Hey everybody, it's Joe Trippie and welcome back to a special episode of that Trippy show.

No Alex this show, but actually there is an Alex.

My special guest this week is Alex Theodorides of UMass Amherst, who just put out one of the most fascinating polls I've seen in a while.

It's not the usual head-to-head about candidates that we always tell you on the show to ignore those head-to-heads.

But with America's 250th coming up, they took a look at what

Americans think it means to be an American. And I think there's a lot we can all learn from this.

Alex, welcome. Great to be here with you, Joe. So, you know, I really think this is fascinating because one of the things, your poll shows about three quarters of Americans say we have more in common than divides us.

But at the same time, you know, there's these huge partisan gaps on issues like racism and Christian nationalism.

Is this, is it basically two different realities coexisting under one national identity? I'd like you to get into the poll a little bit

in some of your findings. Yeah. So, you know, I think what you said earlier in introducing me, I think is what we sort of aim for.

We don't necessarily, you know, want to be or see our comparative advantage being the horse race.

I mean, we do that obviously because it's relevant to all sorts of other things or

or just the standard stuff that other pollsters do. But, you know, we're, we're political scientists.

And, and I think what we bring to this is some expertise in terms of developing poll questions,

getting at some of the deeper sort of meanings of things and relationships between things.

And one of the things we really wanted to look deeply at is, you know, where are we heading

into the 250th?

And as you say, we, you know, we find that sort of what the number you mentioned is sort

of the hopeful number most people

agree um that uh the united states that we have more that unites us than what divides us right

most people who are democrats think that republicans think that it's it's incredibly close like

you know within a millimeter of mercury there they they agree on that but as

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