The story is familiar. It is also incomplete.

A new national survey from the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin asked 1,200 adults a simple question: Are the Republican and Democratic parties in step or out of step with the public on the issues that matter most?

The results unsettle both sides.

On inflation, the issue people rank as most personally important, 64% say Republicans are out of step. Sixty percent say the same of Democrats. On taxes, crime, immigration, and transgender issues, majorities say both parties are out of step with the public.

Each party has exactly one issue where a majority sees it as in step. For Republicans, it is border security. For Democrats, it is healthcare. That is it. On everything else, the people look at both parties and see organizations that have lost the thread.

This is not a polarization story. It is an alienation story. And the distinction matters.

Americans are not fighting each other nearly as much as they are losing confidence in the people meant to govern them.

If the country were simply polarized — half the nation on one side, half on the other, each faithfully represented by its party — the prescription would be moderation and compromise. But the Civitas data suggest something different. The public is not at war with itself. It is estranged from the people who claim to speak for it.

Eighty-three percent of respondents say they are at least somewhat concerned that the two major parties are not properly representing the people. Thirty-seven percent say “extremely.” That is not a partisan complaint. That is a structural one.

Outside political media and activist circles, most Americans are not demanding ideological victory. They are asking why ordinary problems have become so difficult for capable institutions to solve.

The same survey asked whether Americans prefer experienced leaders who know how to work within the system or outsiders who want to bring change. Experience won, 47% to 28%. That gap is enormous — and it runs directly against the narrative that the country is crying out for disruption.

But ask where on a 0–10 scale between changing the system and working within it people want their ideal candidate to land, and the average is 5.28. Almost exactly in the middle.

People want competent governance from leaders who actually listen. They are not revolutionaries. They are not satisfied either. They are waiting for someone to take their complaints seriously without blowing up the building.

The populism findings reinforce this. Only 27% of Americans say they would rather trust ordinary people than experts and intellectuals. Sixty-six percent agree that citizens need expert help to understand complicated things like science and health. Americans do not reject expertise. They are not the anti-science mob of partisan caricature.

But 47% agree that “the system is stacked against people like me.”

That combination is the real consensus. Trust the experts. Fix the system they operate in. It is not anti-intellectual. It is anti-rigging. Americans are not rejecting authority. They are demanding accountability.

And neither party is speaking to it. Republicans have leaned far too much into anti-expert rhetoric that most people reject. Democrats have leaned into institutional defense that ignores the grievances most Americans feel. Both are talking past the country.

The most dangerous number in the entire poll is this: 24% of Americans agree, at least somewhat, that when they think about our political and social institutions, they “cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn.’” Another 28% neither agree nor disagree.

Nearly a quarter of the country has reached institutional nihilism. Another quarter is not far behind.

And yet, in the same survey, 61% affirm that democracy, despite its problems, is the best system of government. Only 9% support a president with dictatorial powers. Only 19% say we need leaders who break the rules to save the nation.

The public is not nihilistic. It is frustrated. Americans still believe in self-governance. They just do not believe the current practitioners of it deserve their trust.

Only 33% rate the way democracy is working as “somewhat good” or better. The federal bureaucracy has a net unfavorable rating of 31 points. Congress has a net unfavorable of 30. The news media, which shapes how people perceive both parties, sits at a net unfavorable of 23.

Every institution standing between the public and its government is failing the public’s test. Not because Americans have given up on institutions. Because the institutions have given up on them.

As Alexis de Tocqueville observed, democracy depends less on agreement than on habits of self-government; that is, the daily practice of listening, compromise, and shared responsibility. Those habits cannot survive long when citizens believe no one governing them is actually listening.

The grading of political figures tells the same story from a different angle. The survey asked respondents to assign a letter grade to a range of possible presidential candidates. Nobody cracked a C-minus. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) got the highest GPA at 1.75 – a D+. Elon Musk received the lowest at 1.32 — an F+. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Vice President JD Vance, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) — all failing.

The public is not rallying around a savior. It is grading the entire political class on a generous curve, and the entire political class is still failing.

I teach politics for a living. I have spent nearly two decades in many classrooms watching young people try to make sense of their country. What I see in the Civitas data is what I hear from my students: not rage, exactly, but a weary disbelief and bewilderment that the people running things could be this far from the people they serve. The disconnect is severe.

My students have seen a lot of bad. They came of age during impeachments, a pandemic, campus eruptions, a contested transfer of power, and a political culture that rewards performance over governance. They have watched adults model contempt rather than disagreement. Many of them have never witnessed what functional democratic argument looks like.

I have. I grew up in the 1980s watching Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill and a Democratic Congress go at each other with genuine force — deep disagreements over taxes, defense, the role of government — and then govern and come together. They fought about real things. They also passed landmark legislation on Social Security, tax reform, and immigration. They did not agree. They did not pretend to. But they demonstrated, in public, that the system could contain serious conflict and still produce results. The country was no less divided then, but its leaders still believed governing was their job.

That was not a bipartisan fantasy. It was democratic practice. And it taught a generation of young Americans, including me, that the machinery of self-government was worth believing in — not because it was perfect, but because it worked.

My students have never seen that. They have no lived memory of government functioning as a place where serious people fought hard and built something anyway. What they know is dysfunction dressed up as principle, and performance masquerading as conviction.

This July, America turns 250. The semiquincentennial is supposed to be a moment of national reflection — a chance to take stock of the republic and ask what we have made of it. If we approach it honestly, the Civitas data tells us what we will find: a public that still believes in the promise of self-governance but has lost faith in the people and institutions charged with delivering it.

That is not a reason for despair. It is an opportunity for renewal.

The polarization frame flatters political leaders. It tells them their base is with them, and only the other side objects. The alienation frame does not flatter anyone. It says: on most issues, the public disagrees with both of you. Your mandate is thinner than you think. Your opponents are not only across the aisle. They are in your own electorate, quietly concluding that neither option represents them.

But the alienation frame also contains a kind of hope. If the problem were truly an irreconcilable division — half the country wanting one thing, the other half wanting its opposite — there would be no path forward short of domination. The Civitas data say otherwise. Americans broadly agree on the problems: inflation, healthcare, Social Security, crime, and jobs. They broadly agree that neither party is solving them. They broadly agree that democracy is worth preserving even as the current version disappoints.

That is not a divided country. That is a neglected one. And a neglected country, unlike a fractured one, can be repaired.

MARCO’S MOMENT: IT’S TIME TO TAKE A RUBIO RUN SERIOUSLY

The 250th anniversary should not be a pageant. It should be a provocation. A chance to ask the hardest question a republic can face: Are we governing ourselves well? The honest answer, right now, is no. But the deeper answer, the one buried in the data, is that the public is ready for something better. Americans have not abandoned the idea. They are waiting for the practice to catch up.

The danger facing America at 250 is not that citizens have lost faith in democracy. It is that too many leaders have stopped practicing it. The public still believes the republic is worth the argument. The question is whether those entrusted to lead it do.