The Union Trilogy T. P. Bartlett

The perception gap

How wrong Americans are about each other, state by state

Americans believe 55.5% of the other party supports political violence. Asked the same question about themselves, 15.1% of Democrats and 14.6% of Republicans say they do. That is a gap of about forty points, and it holds in every one of the fifty states.

The figures come from America's Political Pulse, run by the Polarization Research Lab, which asked 162,000 people the same questions every week from September 2022 to March 2026. 136,731 of those answers carry a state.

All fifty states, widest gap first

The bar runs from what people in that state actually report to what their neighbors believe about them. Where it starts is the truth. Where it ends is the belief. Its length is the distance. Every state name links to that state's page.

Support for political violence in the other party: measured, believed, and the distance between them. Percentage points.
#StateMeasured → believed  0–60%, marks at 20 and 40 MeasuredBelievedGapAnswers
1 North Dakota 11.4% 56.9% 45.5 275
2 Montana 13.2% 58.4% 45.2 447
3 Wyoming 12.4% 56.6% 44.2 236
4 Maine 13.3% 57.2% 43.9 546
5 Oregon 14.8% 58.4% 43.6 2,257
6 Missouri 13.4% 56.7% 43.3 2,686
7 Idaho 12.4% 55.6% 43.2 690
8 Wisconsin 13.8% 56.3% 42.5 2,618
9 Colorado 14.7% 56.8% 42.1 2,302
10 South Dakota 13.9% 56% 42.1 409
11 Minnesota 14.1% 55.6% 41.5 2,205
12 Iowa 13.9% 55.3% 41.4 1,271
13 Indiana 15.4% 56.5% 41.1 2,560
14 Kansas 15.6% 56.7% 41.1 1,042
15 New Hampshire 13% 54% 41 473
16 Arizona 16% 56.6% 40.6 3,526
17 Michigan 14.6% 55% 40.4 3,980
18 Hawaii 16.2% 56.5% 40.3 420
19 Pennsylvania 15.6% 55.9% 40.3 6,072
20 Tennessee 15.5% 55.7% 40.2 2,751
21 Washington 18.4% 58.5% 40.1 3,353
22 Nebraska 15.6% 55.5% 39.9 743
23 North Carolina 15.7% 55.3% 39.6 3,855
24 Connecticut 16.8% 55.9% 39.1 1,180
25 Utah 12.3% 51.4% 39.1 1,098
26 New Mexico 16.9% 55.8% 38.9 1,000
27 Virginia 17% 55.8% 38.8 3,502
28 Rhode Island 15.3% 53.7% 38.4 339
29 Vermont 16.4% 54.2% 37.8 244
30 Maryland 17.5% 55.1% 37.6 2,006
31 Arkansas 15.4% 52.8% 37.4 1,149
32 Kentucky 16.9% 54.2% 37.3 1,904
33 South Carolina 17.3% 54.5% 37.2 1,979
34 Massachusetts 17.2% 54.3% 37.1 2,065
35 West Virginia 14.7% 51.3% 36.6 895
36 Ohio 17.2% 53.7% 36.5 5,330
37 Nevada 20.1% 56.1% 36 1,797
38 Oklahoma 17.5% 53.4% 35.9 1,419
39 Mississippi 15.6% 51.3% 35.7 857
40 Delaware 19.4% 54.4% 35 464
41 Louisiana 18.8% 53.8% 35 1,421
42 Florida 19.5% 54.3% 34.8 10,692
43 Illinois 18.8% 53.2% 34.4 5,361
44 New Jersey 20.2% 54.4% 34.2 3,367
45 Alabama 18.2% 52.3% 34.1 1,869
46 Georgia 20.2% 52.7% 32.5 4,845
47 Texas 21.4% 53.8% 32.4 12,544
48 California 21.5% 53.1% 31.6 14,481
49 New York 23.7% 53% 29.3 9,839
50 Alaska 26.6% 54.3% 27.7 367

What this does not show

The order of the ranking is less solid than the finding. North Dakota sits at the top on 275 answers. Alaska sits at the bottom on 367. California has 14,481. A state with a few hundred answers moves a long way on a handful of them, so treat the top and bottom of this table as noisy and the forty-point gap itself as the result.

Every row carries its own count, in the last column, so you can see which ones to lean on.

The question is about support for political violence specifically. It is not a measure of how extreme the other side is in general, and nothing here says either party is right about anything else.

The District of Columbia is not in this survey, which covers the fifty states. Its card on the map explains what it is instead.

Sources

America's Political Pulse, Polarization Research Lab. Weekly from September 2022 to March 2026. 162,000 respondents nationally, 136,731 of them assigned to a state.

This page is generated from that data by tools/build-gap-page.cjs and is regenerated on every deploy. The figures are not rounded, adjusted, or reweighted here.

Keep going

Answer the question yourself, six seats, from the world down to you.
The map, and how each state joined the Union
Divided Houses, the novel this data sits underneath