As the 2024 election proved, the U.S. has seen dramatic shifts to the right from where it was just four years ago. Results showed that virtually all 50 states, including crucial swing states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, leaned red toward President-elect Trump. At 50 percent, he’s right on track to win the 2024 popular vote, which President Biden won by 7 million in 2020.
So, what’s driving this major realignment? Cultural psychologist Michael Morris, a professor at Columbia Business School, says our underlying tribal identities — or shared ideas — influence these changes in voting patterns. The problem, he believes, is that people (those on the left, in particular) tend to oversimplify these identities.
“It’s not enough for people to have the same skin color or the same kind of last name. They have to have the same ideology, the same ideals, the same habits [to be grouped together],” says Professor Morris, the author of Tribal: How the Cultural Instincts That Divide Us Can Help Bring Us Together. “And I think that perhaps on the left, we’ve forgotten that lesson. We’ve thought that people in the same census category will always vote the same way.”
Drawing on his extensive research on tribal psychology, Morris explains tribalism and how it’s reshaping traditional political landscapes across the country.
Katie Couric Media: In the 2024 election, most of the U.S. shifted to the right. What do you attribute this to?
Michael Morris: There was a shift to the right because the populist rhetoric of the Trump campaign — “Make America Great Again” — resonated with many people. This rhetoric makes some of us uncomfortable because it seems to pin the blame on newcomers, specifically on immigrants.
What’s striking about the increased support for Trump is that in the initial hours after the election, everyone was ready to declare that white males moved to Trump in overwhelming numbers. In fact, the growth in support for Trump compared to previous elections was larger in other demographic categories. That’s interesting because it speaks to this idea of getting beyond traditional identity politics. Traditional identity politics is based on categories like people of color or categories like Hispanics that make more sense from the outside than from the inside.
The various groups of people who fall under the category of Hispanic don’t necessarily feel similar to each other. They don’t have similar historical experiences. They may have a language in common, but people who are Cubans or Venezuelans who are escaping a left-wing dictator have a different point of view than Mexicans or Guatemalans. So when everybody on the left said that a comedian’s insult to Puerto Rico would change the votes of Hispanics generally, well, that didn’t happen.
In my book Tribal, I argue that it’s important to understand tribal psychology. Tribal psychology is the set of evolved systems that first enabled us to live in the large groups that we call tribes, which are distinctive to our species. This enabled us to develop complex civilizations, organizations, and everything else we have.
So, how would you define a tribe?
A tribe is defined as a large group glued together by common ideas. And that’s what culture is: It’s shared ideas within a group that enables communication and collaboration.
What helped us separate from the rest of the primates is that we can form these large groups with people we’re not related to and total strangers, not people we have personal bonds with or have a history of cooperation with. We can trust this much larger group of people because we have common ideas and a common culture. That makes the thoughts of these other people predictable to us. And it makes their behavior something that we can anticipate and coordinate with. [For humans] having the same skin color or the same kind of last name is not enough to make a tribe. They have to have the same ideology, the same ideals, the same habits. And I think that perhaps on the left, we’ve forgotten that lesson. We’ve thought that people in the same census category will always vote the same way.
People make that mistake in the United States a lot because race is so salient in our society because of our history. Race physiognomy tends to correlate with cultural groups with everyday historical experiences. So ethnicity and race are kind of synonymous in our society, but in most of the world, that’s not the case. In Ukraine, you can’t tell who’s Russian or Ukrainian based on somebody’s face. You have to listen to them talk or maybe little things about how they dress or some things about their food.
Those are the cues that people look to for ethnicity. In Israel, you can’t tell who’s Palestinian or who’s Israeli necessarily by the face. You have to listen to the language.
How does tribalism factor into identity politics?
There are many tribes inside every individual. We used to talk about nature versus nurture in social science, and that’s been left behind. And the way we think now is that human nature is nurture. Evolution wired humans to rapidly and unconsciously internalize the patterns of the communities that nurture them. So, you may be born in an ethnic community. You immediately start to learn its language and think of its food as comfort food, but then you may later in your childhood get socialized into the religion. You learn certain concepts related to the religion, and not everyone from the ethnic group is a part of this religion.
Then you go to a school and learn the culture of being a student. That could include wearing a uniform, listening to the bell, and all these habits of being a student. You might choose a career and become socialized into a profession. You join a corporation with a strong culture. Maybe you move to a different country or a different part of the country, and you internalize the ways of that region. So, by the time they’re an adult, a person has many tribes inside them, and not all tribes can operate at once. So they take turns with different identities, and cultural repertoire comes out of us, depending on the situation we’re in.
So why did 45 percent of Hispanic men vote for Trump? Well, these people are not just Hispanics; they are also men. They are also, in many cases, conservative Catholics. They’re legal immigrants, a salient identity category because they’ve been here longer and came here in the more complicated way of getting their papers. And who’s a threat to their job? Well, it’s probably the new people coming over the border from the same part of the world. However, the identity category of being a legal immigrant may be more salient to them than being Hispanic.
So why do politicians make such broad generalizations about certain voting groups?
These broad frames, like, say, people of color, are helpful in politics in mobilizing people and creating solidarity among those who may not inherently or always feel similar.
The problem is that we need to remember that identity is constantly in flux. So, the coalitions that were solid four years ago may not be solid this time around because the situation is different. There are different threats. I’ve tried to put my finger on what that is — Trump has engaged in a lot of rhetoric like he did last time about the enormous threat that’s coming from illegal immigration, particularly from the southern border. And he exaggerated it eight years ago. He exaggerated it this time, time, as well.
I don’t see the data showing that it actually is worse. But that’s how this divisive populism works. It’s this idea that the good times were long ago, when America was great, and now we’ve lost that. And then there’s this feeling of sadness, and that something’s been taken away from us. And then, well, who would be the natural suspect? Well, it’s whoever is here now and wasn’t here before. That’s new immigrants or new identity categories, like trans people, maybe.
But why did that resonate? Why did people feel like things have gotten worse?
These pocketbook issues and inflation are really salient to people because they are part of their daily lives. It’s not just what they read in the newspaper; it’s every time they go to the grocery store, every time they go to the gas pump. That’s the only thing I can see that objectively has changed for the worse in the last four years. That really affects the kinds of people who shifted toward Trump — primarily people who aren’t college-educated or wealthy. And it’s bizarre because I really don’t think any of his policies are going to benefit those people. President Biden did a lot for people in those categories, but he didn’t sell it in a way that helped them see it.
The other thing to say is that the left has to get a handle on the fact that they often focus on relatively niche issues that aren’t popular with a broad swath of the population but that are popular in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Berkeley. I am a big supporter of trans rights, but I think a lot of Americans are appalled by how it’s affected women’s sports. And so I think that the solution that the left has endorsed is not a satisfying solution to most people.
That issue is more of a symbolic threat than an actual threat. Most people weren’t affected by it, and I think there was too much emphasis placed on it. The left focuses on the issues that are salient within the centers of the prestige of the left, and they forget what the broad majority of American voters care about. Some of that is a result of the residential sorting by political parties that has happened over the last two generations and then compounded by the news source sorting that has happened over the last generation thanks to the introduction of websites, blogs, and social media. We started getting our news from these very filtered sources that make us feel like we understand the world, but we’re really understanding just a small subset of the opinion spectrum. We’re not understanding which issues are the ones that would move the most voters to our camp.
What can tribalism today tell us about the future?
We think that the cultural patterns of today were always here and always will be here and that’s not true. These evolve — and the trans movement is a perfect example of that. [People are getting] comfortable using “they” as a pronoun for a person. And same-sex marriage went from something that was the third rail of politics to something that was taken for granted in one decade. So, really profound changes in culture happen all the time, and tribal psychology can also help us understand how these changes occur.
That said, there is substantial evidence that existential threats increase people’s traditionalism and conservatism. For instance, right after 9/11, there was a massive increase in support for George W. Bush.
But in the case of the recent election, this shift to the right is a little more puzzling. Still, it seems that the rhetoric around immigration and immigrants causing crimes was successful as well as scaremongering about trans rights.
The general lesson here is that we are in our bubbles. The political influencers, campaign leaders, and pollsters were all way out of touch with what was really moving people.
This interview was edited and conceded for length and clarity.
