Pollsters, news anchors and newspaper columnists say America is polarized.

The day before the 2024 presidential election, The New Yorker released an article titled “The Americans Prepping for a Second Civil War,” which seemed to anticipate that a nation-shattering conflict would erupt no matter who won.

During President Joe Biden’s term, a 2022 FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos survey found that Americans ranked “political extremism or polarization” as one of their biggest concerns, which was an unusual finding compared with previous poll results.

Earlier polls that had asked the same questions about Americans’ top priorities usually found that the economy and foreign conflicts occupied the top spots.

Yes, another election is always around the corner for Americans, and voting tallies remind us of electoral divides.

In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by less than 4 percentage points in the popular vote. In 2016, Hillary Clinton finished just over 2 points ahead of Donald Trump, who nevertheless won the Electoral College. In 2020, the difference was near 4 points again. In 2024 it was less than 2 points. You get the idea.

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Some choose to describe the period spanning these elections, especially the most recent elections, only from the perspective that we are a polarized populace.

“The United States feels roiled by polarization,” researcher Rachel Kleinfeld wrote for the Carnegie Endowment in 2023. “Some scholars claim that Americans are so polarized they are on the brink of civil war.”

Headlines from NBC (“Here’s What’s Driving American’s Increasing Political Polarization”), The Atlantic (“The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization”) and The New Yorker (“How Politics Got So Polarized”), among others, have claimed our nation is starkly divided.

Social-media platforms such as Facebook and X (formerly known as Twitter) and cable news programs seem designed for people to argue.

Conflict sells advertising and makes for good ratings, but if you watch the evening news or practice “doom scrolling” through social-media feeds before going to bed, you would think Americans have little to nothing in common.

Hollywood is not helping.

In 2024, the film studio A24 released “Civil War,” a feature starring Kirsten Dunst that portrays an America violently divided. A bloc of states has seceded from the union, and characters live in a dystopian future in which the White House is calling airstrikes on civilians. Not a comforting scenario. One reviewer in The Atlantic said the film had an “uncomfortable resonance in these politically polarized times.”

Yet does it resonate, though? Or are Americans being told by “experts” that the nation is polarized when, in fact, there is widespread agreement on issues crucial to our everyday lives?

In these examples, Hollywood, the media and political commentators—even doctors and lawyers who pontificate about political issues (sometimes referred to as the “expert” class)—contend America is sharply divided.

Referring again to Hollywood, movie reviews offer a fitting illustration: The 1999 film “The Boondock Saints” has an “expert” score of just 26% on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences awarded the movie a 91% favorability rating.

There’s a 54-point divide between the experts and the audience on 2001’s “Super Troopers,” with audiences giving it a 90% score compared with a meager 36% favorability from movie reviewers.

The disconnect goes in the opposite direction for 2017’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” with the experts giving it 91% compared with a mere 41% among the true experts—the audience of die-hard “Star Wars” fans.

Likewise, the opinions of the “expert class” are often at odds with public opinion. “Appeals to authority” that once resonated have lost their salience in the wake of COVID-19 as skepticism of fields such as education and medicine has grown.

In March, The New York Times issued a mea culpa of sorts on the COVID pandemic’s origins, publishing commentary by Zeynep Tufekci entitled “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”

Indeed, we were misled—by The New York Times. The “experts” dismissed the lab-leak theory as the pandemic’s origin, several times in fact.

Five years on, Tufecki writes in the Times, “We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.”

The “experts” also held that little kids would be just fine not having access to school, their friends, reading instruction and mask-free faces.

Slate called parents’ concerns over prolonged school closures a “moral panic” pushed by “overblown newspaper headlines and yelling pundits.”

One columnist claimed kids are “more resilient than I ever dreamed possible” and had turned “lemons into lemonade.”

But the most tone-deaf award goes to Larry Delaney, president of the Washington Education Association (the state’s branch of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teacher union), who asked about the long-term negative effect of school closures on children responded that “our kids are resilient. Across the country everyone has missed certain learning. So if everyone is ‘behind,’ I guess no one is behind.”

He was horribly, horribly wrong.

Keeping the nation’s 50 million public-school children out of classrooms for a year or more had devastating consequences. They missed social events like prom and homecoming and missed out on playing on sports teams and associated scholarships, with some opting out of college altogether when universities went remote.

Research estimates the closures will cost students 5% to 6% of lifetime earnings, a loss of some $31 trillion to the United States at large through 2100.

A significant body of research found declines in measures of student mental health. A Perspectives on Psychological Science report documented how “the unprecedented scale and length of school closures resulted in a substantial deficit in children’s learning and a deterioration in children’s mental health.”

Yet even in 2025, National Education Association President Becky Pringle doubled down, claiming school closures were the right approach, and “what we needed to do was listen to the infectious disease experts.”

These are the “experts” who insist that Americans are polarized. The truth is that the experts cannot reckon with an American public that disagrees with them.

Given the headlines, messages from Hollywood and close popular votes in presidential elections, Americans should be surprised to learn they are not as divided on hot-button topics today as the experts would have us believe.

To investigate this claim, I collaborated with a polling company and surveyed more than 2,000 Americans in July, August and September 2023, including parents, working-age adults and adults near or in retirement and then compared the results with research on public policy.

Like the surveys commonly released by Gallup and the mainstream media, the sample is a reliable cross-section of Americans (a “nationally representative” sample) and contains a representative sample of parents.

We surveyed a smaller, not nationally representative sample of K-12 school-board members because some of the most controversial issues confronting Americans today regard K-12 schools.

The results demonstrate Americans are not polarized on some of the most pressing issues in politics and culture today. The results also offer a bridge that connects the politics and culture wars from the first Trump administration through President Joe Biden’s administration into the second Trump White House.

Policymakers do not and should not design laws and regulations based on public opinion alone, but the survey results provide a remarkable contrast to the claims that America is deeply, dangerously even, divided.

Here’s what the survey uncovered:

• Americans care about character and virtue and want children in school to learn about these things (74% in favor).
• Americans want educators to teach civics more in school (57% in favor) so that students can be prepared to be contributing members of society when they grow up.
• Our respondents believe that your biological sex is fixed and want school officials to call a student by the name and pronouns that are consistent with the child’s birth certificate — the name their parents lovingly gave them (60%).
• Respondents did not want young children taught that they can change their “gender” (61%) or any students to have access to books in school that depict sexual activity (69%).
• And Americans do not want college admissions officers to judge student applicants using racial preferences. Such preferences are the centerpiece of the “diversity, equity and inclusion” movement (52% oppose the use of racial preferences, while 23% agreed, and 25% were neutral).

These are just a few of the topics on which this survey found high levels of agreement among respondents on the issues.

One survey does not settle these questions, of course. But other polling, across multiple years and across subjects, supports these results. When several surveys yield the same results over time, the findings are no longer a one-off but depict a trend, a general disposition among Americans.

If surveys reveal that over time a majority of respondents do not want college admissions officers to use race as the most important factor in admissions, these results become part of our shared norms.

To put a finer point on it, prevailing opinions help decide how voters and policymakers and members of communities respond to the questions they face—such as when the US Supreme Court decided in 2023 that race should not be the determining factor in college admissions.

Following the decision, parents, students and university officials all had to respond to the high court’s opinion in their different roles in higher education, from families choosing where their student would apply to college to administrators determining how to evaluate applications to alumni deciding whether they should continue supporting their alma maters and more.

Highlighting the levels of agreement can help strengthen communities. Americans should realize they are not alone in their opinions.

And with this information, lawmakers can confidently design policies that are consistent with voters’ positions, robust research and our Constitution—creating positive outcomes for citizens, voters, families and children.

The survey for this book and others that returned similar findings should give neighbors, co-workers, friends and relatives the confidence to take positions unpopular with the mainstream media and radical left.

The strongest support for DEI and “transgenderism” falls largely on the far-left side of the ideological divide, and that support is outweighed in the poll results by those who support the idea that sex is immutable.

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In general, Americans do not want children taught they can change their “gender.” This position is backed by research, along with a growing number of stories of detransitioners warning others about the dangers of the drugs and surgeries that change vital human functions.

Americans can also be confident that racial discrimination is unpopular.

For these issues around sex and race and the other topics on which the survey found agreement, citizens should speak up before elected boards and with their state and federal officials and can confidently say there are others with them.

For lawmakers should design policies that are supported by polling—and research—and make children safer, uphold civil-rights laws and protect individual liberty.

There will never be agreement on every issue, of course. Our representative system was created to protect the freedom of individuals and enable groups to defend their own interests.

I do not argue there are no differences between Americans; nor are our differences necessarily unhealthy for a society.

But the survey offers evidence that Americans are united on some very important questions that are driving debates in statehouses, schoolhouses and even your house.