Your attention is drawn to Liberal Patriot’s description (https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/a-fascinating-new-look-at-americas) of Echelon Insights—a Republican-leaning polling and data firm—latest results from their Political Tribes project. You can read more details at https://echeloninsights.com/tribes/ In short, Echelon insights used a three-axis study to determine typologies, the axes being economic, social, and ‘trust in institutions’, of actual voters.
Readers considering where a new third party might fit in the political spectrum might find the work to be of interest.
There is a Libertarian quadrant in the cross-tabs at the bottom of the page. Check the very bottom of the cross tabs. 5% of the overall survey were placed in the Liberatarian quadrant. Once the quadrants are divided into “tribes”
31% of libertarians are in the Moderate Right tribe
25% are American Institutionalists
18% Young And Disillusioned
14% Middle American Optimists
8% New Republican Populists
4% Hard Left
1% Electibility Democrats
0% Hard Right
But, the Libertarian quadrant cross-tabs are nonsensical. “Libertarians” were defined as economic conservatives and social liberals. Dividing it that way meant a strong majority of “libertarians”, 72%, support government prohibitions on hate speech and 58% support gun control. 27% say they would prefer bigger government providing more services while 28% appear to be full blown MAGAts who support Trump on immigration and tariffs and think the US has become more respected in the world since Trump took office. 38% actually voted for Trump while 57% voted for Harris and 5% for RFK and none for Oliver.
The biggest tell that there is something wrong with their classification is that the male-female split for Libertarians was 31%-69%. And we all know that isn’t the case.
Of the Strong Populists, which basically maps to the New Republican Populist tribe, only 9% reported being employed full time. Which explains something.
Several decades ago, one or another group — I vaguely recall it was the Pew trust — did similar studies. However, they did something much more modern and scientific than choosing the axes in advance. They used cluster analysis, in which you take the answers people have given you to a significant number of questions, and let their answers tell you what the actual axes are. They used a computer to find groups of people who mostly agree with each other. You end up with mostly-similar people in each group, and then ask what the groups are. there are no N-dimensional figures. They did identify a Libertarian group in most of their studies, but it was not large.
It’s interesting to note that the biggest tribes are the Hard Right with 17% and the Hard Left with 16%. These are the folks that dominate the major party primaries and drive the polarization of the country, IMO.
I don’t seem to fit perfectly into any of their “tribes” I seem to be Moderate Right on some issues, and a Middle American Optimist on others. I definitely don’t see myself in any of the other tribes, either left or right.
Flawed study. It tries to drop a linear spectrum into a 3-D chart, and in doing so ignores both libertarianism and socialism.
I think that it is quite interesting. They took the Nolan Chart, and added one dimension: pro- versus anti- establishment. As far as it goes, I think that it is a fairly accurate analysis. If libertarians and socialists don’t show up as distinct tribes, its probably because they are distributed among other tribes. I think that its fair to say, given the recent upheaval within the Libertarian Party, that party contains members from two or three different tribes.