It’s easy to forget that Americans are voting in a year that marks the 250th anniversary of the nation’s Declaration of Independence. You don’t hear much about the declaration in the campaign rhetoric, and most people would bristle at the notion that the sublime message of the founding document has much to do with the messy politics of this year.
But maybe one can detect, here and there, echoes of the Americans of 250 years ago.
Not in ordinary political rhetoric, however. There is support in polling evidence for one economist’s observation that “2026 marks the worst Americans have ever felt about the economy, their personal financial situation, and government economic policy, and the records go back to 1960.” Reporters are hearing variations on that theme in voter interviews.
But when you look at economic indicators, there’s little basis for such complaints. Inflation and gasoline price increases are lower than at this point four years ago, unemployment is at historically low levels, and stock prices — and remember that most Americans are directly or indirectly investors — are near record highs.
The American patriots of 1776 had their economic complaints as well. The economy then was so different from today’s that it’s impossible to make dollar-to-dollar comparisons, but in terms of calorie consumption, the North American British colonists were probably the best-fed people on earth in the 18th century. Meat was plentiful, famine was unheard of, property ownership was widely dispersed, and the total population was doubling in less than 35 years.
The North American seaboard and western Europe were then, unknowingly, on the threshold of a new economic era. Before 1800, the world’s economies never grew much, and when they did, as the British clergyman Thomas Malthus pointed out, increasing population gobbled up the gains.
But just as Malthus was writing, technological advancements and free markets on both sides of the Atlantic started producing huge economic growth, tracing almost a straight line upward on the graph. That Americans have come to expect low-inflation economic growth is evidence of great historic progress, which voters have come to take for granted.
Complaints about taxation without representation were less about economic burden than they were, as I have argued in this space, about broken promises. The Parliament in London, which had mostly left them alone, was taxing their stamps and their tea. Similarly, economic complaints in 2026 reflect broken promises: President Donald Trump promised to subdue inflation, but his sometimes whimsically imposed tariffs and his never-much-explained offensive against Iran have raised prices instead.
Complaints are rife today, on all political sides, that our politics is divisive and coarsening, rending our nation into hostile camps. Of course, some of this is definitionally true. Elections are an adversarial process — one candidate wins, and the others all lose. Sometimes competitors go too far.
Examples this year include Ohio Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy’s ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s long-estranged mother calling her a liar, and an ad by backers of Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed blaming higher grocery costs on U.S. aid to Israel for “killing Palestinians.”
But politics has divided Americans along cultural rather than economic lines not just recently but over the very long run, for the very good reason that America has always — and not just in some recent decades, as “progressive” rhetoric suggests — been characterized by cultural variety. The signers of the declaration grew up in colonies founded by Calvinists, Anglicans, Catholics, and Quakers when Europe was just recovering from two centuries of hugely destructive religious wars.
The idea that they could be consolidated into one political unit was advanced by the most internationally famous colonist, Benjamin Franklin, in his Albany Plan of Union in 1754 and enshrined in the Declaration of Independence 22 years later. The Constitution that Franklin and George Washington endorsed in 1787, as amended in 1791, took care to ban religious tests for office and guarantee the free exercise of religion and freedom of the press.
That doesn’t mean that cultural issues are easily settled or cultural divisions quietly bridged. Nineteenth-century Americans identified their different attitudes toward slavery as rooted in the differences between Roundheads and Cavaliers in the English Civil War in the 1640s. Those divisions over slavery produced a Civil War in which 600,000 Americans died in the 1860s.
Twenty-first-century Americans have been divided on cultural issues such as abortion, on which divisions in opinion have persisted, and same-sex marriage, on which millions of minds have been changed. Differences on transgender issues — should the government pay for transgender surgery for prisoners? — divided the two parties’ nominees for president in 2024.
The differences between the two parties can test this culturally diverse nation’s political mettle. But differences within each of the two political parties can shape the future of political debate and public policy. Such differences have been lurking in the political background in recent years and have come to the fore in this campaign year.
Since its founding in 1854, the Republican Party has drawn its core support from people who see themselves, and are seen by others, as typical Americans, even though they have never constituted a majority of the nation’s diverse population.
The question going forward is whether its support will continue to be centered on non-college graduates spread around the edges of and between the 50 or so major metropolitan areas with populations of 1 million or more, where half of Americans live.
The Democratic Party, since its founding in 1832, has been a coalition of those not considered, by themselves or others, to be typical Americans, but who, taken together, can form a national majority.
WHAT’S AHEAD IF THE POLLS ARE RIGHT OR WRONG
This year has exposed a divide between the Democratic Socialists of America and others who oppose American support for Israel — and, in some cases, its very existence — and those, Jewish and otherwise, who support Israel. That divide is most visible in Michigan’s Senate race, where el Sayed, unlike Democratic candidates in other states targeted in 2024, has not polled well ahead of Kamala Harris’s benchmarks.
The results of Tuesday’s elections will tell us much about the political struggles and policy vectors of the next few years. But they also seem likely only to set the stage for some serious and perhaps as-yet-unpredicted changes in our politics in the decades ahead.