What 13,000 Answers Reveal About How We Actually Cluster

Votto is not a poll. We don’t claim to represent America.

What we are is a living vibe check — a place where people answer provocative questions on a six-point agree/disagree scale, fill out identity dimensions (generation, geography, faith, politics, parenthood, media habits), and then see how different slices of the community responded to the same questions. The product is built around discovery: put on a different lens, see a different pattern.

This is our first look at what the data actually reveals. The user base skews toward people paying close attention: subscribing to newsletters, arguing in reply threads, consuming independent media alongside legacy outlets. Politically, it’s wider than you’d expect. And when you cross-tabulate their opinions against their identities, unexpected fault lines emerge — ones that don’t map onto the left/right narrative at all.

Who Holds Their Opinions Hardest?

Votto’s six-point scale captures more than direction — it captures conviction. We measured how often each group chose the extreme endpoints (Strongly Disagree or Strongly Agree) versus hedging toward the middle.

The assumption that young people are more extreme doesn’t hold. Boomers answer at the poles 12 points more often than Gen X, who are the most measured generation in the dataset.

Libertarians land at the bottom of the intensity ranking — 28.0% extreme — lower than every other group, including moderates. Progressives hold the opposite position: the strongest conviction at the highest intensity.

The Media Trust Chasm

In this dataset, the most predictive identity dimension isn’t political lean, generation, or education. It’s how much you trust mainstream media.

The gap between “Some trust” and “No trust” respondents produces wider splits than Progressive vs. Conservative on nearly every question we tested.

The “No trust” cohort isn’t simply conservative. They’re institutionally contrarian: pro-tariff, anti-NATO, skeptical of birthright citizenship, and supportive of Iran strikes — a combination that doesn’t fit neatly into either party. The “Some trust” group is institutionally deferential: pro-NATO, anti-tariff, pro-birthright, anti-strike.

And “Low trust” — people who are skeptical but not totally checked out — lands between these positions on almost every question. The shift isn’t gradual. There is a cliff between I don’t trust them much and I don’t trust them at all.

The Parenthood Realignment

Having children doesn’t just change your schedule. It rewires your political instincts in ways that cut across party lines.

The pattern isn’t left or right. Parents shift hawkish on borders, protective on neighborhoods, and — counterintuitively — more in favor of forcing AI companies to open-source their models. They want to see inside the black box. They want the government to intervene on social media for children.

The through-line is risk awareness and a demand for transparency. The childless are more libertarian on every one of these axes — more open-borders, less interested in banning social media for kids, less interested in forcing AI transparency. Parenthood compresses the spectrum toward protection and legibility.

What Religious People and Atheists Secretly Agree On

Move past the obvious questions and the faith divide gets strange. On questions with no theological valence, the most religious and most secular respondents converge at rates that would surprise both groups.

The agreement list is longer than the disagreement list. The devout and the atheists in this dataset share positions on integration, policing, DEI, NATO, and birthright citizenship. They diverge on criminal justice severity and firearms. A real pattern emerges here — one that’s largely invisible in standard political coverage.

What “Moderate” Actually Means

“Moderate” is often treated as a synonym for undecided. In this dataset, the picture looks more specific: moderates appear to hold a coherent worldview that neither party is currently offering.

The moderate position isn’t “a little of each side.” It’s culturally conservative — religion matters, the “world is too broken for kids” framing doesn’t land, lockdowns went too far — but institutionally pragmatic: ending the Afghanistan war was correct, parents shouldn’t override professional educators, social media is the real threat.

In this sample, it looks like a coherent political identity — someone who trusts civilizational continuity but not the specific institutions claiming to protect it.

The Surprising Consensus

Across every identity line, some positions command near-total agreement:

And then there’s this: only 5% agree (n=21) that “podcasts are the best medium for learning and forming opinions.” In a population that overwhelmingly consumes podcasts. They use the medium voraciously while rejecting the claim that it’s sufficient. That kind of consumption — I rely on this constantly, but I don’t pretend it’s enough — may be the defining trait of this user base.

The Hidden Fault Line

The deepest split in the dataset doesn’t run along any of the usual lines. It’s not left/right, young/old, or urban/rural. It runs between people who trust institutions to manage collective risk and people who trust individuals to manage their own risk.

This axis predicts positions on vaccine mandates, parental rights over curriculum, AI regulation, social media bans for kids, and government spending cuts more accurately than stated political identity does. You can be a progressive who trusts individuals over institutions (on drug policy, on policing) or a conservative who trusts institutions over individuals (on military action, on immigration enforcement). The specific institution matters less than the reflex: when something goes wrong, do you want a system to step in, or do you want to handle it yourself?

It’s a question that standard left/right polling rarely surfaces. Votto is built to find it.