to armed conflict to gain independence.”
A call for understanding
Even these numbers likely overestimate Americans’ support for political violence. I read the interviews, checking the AI system’s labeling, and concluded that, if anything, it was overestimating support for violence.
Other factors may also be distorting reports of public support for political violence. Many surveys are conducted primarily online. One study estimated that anywhere from 4% to 7% of respondents in online surveys are “bogus respondents” who are selecting arbitrary responses. Another study reported that such respondents dramatically increase positive responses on questions about political violence.
Respondents may also be willing to espouse attitudes anonymously online that they would never say or do in real life. Studies have suggested that “online disinhibition effects” or “survey trolling” can impact survey results.
In sum, my preliminary research suggests that response error is a substantial problem in surveys about political violence.
Americans almost universally condemn the recent political violence they have witnessed. The recent poll results showing otherwise more likely stem from confusion about what the questions are asking than actual support for political violence. More
The President’s polling results haven’t changed much since the government came to a standstill. Here’s why the shutdown came about and how it’s progressing. More
It’s been eight days since a partial US government shutdown began on October 1, owing to a failure by Congress to agree to a new budget by the September 30 deadline.
Democrats are refusing to help to pass a budget unless health insurance subsidies are extended, while Republicans and President Donald Trump want a budget passed without these subsidies. There does not appear to be any progress towards ending the shutdown.
Analyst G. Elliott Morris has reported polls that have Republicans and Trump blamed for the shutdown by six to 17 points more than Democrats. In a YouGov poll for CBS News, by 40–28 respondents said the Democratic positions were not worth the shutdown, and by 45–23 they said the same of the Republican positions.
In analyst Nate Silver’s US national poll aggregate, Trump has a net approval of -9.4, with 52.7% disapproving and 43.3% approving. His net approval dropped two points in late September, but the shutdown hasn’t changed it yet.
Trump’s net approval on the four issues tracked by Silver are -4.7 on immigration, -15.3 on the economy, -15.6 on trade and -27.4 on inflation. His net approval on trade and inflation has risen in the last two weeks.
In November 2026 all of the House of Representatives and one-third of the Senate will be up for election at midterm elections. Morris’ generic ballot average has Democrats leading Republicans by 44.9–42.1. Democrats have led narrowly since April.
In polling conducted before the shutdown started, Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer averaged a net favourability of -20.5 according to Silver, making him the least popular of the six party leaders (Trump, Vice President JD Vance and the Democratic and Republican House and Senate leaders).
Schumer’s poor ratings are due to weak ratings from Democratic-aligned voters. A Pew poll gave him an overall 50–21 unfavourable rating, including 39–35 unfavourable with Democrats. There’s pressure on Schumer from his own party to fight Trump harder. If Democrats are perceived to have caved to Republicans, Schumer is likely to be blamed by other Democrats.
How do shutdowns affect the US economy?
There have been 11 US government shutdowns since 1980, with seven of them lasting five days or less. The longest shutdown (35 days) occurred during Trump’s first term after Democrats gained control of the House in November 2018 elections.
Shutdowns are economically damaging, but past shutdowns haven’t lasted long enough to do great damage, and the economy rebounds once the shutdown is over.
Shutdowns result in far less government economic data. The September jobs report was to be released last Friday, but this won’t happen until after the shutdown finishes.
Despite the shutdown, the benchmark US S&P 500 stock index surged to a new record high in Wednesday’s session, and is up 4% in the last month. The stock market has been supporting Trump since it rebounded from April lows.
Why is there a shutdown when Republicans control both chambers?
Republicans won the House of Representatives by 220–215 over Democrats at the November 2024 elections and currently hold it by 219–213, with two special elections to occur later this year. A Democrat who won a September 23 special election has not yet been formally certified the winner.
Republicans also hold a 53–47 majority in the Senate.
In the Senate, legislation usually needs to clear a 60-vote “filibuster” threshold. The filibuster allows at least 41 senators to indefinitely delay legislation they disagree with. To reach 60 votes, Republicans need at least seven Democratic senators to vote with them.
The filibuster is not part of the US Constitution, and the majority party could eliminate it. But some Republican senators are probably worried about what Democrats would do if they won the presidency and majorities in both chambers of Congress.
The filibuster cannot be applied to all legislation. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” passed the Senate using “reconciliation” by 51–50 on Vance’s tie-breaking vote. But reconciliation is a cumbersome process that isn’t appropriate for a normal budget bill.
Ipsos poll on Trump’s troop deployments
Trump has deployed national guard troops on home soil in Chicago, Illinois, and attempted to also do this in Portland, Oregon. The national guard has assisted before, during environmental disasters and protests, but Trump’s deployments are against the wishes of the affected states’ governors.
In an Ipsos US national poll for Reuters, respondents thought by 58–25 that the president should only deploy troops to areas with external threats. By 48–37, they did not think the president should be able to send troops into a state if its governor objects. More
