Colin Woodard: regional cultures explain U.S. political and public‑health divides; polling finds broad support for a civic national narrative

On the Transatlantic podcast produced by the U.S. Helsinki Commission, Bachte Nishano interviewed Colin Woodard, the author of American Nations, who argued that ‘‘we’re not a nation state. We never have been. We’re a federation of rival stateless nations,’’ and that those regional settlement patterns still shape today’s politics and public health outcomes.

Woodard, director of Nationhood Lab and a long‑time journalist, told the commission the different colonial projects that settled North America — Puritan New England, the Dutch New Netherland around present‑day New York, the Chesapeake planter societies, and the Spanish Southwest — produced regional cultures that do not line up with modern state borders and nonetheless predict county‑level differences in voting, chronic disease, COVID vaccination and death rates, and other social indicators.

Why that matters: Woodard said understanding the persistent regional map changes how policymakers should think about politics and local conditions. ‘‘Once you know that map, you will see it in county level data today,’’ he said, arguing that settlement history, uneven immigration patterns and voluntary internal migration have produced durable cultural differences.

Woodard described two mechanisms behind the persistence. First, the historic geographic distribution of immigrants (the large 1880–1924 immigration wave and later shifts) left some regions (notably parts of the Deep South and Greater Appalachia) with far fewer foreign‑born residents historically, shaping cultural trajectories. Second, recent internal migration often sorts people by preference: movers tend to adopt destination norms, and people “vote with their feet,” reducing minority positions and sharpening regional differences.

On public opinion, Woodard described Nationhood Lab polling and testing of a short civic national narrative grounded in the Declaration of Independence. He said baseline polling returned roughly 60/30 margins in favor of the civic‑ideals framing across many demographic groups and that a leader‑level test of narrative language produced an outsized result he summarized as ‘‘97 to 2’’ in favor of the civic frame. He urged leaders to adopt a clear civic narrative so debates about policy start from shared premises rather than mutually exclusive national stories.

Woodard also cited large datasets such as UCLA’s Nationscape (he noted roughly 500,000 interviews), which show that while regions differ on the extremes of many questions, the ‘‘middle’’ policy options on issues from gun control to renewable energy find broad, often cross‑regional support.

The interview closed with Woodard’s recommendation to national leaders: frame policy debates around shared civic goals so opponents argue about means rather than competing visions of who belongs. ‘‘If you agree on what you’re talking about — how do we execute the promise in the Declaration — you’re already in a much better space,’’ he said.

The podcast episode was recorded for the U.S. Helsinki Commission’s Transatlantic series. Woodard directed listeners to nationhoodlab.org for the Nationhood Lab narrative materials and documented findings.