--- title: "The Great American Breakup: Could the USA Split Into New Nations?" description: "\"One nation; indivisible.\" Most living Americans have recited those words at least once, hands over their hearts, in a solemn pledge of allegiance to the single most powerful nation on Earth. But ask those same Americans whether the country still feels indivisible, and most are likely to wince. It has been a long time since America truly felt like a single, undivided whole. In its place has come bitterness, polarization, and a set of grand divides that seem to grow deeper by the day.\n\nWhen people describe the United States as the \"great American experiment,\" they call it an experiment for a reason. First thirteen, and now fifty distinct states, each with its own culture, economy, and politics, joined together to become a nation greater than the sum of its parts while still trying to stay true to themselves. That experiment was never simple in theory, and it has been anything but simple in practice. Many states have considered leaving at many different moments, and the country even fought a civil war over the question. States like Texas and California still flirt with secession today, and it has become increasingly common to hear Americans openly wonder whether they share one nation at all.\n\nSo it is worth asking, as a serious thought experiment, what would actually happen if the United States decided the grand experiment had finally failed. What would it mean for one nation of fifty states to break apart into two, or three, or more? Which states would join together, and which of these new nations would stand the best chance of surviving on their own? And what really happens next to a country that has decided it is no longer so united?\n\nThe blunt answer is that there may be no clean way to do it at all. A national divorce is far easier to imagine than to execute, and the deeper you look, the more the practical obstacles multiply.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- A 2021 University of Virginia survey found that roughly half of 2020 Trump voters, and around 40 percent of Biden voters, agreed it was time for red and blue states to split, signaling that secession talk is no longer fringe.\n- An Ipsos survey found that more than 80 percent of Americans, including 80 percent or more of polled Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, believe the country is more divided than united, and roughly as many think it is more divided than a decade ago.\n- A clean red-versus-blue split fails on geography: 2024 results place conservative territory in a contiguous sideways \"S,\" while liberal areas are scattered across both coasts and isolated interior states that cannot form a single workable country.\n- Any two-way partition would strand tens of millions of people in the \"wrong\" country, echoing the 1947 partition of British India, which displaced between twelve and twenty million people and left as many as two million dead.\n- A managed six-nation breakup could make dividing the military, economy, and federal assets more orderly, but it would still produce winners and losers, dismantle wealth-redistribution systems, and risk long-term \"Balkanization.\"\n- Donor regions like California and the Northeast could plausibly emerge wealthier per capita, while poorer regions dependent on federal support, such as the Deep South and landlocked Northwest, would face a difficult transition.\n- The deepest irony is that a country polarized enough to seriously debate breaking up is probably too dysfunctional to manage the breakup well, since a peaceful partition would demand exactly the bipartisan cooperation that is now missing.\n\n## A Nation That No Longer Feels United\n\nThe numbers behind America's mood are striking. According to a 2021 University of Virginia survey, around half of all people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, and roughly 40 percent of those who voted for Joe Biden, agreed with the idea that it was time for the country's red and blue states to go their separate ways. More recently, an Ipsos survey found that over 80 percent of Americans, including 80 percent or more of polled Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, believe the United States is now more divided than it is united. Almost the same share agreed that the country is more divided today than it was a decade ago.\n\nThe disillusionment cuts across party lines. Neither of America's dominant political parties draws anywhere near a 50 percent approval rating. By 2025 polling, the Democrats sat at only about 25 to 35 percent approval, and the Republicans fared little better. Against that backdrop, passionate writers on both sides of the aisle now openly explore the idea of a \"national divorce\" in books and think-pieces that draw real audiences, and even elected officials have called for it in recent years. What was once unthinkable has become a mainstream topic of conversation.\n\n## Why the Obvious Split Is the Worst One\n\nThe most obvious way to divide the United States is also the one that sounds simplest on paper: take its fifty states, its 3.8 million square miles, and its population of 340 million, and split them in two along the country's defining fault line. That divide is the familiar one between red and blue, right and left, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. It is an imperfect distinction. Millions of Americans do not align neatly with either side, and many feel represented by neither. But in broad strokes, this is the single great divide in American life, an intensely bitter, hyper-polarized standoff in which neither side seems much interested in reconciliation.\n\nThere are two reasons to examine this clean partisan split first. The first is that it is the easiest to picture. Because people with similar political beliefs tend to ally together, and because allies tend to homogenize their views over time, it is surprisingly easy to predict an American's entire belief system from just a few data points. A person who lives in Brooklyn, attends pro-choice marches, and earns 130,000 dollars a year probably also supports firearm restrictions, opposes mass deportations, backs cannabis legalization, and opposes new restrictions on gay or transgender Americans. A person in rural Montana who attends church weekly, earns 48,000 dollars a year, and owns five firearms probably supports the death penalty in murder cases, opposes teaching critical race theory in schools, favors a smaller federal government, and opposes efforts to defund local police.\n\nThese are not iron laws. The American electorate is a massive, diverse, complicated thing, and for any odd combination of beliefs you can imagine, at least one person somewhere holds it. But for the most part, Americans self-sort fairly painlessly into the political left or the political right. If a national divorce simply created one country for each group, it would be easy to predict where any given person would land.\n\nThe second reason to start here is that, in practice, it is a genuinely bad idea. Beyond the basic truth that any breakup of a country tends to either follow or trigger a civil war, the specifics are grim. The last time the United States tried, roughly 700,000 soldiers from both sides died, along with probably hundreds of thousands of civilians. And even setting violence aside, a half-and-half split runs aground on something more stubborn: geography.\n\n## The Map Does Not Cooperate\n\nLook at the state-by-state results from the 2024 election, and the problem appears immediately. The band of territory won by the American right, and thus the land that would form a new conservative nation, is relatively contiguous, spread across the continental United States in the rough shape of a sideways letter \"S.\" It runs from the Southwest up to the northern plains, down through the tornado belt to Texas, across the Deep South, through the Appalachian range, and finally into the historic manufacturing states south of the Great Lakes.\n\nThe American left, by contrast, is scattered. It holds the entire West Coast, the northern half of the East Coast, a two-state block in the center-west, and a pair of states isolated entirely on their own, Minnesota and Illinois. Put simply, you cannot build a single coherent country out of that. Wind the clock back four years and the problem shifts but does not improve: in 2020 the left controlled the West Coast, much of the Southwest, several Great Lakes states, slightly more of the upper East Coast, and the lone outpost of Georgia, while the right held a sprawling, mostly uninterrupted blob.\n\nThe lesson is that U.S. states do not cluster into neat geographical regions the way they cluster on either side of a partisan line. Urban-versus-rural makeup, resource access, and other factors shape a state's politics, but they have never produced a map that makes sense for nation-building. The old dividing lines of the 1860s, like the Mason-Dixon Line separating free states from slave states, have simply not survived into the modern era.\n\n## Tens of Millions in the Wrong Country\n\nThe dramatic shift between the 2020 and 2024 maps points to a deeper reality that dooms any two-way divide. No U.S. state is an ideological monolith. Even the most conservative states contain large liberal populations, and even the most liberal states have substantial conservative minorities. In nearly a dozen states, the split is so close to fifty-fifty that they flip from right to left and back again from one election to the next.\n\nWhat that means is that any clean separation into two countries would instantly leave tens of millions of people stranded in the \"wrong\" nation. History offers a sobering precedent. The 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan displaced somewhere between twelve and twenty million people and left as many as two million, possibly more, dead before it was over. A similar process in the United States could leave millions dead if it turned violent, with fatality rates driven far higher by the sheer availability of consumer and military-grade firearms across the country. Both successor nations would spend decades recovering from the damage and absorbing waves of internally displaced refugees.\n\nThe human geography, in other words, refuses to match the partisan geography. People do not live sorted into tidy blocks. They live mixed together, in cities and suburbs and small towns, and no border drawn between two halves can change that without enormous coercion or enormous suffering.\n\n## Dividing the Indivisible: Military, Economy, and Assets\n\nFrom there, the practical impact of cutting the country in half only gets worse. A successful breakup would require the U.S. military to be divided peacefully, without taking part in hostilities or trying to reimpose federal order. That means splitting up 1.3 million active-duty service members, along with the assets of the most powerful Army, Navy, and Air Force on the planet, and thousands of nuclear warheads. The result would be at least one new nation born with a massive nuclear arsenal in hand.\n\nThe economy presents the same puzzle on a larger scale. The American economy is a vast, interconnected web of capital and resources built on the premise that the states are inter-reliant. Raw materials grown or mined in one state are processed in another, then shipped to a third to be turned into finished goods. Those goods are sold across a range of states and exported through the ports of still others. How any of those networks could remain stable in a country that is actively dividing, and possibly fighting internally, is anybody's guess.\n\nThen there are the assets that belong to no single place. What becomes of the institutions of the federal government? Are they simply handed to whichever new state happens to control the land they sit on? What happens to Washington, D.C., or to America's overseas territories? What happens to the federal government's bank accounts, or its assets in orbit and in cyberspace? A clean partisan split offers no good answers to any of these questions. In an ideal world, a two-way break might seem to solve a lot of problems at once. In reality, the circumstances that would allow a clean break simply do not exist. To find a better path, you have to get creative.\n\n## A Six-Nation Thought Experiment\n\nSo suppose we try to divide the United States in a way that might not lead to catastrophe. A few ground rules help. First, whatever nations emerge have to make geographical sense as contiguous landmasses. Second, they should be built from the existing borders of existing states rather than redrawn from scratch. Third, we will not forbid new nations that contain both red and blue states, since perfect sorting is impossible and minority populations will exist everywhere regardless. Fourth, and most important, we assume this is a managed breakup rather than a free-for-all in which two hostile factions race to grab as much territory and as many assets as they can.\n\nWith those rules, one workable starting map divides the country into six sovereign nations. The point is not that this is the single correct answer; there may be no good answer at all. It is simply a reasonable place to begin deeper analysis.\n\nStarting on the West Coast, one nation comprises California, Oregon, and Washington, plus the inland states of Nevada and Arizona, and the island state of Hawaii. On the opposite coast, the American Northeast forms another country: the six New England states plus New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The Deep South becomes its own nation, extending to the western edge of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri. There it meets a Lower Central nation made up of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. The Great Lakes nation gathers Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota, with West Virginia, Kentucky, and Iowa added for good measure. Finally, the Northwestern plains and Rocky Mountains form a sixth nation of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Utah, and Colorado, along with the exclave of Alaska, since it seems unfair for the West Coast nation to claim both Alaska and Hawaii.\n\n## What the Six-Nation Map Gets Right, and Wrong\n\nThis arrangement tries to balance several factors at once. Each nation is meant to be at least relatively homogeneous politically. The Northeast and West Coast lean reliably blue, the Deep South and Lower Central nations lean red, and the Great Lakes nation mixes a few consistent blues, a few consistent reds, and several swing states. The landlocked Northwest folds blue Colorado into an otherwise red group, but the regional \"vibes,\" as residents might attest, tend to align well enough despite the differences.\n\nCrucially, all but one of the new nations have access to seaports, either directly or through the St. Lawrence River. Each is relatively consistent in geography, climate, and biome, and each comes with its own major urban centers, natural resources, interconnected infrastructure, and distinct regional economy. There is plenty of room to argue about shifting a state here or there, but the broad logic holds.\n\nA managed split like this could make it considerably easier to divide America's assets from the top down. The military could be broken into smaller forces and based in existing facilities across all six nations. Each nation has urban centers that already host large state governments, plus even larger cities, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, that could become new federal capitals. Not every nation could fully feed or supply itself, but the same is true of many countries worldwide, and most have the seaports to import what they need. The one landlocked nation could strike deals with its three neighbors, or with Canada. And while each new country would still develop internal political factions, none would be nearly as polarized as the United States is as a whole today.\n\nEven so, the deeper problems do not vanish. Distributing the wealth and assets of the United States, especially assets not tied to any particular geography, would be a long and painful process. There would be clear disparities in outcomes: the Deep South struggles with high poverty, and the landlocked Northwest with low population and thin infrastructure. The systems that currently move wealth from richer regions to poorer ones would be dismantled, leaving the unluckier new nations with few options but a difficult, risky transition.\n\n## The Long Shadow of Balkanization\n\nThere is also a darker long-term risk. While the immediate danger of conflict might be lower under a careful six-way split than under a raw partisan one, the long-term danger could be far higher. Geopolitically, fragmenting a large country into smaller, sometimes bitterly opposed states has a name: Balkanization, after the Balkans of Europe, a region notorious for a modern history of chaos and ethnic conflict.\n\nThe flashpoints in a divided ex-America would differ from those of the Balkans, but the core problem would be the same: six newly formed nations trying to coexist after being divided in ways that set them on divergent political paths. What happens if one of them turns darkly authoritarian, even totalitarian, and begins picking fights with a more democratic neighbor? What happens if the rural, relatively poor Northwestern nation starts leaning on a powerful foreign patron like China, while its Great Lakes neighbor, a resurgent manufacturing powerhouse, competes directly with China on the world stage? And what does it mean when nuclear weapons and advanced military hardware have been divided equally among all six? Does that deter conflict, or does it raise the odds that a dispute between any two of these neighbors could spiral into a third world war? These are not idle questions; they are the kind that follow every partition in history.\n\n## Other Maps, Other Ambitions\n\nThe six-nation sketch is far from the only proposal for a great American divorce, and every map comes with its own benefits and drawbacks. The wider world of divided-America maps is surprisingly rich.\n\nOne starting point is a 2015 Vox article spotlighting the meticulous work of a Reddit user known as Hormisdas, who divided the country in several iterations using population as the key variable. One five-way map, based on 2010 census data, gave each new nation roughly the population of the United Kingdom. It produced Northeast, Deep South, and Great Lakes nations similar to the six-nation version, plus an expanded West Coast nation and a gigantic \"Middle America\" stretching from Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and most of Minnesota in the north all the way down to New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. An eight-way version turned California into its own nation beside a massive stretch of land covering part or all of nineteen states.\n\nFurther back, a 2010 map by blogger Pete Warden drew on data from 210 million public Facebook profiles, letting the country self-sort by social networking rather than geography. The result would have produced a long, thin sovereign Mormon state, a small nation at the tip of the Pacific Northwest, a nation covering today's southern California, and a sprawling country reaching from New England to Missouri to the Dakotas. A related map by the geographer and futurist Joel Kotkin split America into sevenths, including thin coastal nations along both the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, and made the almost sacrilegious choice to split Texas into three parts.\n\n## When Culture and Borders Get Strange\n\nThen there is the historical approach. In his 2011 book \"American Nations,\" author and historian Colin Woodard divides the modern United States into eleven distinct cultures, each with its own long history and modern character. He describes the highly educated, communal \"Yankeedom,\" rooted in New England's Puritan settlements but today reaching into Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. He describes \"New Netherland,\" a multicultural, capitalistic society rooted in Dutch settlement of the mid-Atlantic, today centered on New York City. He maps the originally Spanish-settled \"El Norte,\" covering southern California, west Texas, and parts of several American and Mexican states, and \"New France,\" a diasporic region linking southern Louisiana with the Canadian province of Quebec. Turning these cultures into modern nations would be enormously difficult, but they pose a sharp question: once you open Pandora's box and divide the country by culture, how far do you go?\n\nSome thinkers have tried to make a two-state divide work in practice. In 2018, conservative author Jesse Kelly drew a spidery map separating predominantly progressive and predominantly conservative areas, which a mapmaker named Dicken Schrader later expanded into a strange but oddly functional geographical monstrosity. The result was a pair of nations that each somehow remained contiguous, so that a traveler could move through one without ever crossing into the other, using existing interstate highways to thread the most sensitive areas. Both nations got access to both coasts and the Gulf. The conservative nation received twice the landmass, while the progressive nation received twice the population, and each kept several major cities.\n\nMore recently, others have experimented with dividing the country by natural watersheds, by religious or anti-religious regions, by power grids, or by transportation networks. Some have revived old proposals for single-state secession, like California or Texas, or for handing Alaska to Canada. And then there is the most Balkanized option of all: making every single state its own country, ranging from California, which alone would be the world's third-largest economy behind only China and Germany, down to Vermont, whose economy is roughly comparable to Nepal, Paraguay, or Estonia.\n\n## Could It Ever Actually Work?\n\nNo matter the specifics or the number of nations, all of these plans share one trait: there are no guarantees that any of them would actually work, and certainly none that they would leave Americans better off than the status quo.\n\nStill, there are reasons to take the question seriously. Many Americans would object that you simply cannot build a better system than the one America already has, but it is worth asking whether that conviction is partly just bias. The United States has grown into the most powerful nation on Earth, and it is tempting to look at that success and assume no better arrangement was ever possible, even though no one actually knows, because it has never been tried. There is a respectable argument that a well-managed breakup could serve the interests of people living in a unified America. Not every idea would work, and slicing the country in two along the partisan line is a recipe for total disaster, but dismissing every proposal simply because it involves division does not follow either.\n\nHistory reinforces the point. America's Founding Fathers could not possibly have foreseen what their nation became: fifty individually powerful states working as relative equals, dozens of major metropolitan centers, a wildly diversified economy, and roughly 136 times the population of the thirteen colonies of 1776. The country bears no resemblance to the colonial empires of that era, and its territorial expansion looked nothing like late-eighteenth-century norms. The United States has outgrown its founding documents in countless ways, which is precisely why those documents have been so heavily amended and reinterpreted to stay relevant. If a Constitution from the founding era has been updated so extensively to fit the country of the 2020s, the argument goes, why shouldn't America's geographical makeup be allowed to change too?\n\n## Better for Some, Worse for Others\n\nShift the focus from outcomes for everyone to outcomes for specific groups, and a breakup would clearly benefit some of the resulting nations. Consider California, which currently contributes so much to the federal government that it helps prop up several other states. Pull California out of the federal system, pair it with fellow donor states like Oregon and Washington, and give it dominion over the West Coast, and the result is obvious: a nation wealthier and more powerful per capita than any of those states are today as contributors to a shared federal government.\n\nThe trouble with such plans lies in their effect on everyone else, especially regions like the Deep South or the landlocked Northwest that depend on federal redistribution to stay afloat. But approach the question purely as self-interest, and it is no surprise that the West Coast, or other donor blocs like New York, Pennsylvania, and New England, might see real opportunity in charting a more independent course. The hard part is whether any partition could serve every part of the country at once.\n\nThat is the unanswered question at the heart of the whole debate. Is there a way to divide the United States so that nobody ends up worse off? A way to break it up while preventing future wars, avoiding mass resettlement crises, and ensuring every new nation is economically viable? After the confusion, the argument, and the short-term pain, is there a way to reach a finished result that leaves everybody better off?\n\n## The Final Irony\n\nFor now, nobody can answer that. And here lies the deepest irony. A United States so starkly divided that its two sides are openly asking about a national breakup is probably not a United States capable of pulling one off. There may well be some path to a genuinely successful partition. But it exists only if the people of the modern United States can work together productively, for long enough and in fine enough detail, to divide their own country responsibly.\n\nIf America's national divorce stands any chance of being a clean, amicable break, that is exactly what it would take: real, intensive collaboration across the aisle, at the state, local, and federal levels, to manage one of the most complex decisions in American history, and also the last. If that sounds like a challenge today's United States is ready for, then fair enough. But it would demand a great deal more faith in American bipartisanship than the current moment seems to justify.\n\n## Frequently Asked Questions\n\n**How widespread is support for splitting the United States?**\nIt has grown well beyond the fringe. A 2021 University of Virginia survey found that roughly half of 2020 Trump voters and around 40 percent of Biden voters agreed it was time for red and blue states to split. An Ipsos survey found that more than 80 percent of Americans, across Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, believe the country is more divided than united, with nearly as many saying it is more divided than a decade ago.\n\n**Why wouldn't a simple red-versus-blue split work?**\nGeography. Conservative-leaning territory forms a relatively contiguous sideways \"S\" across the continent, but liberal-leaning areas are scattered across both coasts and isolated interior states like Minnesota and Illinois. You cannot assemble a coherent, connected country from that pattern, and the maps shift significantly from one election to the next.\n\n**What would happen to people living in the \"wrong\" state?**\nA two-way split would instantly strand tens of millions of people on the wrong side of a new border, since no state is ideologically uniform. Historically, such situations rarely resolve peacefully. The 1947 partition of British India displaced between twelve and twenty million people and left as many as two million dead, and a U.S. version could be deadlier still given the prevalence of firearms.\n\n**How would the military and nuclear weapons be divided?**\nA peaceful breakup would require splitting 1.3 million active-duty service members and the assets of the world's most powerful Army, Navy, and Air Force, along with thousands of nuclear warheads. That alone would create at least one new nation with a massive nuclear arsenal, raising serious questions about deterrence and the risk of future conflict.\n\n**What is the six-nation proposal?**\nIt is a thought experiment that divides the country into six contiguous nations using existing state borders: a West Coast nation, a Northeast nation, a Deep South nation, a Lower Central nation centered on Texas, a Great Lakes nation, and a landlocked Northwestern nation that includes Alaska. Each is designed to be relatively homogeneous and economically functional, though none is presented as a definitive answer.\n\n**What does \"Balkanization\" mean in this context?**\nIt refers to fragmenting a large nation into smaller, sometimes bitterly opposed states, named for the Balkans of Europe and their history of conflict. Even a carefully managed six-way split could lower short-term conflict risk while raising the long-term danger, as new neighbors with nuclear weapons and divergent political paths jockey for advantage and foreign alliances.\n\n**Which regions would benefit most, and which would struggle?**\nWealthy donor states like California, paired with Oregon and Washington, could emerge richer and more powerful per capita than they are within the current federal system. Regions that rely on federal redistribution, such as the Deep South and the landlocked Northwest, would lose that support and face a difficult, risky transition, making the partition far better for some new nations than for others.\n\n## Sources\n\n- [Should we chop America into 7 different countries, seriously? — The Week](https://theweek.com/articles/805689/should-chop-america-into-7-different-countries-seriously)\n- [America's divorce: left and right each get half the country — Big Think](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/americas-divorce-left-and-right-each-get-half-the-country/)\n- [United States, United Kingdom map — Vox](https://www.vox.com/2015/5/29/8686781/united-states-united-kingdom-map)\n- [How to split up the US — Pete Warden](https://petewarden.com/2010/02/06/how-to-split-up-the-us/)\n- [This map carves the U.S. into seven nations and splits Texas three ways — KUT](https://www.kut.org/texas/2013-09-13/this-map-carves-the-u-s-into-seven-nations-and-splits-texas-three-ways)\n- [U.S. regions with the same population as California — Imgur](https://imgur.com/u-s-regions-with-same-population-as-california-2264x1348-kPT5HJa)\n- [US red-blue partition plan — Big Think](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/us-red-blue-partition-plan/)\n- [Could America break apart? A UCSB expert explores the possibility — UCSB](https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/021936/could-america-break-apart-ucsb-expert-explores-possibility)\n- [Could the United States be headed for national divorce? — Chatham House](https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/02/could-united-states-be-headed-national-divorce)\n- [Americans talk about a national divorce. They're wrong. — Politico](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/06/americans-national-divorse-theyre-wrong-515443)\n- [Is America headed for a national divorce? — The Week](https://theweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene/1021173/is-america-headed-for-a-national-divorce)\n- [Best-case scenario: a negotiated breakup — The New Republic](https://newrepublic.com/article/168877/best-case-scenario-negotiated-breakup)\n- [American political divisions on July Fourth — CNN](https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/04/politics/american-political-divisions-july-fourth)\n- [The United States as two nations — The Nation](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/united-states-two-nations/)\n- [Reality check: how divided is America really? — CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reality-check-how-divided-is-america-really/)\n- [With Honor — Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/with-honor-ipsos)\n- [America is exceptional in the nature of its political divide — Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/11/13/america-is-exceptional-in-the-nature-of-its-political-divide/)\n- [Democratic Party poll: voter confidence, July 2025 — Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/democratic-party-poll-voter-confidence-july-2025-9db38021)\n- [Democrats' negative approval rating — The Hill](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5421535-democrats-negative-approval-rating/)\n- [Divisive issues by political ideology in the US — Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1416594/divisive-issues-political-ideology-us/)\n- [2024 election map — 270toWin](https://www.270towin.com/2024-election)\n- [2020 actual electoral map — 270toWin](https://www.270towin.com/maps/2020-actual-electoral-map)\n\n" url: https://homefronts.pub/article/the-great-american-breakup-could-the-usa-split-into-new-nations.md canonical: https://homefronts.pub/article/the-great-american-breakup-could-the-usa-split-into-new-nations datePublished: 2026-06-03 dateModified: 2026-06-03 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://homefronts.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: HomeFronts image: "https://media.homefronts.pub/cdn-cgi/image/width=1600,height=900,fit=cover,quality=80,format=auto/articles/PZh1PSLBcZY/hero.jpg" type: Article contentHash: d415926472d0cb80964b0cd28b542c209411ccc8aef063f138a2ed985cc2711c tokens: 8118 summaryUrl: https://homefronts.pub/article/the-great-american-breakup-could-the-usa-split-into-new-nations.md.summary.md --- "One nation; indivisible." Most living Americans have recited those words at least once, hands over their hearts, in a solemn pledge of allegiance to the single most powerful nation on Earth. But ask those same Americans whether the country still feels indivisible, and most are likely to wince. It has been a long time since America truly felt like a single, undivided whole. In its place has come bitterness, polarization, and a set of grand divides that seem to grow deeper by the day. When people describe the United States as the "great American experiment," they call it an experiment for a reason. First thirteen, and now fifty distinct states, each with its own culture, economy, and politics, joined together to become a nation greater than the sum of its parts while still trying to stay true to themselves. That experiment was never simple in theory, and it has been anything but simple in practice. Many states have considered leaving at many different moments, and the country even fought a civil war over the question. States like Texas and California still flirt with secession today, and it has become increasingly common to hear Americans openly wonder whether they share one nation at all. So it is worth asking, as a serious thought experiment, what would actually happen if the United States decided the grand experiment had finally failed. What would it mean for one nation of fifty states to break apart into two, or three, or more? Which states would join together, and which of these new nations would stand the best chance of surviving on their own? And what really happens next to a country that has decided it is no longer so united? The blunt answer is that there may be no clean way to do it at all. A national divorce is far easier to imagine than to execute, and the deeper you look, the more the practical obstacles multiply. ## Key Takeaways - A 2021 University of Virginia survey found that roughly half of 2020 Trump voters, and around 40 percent of Biden voters, agreed it was time for red and blue states to split, signaling that secession talk is no longer fringe. - An Ipsos survey found that more than 80 percent of Americans, including 80 percent or more of polled Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, believe the country is more divided than united, and roughly as many think it is more divided than a decade ago. - A clean red-versus-blue split fails on geography: 2024 results place conservative territory in a contiguous sideways "S," while liberal areas are scattered across both coasts and isolated interior states that cannot form a single workable country. - Any two-way partition would strand tens of millions of people in the "wrong" country, echoing the 1947 partition of British India, which displaced between twelve and twenty million people and left as many as two million dead. - A managed six-nation breakup could make dividing the military, economy, and federal assets more orderly, but it would still produce winners and losers, dismantle wealth-redistribution systems, and risk long-term "Balkanization." - Donor regions like California and the Northeast could plausibly emerge wealthier per capita, while poorer regions dependent on federal support, such as the Deep South and landlocked Northwest, would face a difficult transition. - The deepest irony is that a country polarized enough to seriously debate breaking up is probably too dysfunctional to manage the breakup well, since a peaceful partition would demand exactly the bipartisan cooperation that is now missing. ## A Nation That No Longer Feels United The numbers behind America's mood are striking. According to a 2021 University of Virginia survey, around half of all people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, and roughly 40 percent of those who voted for Joe Biden, agreed with the idea that it was time for the country's red and blue states to go their separate ways. More recently, an Ipsos survey found that over 80 percent of Americans, including 80 percent or more of polled Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, believe the United States is now more divided than it is united. Almost the same share agreed that the country is more divided today than it was a decade ago. The disillusionment cuts across party lines. Neither of America's dominant political parties draws anywhere near a 50 percent approval rating. By 2025 polling, the Democrats sat at only about 25 to 35 percent approval, and the Republicans fared little better. Against that backdrop, passionate writers on both sides of the aisle now openly explore the idea of a "national divorce" in books and think-pieces that draw real audiences, and even elected officials have called for it in recent years. What was once unthinkable has become a mainstream topic of conversation. ## Why the Obvious Split Is the Worst One The most obvious way to divide the United States is also the one that sounds simplest on paper: take its fifty states, its 3.8 million square miles, and its population of 340 million, and split them in two along the country's defining fault line. That divide is the familiar one between red and blue, right and left, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican. It is an imperfect distinction. Millions of Americans do not align neatly with either side, and many feel represented by neither. But in broad strokes, this is the single great divide in American life, an intensely bitter, hyper-polarized standoff in which neither side seems much interested in reconciliation. There are two reasons to examine this clean partisan split first. The first is that it is the easiest to picture. Because people with similar political beliefs tend to ally together, and because allies tend to homogenize their views over time, it is surprisingly easy to predict an American's entire belief system from just a few data points. A person who lives in Brooklyn, attends pro-choice marches, and earns 130,000 dollars a year probably also supports firearm restrictions, opposes mass deportations, backs cannabis legalization, and opposes new restrictions on gay or transgender Americans. A person in rural Montana who attends church weekly, earns 48,000 dollars a year, and owns five firearms probably supports the death penalty in murder cases, opposes teaching critical race theory in schools, favors a smaller federal government, and opposes efforts to defund local police. These are not iron laws. The American electorate is a massive, diverse, complicated thing, and for any odd combination of beliefs you can imagine, at least one person somewhere holds it. But for the most part, Americans self-sort fairly painlessly into the political left or the political right. If a national divorce simply created one country for each group, it would be easy to predict where any given person would land. The second reason to start here is that, in practice, it is a genuinely bad idea. Beyond the basic truth that any breakup of a country tends to either follow or trigger a civil war, the specifics are grim. The last time the United States tried, roughly 700,000 soldiers from both sides died, along with probably hundreds of thousands of civilians. And even setting violence aside, a half-and-half split runs aground on something more stubborn: geography. ## The Map Does Not Cooperate Look at the state-by-state results from the 2024 election, and the problem appears immediately. The band of territory won by the American right, and thus the land that would form a new conservative nation, is relatively contiguous, spread across the continental United States in the rough shape of a sideways letter "S." It runs from the Southwest up to the northern plains, down through the tornado belt to Texas, across the Deep South, through the Appalachian range, and finally into the historic manufacturing states south of the Great Lakes. The American left, by contrast, is scattered. It holds the entire West Coast, the northern half of the East Coast, a two-state block in the center-west, and a pair of states isolated entirely on their own, Minnesota and Illinois. Put simply, you cannot build a single coherent country out of that. Wind the clock back four years and the problem shifts but does not improve: in 2020 the left controlled the West Coast, much of the Southwest, several Great Lakes states, slightly more of the upper East Coast, and the lone outpost of Georgia, while the right held a sprawling, mostly uninterrupted blob. The lesson is that U.S. states do not cluster into neat geographical regions the way they cluster on either side of a partisan line. Urban-versus-rural makeup, resource access, and other factors shape a state's politics, but they have never produced a map that makes sense for nation-building. The old dividing lines of the 1860s, like the Mason-Dixon Line separating free states from slave states, have simply not survived into the modern era. ## Tens of Millions in the Wrong Country The dramatic shift between the 2020 and 2024 maps points to a deeper reality that dooms any two-way divide. No U.S. state is an ideological monolith. Even the most conservative states contain large liberal populations, and even the most liberal states have substantial conservative minorities. In nearly a dozen states, the split is so close to fifty-fifty that they flip from right to left and back again from one election to the next. What that means is that any clean separation into two countries would instantly leave tens of millions of people stranded in the "wrong" nation. History offers a sobering precedent. The 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan displaced somewhere between twelve and twenty million people and left as many as two million, possibly more, dead before it was over. A similar process in the United States could leave millions dead if it turned violent, with fatality rates driven far higher by the sheer availability of consumer and military-grade firearms across the country. Both successor nations would spend decades recovering from the damage and absorbing waves of internally displaced refugees. The human geography, in other words, refuses to match the partisan geography. People do not live sorted into tidy blocks. They live mixed together, in cities and suburbs and small towns, and no border drawn between two halves can change that without enormous coercion or enormous suffering. ## Dividing the Indivisible: Military, Economy, and Assets From there, the practical impact of cutting the country in half only gets worse. A successful breakup would require the U.S. military to be divided peacefully, without taking part in hostilities or trying to reimpose federal order. That means splitting up 1.3 million active-duty service members, along with the assets of the most powerful Army, Navy, and Air Force on the planet, and thousands of nuclear warheads. The result would be at least one new nation born with a massive nuclear arsenal in hand. The economy presents the same puzzle on a larger scale. The American economy is a vast, interconnected web of capital and resources built on the premise that the states are inter-reliant. Raw materials grown or mined in one state are processed in another, then shipped to a third to be turned into finished goods. Those goods are sold across a range of states and exported through the ports of still others. How any of those networks could remain stable in a country that is actively dividing, and possibly fighting internally, is anybody's guess. Then there are the assets that belong to no single place. What becomes of the institutions of the federal government? Are they simply handed to whichever new state happens to control the land they sit on? What happens to Washington, D.C., or to America's overseas territories? What happens to the federal government's bank accounts, or its assets in orbit and in cyberspace? A clean partisan split offers no good answers to any of these questions. In an ideal world, a two-way break might seem to solve a lot of problems at once. In reality, the circumstances that would allow a clean break simply do not exist. To find a better path, you have to get creative. ## A Six-Nation Thought Experiment So suppose we try to divide the United States in a way that might not lead to catastrophe. A few ground rules help. First, whatever nations emerge have to make geographical sense as contiguous landmasses. Second, they should be built from the existing borders of existing states rather than redrawn from scratch. Third, we will not forbid new nations that contain both red and blue states, since perfect sorting is impossible and minority populations will exist everywhere regardless. Fourth, and most important, we assume this is a managed breakup rather than a free-for-all in which two hostile factions race to grab as much territory and as many assets as they can. With those rules, one workable starting map divides the country into six sovereign nations. The point is not that this is the single correct answer; there may be no good answer at all. It is simply a reasonable place to begin deeper analysis. Starting on the West Coast, one nation comprises California, Oregon, and Washington, plus the inland states of Nevada and Arizona, and the island state of Hawaii. On the opposite coast, the American Northeast forms another country: the six New England states plus New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia. The Deep South becomes its own nation, extending to the western edge of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Missouri. There it meets a Lower Central nation made up of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska. The Great Lakes nation gathers Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota, with West Virginia, Kentucky, and Iowa added for good measure. Finally, the Northwestern plains and Rocky Mountains form a sixth nation of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Utah, and Colorado, along with the exclave of Alaska, since it seems unfair for the West Coast nation to claim both Alaska and Hawaii. ## What the Six-Nation Map Gets Right, and Wrong This arrangement tries to balance several factors at once. Each nation is meant to be at least relatively homogeneous politically. The Northeast and West Coast lean reliably blue, the Deep South and Lower Central nations lean red, and the Great Lakes nation mixes a few consistent blues, a few consistent reds, and several swing states. The landlocked Northwest folds blue Colorado into an otherwise red group, but the regional "vibes," as residents might attest, tend to align well enough despite the differences. Crucially, all but one of the new nations have access to seaports, either directly or through the St. Lawrence River. Each is relatively consistent in geography, climate, and biome, and each comes with its own major urban centers, natural resources, interconnected infrastructure, and distinct regional economy. There is plenty of room to argue about shifting a state here or there, but the broad logic holds. A managed split like this could make it considerably easier to divide America's assets from the top down. The military could be broken into smaller forces and based in existing facilities across all six nations. Each nation has urban centers that already host large state governments, plus even larger cities, Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, New York, that could become new federal capitals. Not every nation could fully feed or supply itself, but the same is true of many countries worldwide, and most have the seaports to import what they need. The one landlocked nation could strike deals with its three neighbors, or with Canada. And while each new country would still develop internal political factions, none would be nearly as polarized as the United States is as a whole today. Even so, the deeper problems do not vanish. Distributing the wealth and assets of the United States, especially assets not tied to any particular geography, would be a long and painful process. There would be clear disparities in outcomes: the Deep South struggles with high poverty, and the landlocked Northwest with low population and thin infrastructure. The systems that currently move wealth from richer regions to poorer ones would be dismantled, leaving the unluckier new nations with few options but a difficult, risky transition. ## The Long Shadow of Balkanization There is also a darker long-term risk. While the immediate danger of conflict might be lower under a careful six-way split than under a raw partisan one, the long-term danger could be far higher. Geopolitically, fragmenting a large country into smaller, sometimes bitterly opposed states has a name: Balkanization, after the Balkans of Europe, a region notorious for a modern history of chaos and ethnic conflict. The flashpoints in a divided ex-America would differ from those of the Balkans, but the core problem would be the same: six newly formed nations trying to coexist after being divided in ways that set them on divergent political paths. What happens if one of them turns darkly authoritarian, even totalitarian, and begins picking fights with a more democratic neighbor? What happens if the rural, relatively poor Northwestern nation starts leaning on a powerful foreign patron like China, while its Great Lakes neighbor, a resurgent manufacturing powerhouse, competes directly with China on the world stage? And what does it mean when nuclear weapons and advanced military hardware have been divided equally among all six? Does that deter conflict, or does it raise the odds that a dispute between any two of these neighbors could spiral into a third world war? These are not idle questions; they are the kind that follow every partition in history. ## Other Maps, Other Ambitions The six-nation sketch is far from the only proposal for a great American divorce, and every map comes with its own benefits and drawbacks. The wider world of divided-America maps is surprisingly rich. One starting point is a 2015 Vox article spotlighting the meticulous work of a Reddit user known as Hormisdas, who divided the country in several iterations using population as the key variable. One five-way map, based on 2010 census data, gave each new nation roughly the population of the United Kingdom. It produced Northeast, Deep South, and Great Lakes nations similar to the six-nation version, plus an expanded West Coast nation and a gigantic "Middle America" stretching from Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, and most of Minnesota in the north all the way down to New Mexico, Texas, and Louisiana. An eight-way version turned California into its own nation beside a massive stretch of land covering part or all of nineteen states. Further back, a 2010 map by blogger Pete Warden drew on data from 210 million public Facebook profiles, letting the country self-sort by social networking rather than geography. The result would have produced a long, thin sovereign Mormon state, a small nation at the tip of the Pacific Northwest, a nation covering today's southern California, and a sprawling country reaching from New England to Missouri to the Dakotas. A related map by the geographer and futurist Joel Kotkin split America into sevenths, including thin coastal nations along both the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, and made the almost sacrilegious choice to split Texas into three parts. ## When Culture and Borders Get Strange Then there is the historical approach. In his 2011 book "American Nations," author and historian Colin Woodard divides the modern United States into eleven distinct cultures, each with its own long history and modern character. He describes the highly educated, communal "Yankeedom," rooted in New England's Puritan settlements but today reaching into Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. He describes "New Netherland," a multicultural, capitalistic society rooted in Dutch settlement of the mid-Atlantic, today centered on New York City. He maps the originally Spanish-settled "El Norte," covering southern California, west Texas, and parts of several American and Mexican states, and "New France," a diasporic region linking southern Louisiana with the Canadian province of Quebec. Turning these cultures into modern nations would be enormously difficult, but they pose a sharp question: once you open Pandora's box and divide the country by culture, how far do you go? Some thinkers have tried to make a two-state divide work in practice. In 2018, conservative author Jesse Kelly drew a spidery map separating predominantly progressive and predominantly conservative areas, which a mapmaker named Dicken Schrader later expanded into a strange but oddly functional geographical monstrosity. The result was a pair of nations that each somehow remained contiguous, so that a traveler could move through one without ever crossing into the other, using existing interstate highways to thread the most sensitive areas. Both nations got access to both coasts and the Gulf. The conservative nation received twice the landmass, while the progressive nation received twice the population, and each kept several major cities. More recently, others have experimented with dividing the country by natural watersheds, by religious or anti-religious regions, by power grids, or by transportation networks. Some have revived old proposals for single-state secession, like California or Texas, or for handing Alaska to Canada. And then there is the most Balkanized option of all: making every single state its own country, ranging from California, which alone would be the world's third-largest economy behind only China and Germany, down to Vermont, whose economy is roughly comparable to Nepal, Paraguay, or Estonia. ## Could It Ever Actually Work? No matter the specifics or the number of nations, all of these plans share one trait: there are no guarantees that any of them would actually work, and certainly none that they would leave Americans better off than the status quo. Still, there are reasons to take the question seriously. Many Americans would object that you simply cannot build a better system than the one America already has, but it is worth asking whether that conviction is partly just bias. The United States has grown into the most powerful nation on Earth, and it is tempting to look at that success and assume no better arrangement was ever possible, even though no one actually knows, because it has never been tried. There is a respectable argument that a well-managed breakup could serve the interests of people living in a unified America. Not every idea would work, and slicing the country in two along the partisan line is a recipe for total disaster, but dismissing every proposal simply because it involves division does not follow either. History reinforces the point. America's Founding Fathers could not possibly have foreseen what their nation became: fifty individually powerful states working as relative equals, dozens of major metropolitan centers, a wildly diversified economy, and roughly 136 times the population of the thirteen colonies of 1776. The country bears no resemblance to the colonial empires of that era, and its territorial expansion looked nothing like late-eighteenth-century norms. The United States has outgrown its founding documents in countless ways, which is precisely why those documents have been so heavily amended and reinterpreted to stay relevant. If a Constitution from the founding era has been updated so extensively to fit the country of the 2020s, the argument goes, why shouldn't America's geographical makeup be allowed to change too? ## Better for Some, Worse for Others Shift the focus from outcomes for everyone to outcomes for specific groups, and a breakup would clearly benefit some of the resulting nations. Consider California, which currently contributes so much to the federal government that it helps prop up several other states. Pull California out of the federal system, pair it with fellow donor states like Oregon and Washington, and give it dominion over the West Coast, and the result is obvious: a nation wealthier and more powerful per capita than any of those states are today as contributors to a shared federal government. The trouble with such plans lies in their effect on everyone else, especially regions like the Deep South or the landlocked Northwest that depend on federal redistribution to stay afloat. But approach the question purely as self-interest, and it is no surprise that the West Coast, or other donor blocs like New York, Pennsylvania, and New England, might see real opportunity in charting a more independent course. The hard part is whether any partition could serve every part of the country at once. That is the unanswered question at the heart of the whole debate. Is there a way to divide the United States so that nobody ends up worse off? A way to break it up while preventing future wars, avoiding mass resettlement crises, and ensuring every new nation is economically viable? After the confusion, the argument, and the short-term pain, is there a way to reach a finished result that leaves everybody better off? ## The Final Irony For now, nobody can answer that. And here lies the deepest irony. A United States so starkly divided that its two sides are openly asking about a national breakup is probably not a United States capable of pulling one off. There may well be some path to a genuinely successful partition. But it exists only if the people of the modern United States can work together productively, for long enough and in fine enough detail, to divide their own country responsibly. If America's national divorce stands any chance of being a clean, amicable break, that is exactly what it would take: real, intensive collaboration across the aisle, at the state, local, and federal levels, to manage one of the most complex decisions in American history, and also the last. If that sounds like a challenge today's United States is ready for, then fair enough. But it would demand a great deal more faith in American bipartisanship than the current moment seems to justify. ## Frequently Asked Questions **How widespread is support for splitting the United States?** It has grown well beyond the fringe. A 2021 University of Virginia survey found that roughly half of 2020 Trump voters and around 40 percent of Biden voters agreed it was time for red and blue states to split. An Ipsos survey found that more than 80 percent of Americans, across Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, believe the country is more divided than united, with nearly as many saying it is more divided than a decade ago. **Why wouldn't a simple red-versus-blue split work?** Geography. Conservative-leaning territory forms a relatively contiguous sideways "S" across the continent, but liberal-leaning areas are scattered across both coasts and isolated interior states like Minnesota and Illinois. You cannot assemble a coherent, connected country from that pattern, and the maps shift significantly from one election to the next. **What would happen to people living in the "wrong" state?** A two-way split would instantly strand tens of millions of people on the wrong side of a new border, since no state is ideologically uniform. Historically, such situations rarely resolve peacefully. The 1947 partition of British India displaced between twelve and twenty million people and left as many as two million dead, and a U.S. version could be deadlier still given the prevalence of firearms. **How would the military and nuclear weapons be divided?** A peaceful breakup would require splitting 1.3 million active-duty service members and the assets of the world's most powerful Army, Navy, and Air Force, along with thousands of nuclear warheads. That alone would create at least one new nation with a massive nuclear arsenal, raising serious questions about deterrence and the risk of future conflict. **What is the six-nation proposal?** It is a thought experiment that divides the country into six contiguous nations using existing state borders: a West Coast nation, a Northeast nation, a Deep South nation, a Lower Central nation centered on Texas, a Great Lakes nation, and a landlocked Northwestern nation that includes Alaska. Each is designed to be relatively homogeneous and economically functional, though none is presented as a definitive answer. **What does "Balkanization" mean in this context?** It refers to fragmenting a large nation into smaller, sometimes bitterly opposed states, named for the Balkans of Europe and their history of conflict. Even a carefully managed six-way split could lower short-term conflict risk while raising the long-term danger, as new neighbors with nuclear weapons and divergent political paths jockey for advantage and foreign alliances. **Which regions would benefit most, and which would struggle?** Wealthy donor states like California, paired with Oregon and Washington, could emerge richer and more powerful per capita than they are within the current federal system. Regions that rely on federal redistribution, such as the Deep South and the landlocked Northwest, would lose that support and face a difficult, risky transition, making the partition far better for some new nations than for others. ## Sources - [Should we chop America into 7 different countries, seriously? — The Week](https://theweek.com/articles/805689/should-chop-america-into-7-different-countries-seriously) - [America's divorce: left and right each get half the country — Big Think](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/americas-divorce-left-and-right-each-get-half-the-country/) - [United States, United Kingdom map — Vox](https://www.vox.com/2015/5/29/8686781/united-states-united-kingdom-map) - [How to split up the US — Pete Warden](https://petewarden.com/2010/02/06/how-to-split-up-the-us/) - [This map carves the U.S. into seven nations and splits Texas three ways — KUT](https://www.kut.org/texas/2013-09-13/this-map-carves-the-u-s-into-seven-nations-and-splits-texas-three-ways) - [U.S. regions with the same population as California — Imgur](https://imgur.com/u-s-regions-with-same-population-as-california-2264x1348-kPT5HJa) - [US red-blue partition plan — Big Think](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/us-red-blue-partition-plan/) - [Could America break apart? A UCSB expert explores the possibility — UCSB](https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/021936/could-america-break-apart-ucsb-expert-explores-possibility) - [Could the United States be headed for national divorce? — Chatham House](https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/02/could-united-states-be-headed-national-divorce) - [Americans talk about a national divorce. They're wrong. — Politico](https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/10/06/americans-national-divorse-theyre-wrong-515443) - [Is America headed for a national divorce? — The Week](https://theweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene/1021173/is-america-headed-for-a-national-divorce) - [Best-case scenario: a negotiated breakup — The New Republic](https://newrepublic.com/article/168877/best-case-scenario-negotiated-breakup) - [American political divisions on July Fourth — CNN](https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/04/politics/american-political-divisions-july-fourth) - [The United States as two nations — The Nation](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/united-states-two-nations/) - [Reality check: how divided is America really? — CBS News](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reality-check-how-divided-is-america-really/) - [With Honor — Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/with-honor-ipsos) - [America is exceptional in the nature of its political divide — Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/11/13/america-is-exceptional-in-the-nature-of-its-political-divide/) - [Democratic Party poll: voter confidence, July 2025 — Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/democratic-party-poll-voter-confidence-july-2025-9db38021) - [Democrats' negative approval rating — The Hill](https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5421535-democrats-negative-approval-rating/) - [Divisive issues by political ideology in the US — Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1416594/divisive-issues-political-ideology-us/) - [2024 election map — 270toWin](https://www.270towin.com/2024-election) - [2020 actual electoral map — 270toWin](https://www.270towin.com/maps/2020-actual-electoral-map) <!-- youtube:PZh1PSLBcZY -->