About nine in 10 Democrats and Republicans say core values such as fairness, compassion and personal responsibility are very or extremely important, yet only about one-third in each party believe those same values describe the opposing party. The finding comes from a poll by NORC at the University of Chicago and the nonprofit Starts With Us, published on Wednesday. The gap between near-universal self‑reported values and mutual misperception helps explain growing distrust that's reshaping voter behaviour, civic institutions and partisan messaging across the United States. This poll’s authors and experts say it highlights both shared civic commitments and the practical challenge of correcting cross‑party misconceptions.

The NORC at the University of Chicago and Starts With Us asked respondents in both parties to rate specific civic values. Roughly nine in 10 Democrats and nine in 10 Republicans endorsed those values for themselves, the poll found, while only about one-third in each party said the opposing side held the same values. Tom Fishman, chief executive at Starts With Us, described the result as "a hidden opportunity for Americans to reestablish a sense of shared values," and urged voters to correct misconceptions that deepen polarisation.

Shared values, mutual blind spots

The contrast is stark. People on both sides of the aisle broadly agree on what matters, yet they don't believe their opponents do. Experts who spoke to the pollsters pointed to a cluster of institutional and media forces that help explain the mismatch. They cited declining trust in mainstream media, government, science and public health, the growth of social media echo chambers, and politicians who deliberately stoke distrust. Those dynamics, the experts said, magnify differences and harden identities, even where underlying values overlap.

Nealin Parker, executive director of Common Ground USA, warned that polarisation becomes dangerous when it shifts from disagreement to dehumanisation. Parker said that pattern has surfaced in episodes of political violence in recent years. That warning chimes with the poll’s broader implication: shared values alone aren't enough to prevent escalation if people believe the other side doesn't share those values.

Commentators and analysts differ on how big the disconnect is and what to do about it. Some call for structural reforms or renewed emphasis on civic pluralism to reduce the party‑as‑identity dynamic that now shapes many social interactions. Others focus on the mechanics of mistrust and on fixing information flows between communities that no longer talk to one another.

Mastheads

Tactics converge across left and right

Across several essays and public panels there's a related argument, framed as less a clash of values than a convergence of tactics. Panelists in a public forum hosted by RDI sketched a change in the conservative movement away from an older, liberty‑focused conservatism toward a strand that valorises nationhood and is prepared to curtail liberties in service of nationalist aims.

That analysis links the conservative shift to new media incentives and to leaders who prize winning cultural battles over preserving pluralist norms.

At the same time, some commentators say parts of the Left have adopted methods once associated with the Right, including censorship and intolerance in certain university and activist spaces. One essay cited case studies such as book‑banning campaigns and said some individual lawyers affiliated with the ACLU had called to restrict speech. Those particular claims appear in that single essay and were not corroborated elsewhere in the briefing bundle.

Some political scientists and writers invoked the horseshoe theory to describe how extremes on both sides can begin to resemble each other, in authoritarian tendencies, dogmatism and a readiness to subordinate pluralistic norms to ideological ends. That portrait of mutual mimicry extends to economic populism, where analysts note that both left and right currents can be sceptical of markets and favour greater government control, while blaming different targets. On the left, rhetoric tends to target corporations and the wealthy. On the right, the focus is often on immigrants and trade.

There is pushback to the direst economic narratives from a small number of voices in the bundle. One analysis cited economists who argue that typical workers’ real wages and post‑tax incomes for low‑income households have risen over recent decades, and that consumption and measures of lived well‑being have improved. That empirical counterargument is single‑sourced within the set of pieces the research editor provided.

Across the material, a repeated theme is that tactics now matter as much as stated goals. Messaging strategies that once belonged to one side have been adopted, adapted or mirrored by the other. The result is a political environment where mistrust is fuelled not only by disagreement over policy but also by competing narratives about who the other side is and what it wants.

Readers should note the limits of the available material. Several claims about methods and actors rest on individual essays or single panels. The NORC and Starts With Us poll remains the clearest, cross‑sectional empirical measure in the bundle, and it underpins much of the subsequent commentary.

Related Articles

The poll found roughly nine in 10 Democrats and Republicans say core civic values matter to them, yet only about one-third in each party believe the other side shares those values. Tom Fishman of Starts With Us called that gap "a hidden opportunity for Americans to reestablish a sense of shared values," and the poll’s authors say correcting those misperceptions is the practical challenge for reducing polarisation.

This article was created with AI assistance.