July 30, 2026, Seward Folly by John Fraser

A new national study from the Pew Research Center and the Pew-Knight Initiative, released last Thursday, July 16, 2026, offers something genuinely useful for anyone organizing, volunteering, or trying to get folks involved in community programs. Pew has a working map of the different ways people participate in public life. “How Americans Are Engaged With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life” sorts U.S. adults into four groups based on 19 measures spanning politics, civic involvement, religious attendance and news habits like reading the Seward Folly. The value for local organizers is not the national percentages themselves, but the underlying insights. Pew reports that people engage with their community through genuinely different, equally legitimate pathways. Knowing which pathway your neighbors favor can help people looking for support to be more empathetic as they navigate polarization in the coming election season or finding folks to help out with the much-needed volunteerism throughout Seward’s winter.

Pew’s smallest group, “Mobilizers,” are the neighbors who volunteer for political campaigns, attend public meetings, and contact elected officials. “Connectors,” the largest engaged group they identified and representing 28% of all Americans, are the backbone of community life. Connectors vote, join groups, attend religious services, and give generously to nonpolitical causes, but they are not drawn to politics itself. In fact, Connectors are turned off if someone expects their volunteerism to translate into political advocacy on any topic. “Spectators” follow the news closely and talk about it, often privately, without necessarily attending meetings or events. “Outsiders” participate less across the board, but even this group is far from checked out: 41% voted in 2024 and nearly a quarter attend religious services monthly.

One of the study’s more reassuring findings, according to lead author Elisa Shearer, is how ordinary the most and least engaged groups look demographically. What the Pew study highlights, she said in an interview, is that “Mobilizers and outsiders look like the rest of the population. It’s not about income or age, it’s just a way of being.”

In other words, the quietest neighbor on your street and the one who shows up to every city council meeting cannot be sorted by wealth or generation. They are hard-wired to participate differently.

Seward may already be a Connector town, and Shearer’s own data backs the idea. In conversation, this reporter hypothesized that Seward likely has a higher share of Connectors than the national average, since local residents seem more willing to attend public meetings, contact officials, and organize around local social issues than to engage in state or national politics. Shearer responded by suggesting that the pattern fits the profile precisely: “Connectors [are] doing all of these things that would seem to suggest political involvement, but they are less interested in politics and less vocal about politics. Connectors aren’t putting bumper stickers or campaigning, but they are voting at a higher rate.” That description tracks closely with what many Seward residents will recognize in their neighbors: people who show up, give generously and vote reliably, without necessarily flying a partisan flag.

Two independent data sources support the idea that Alaskans, and by extension Seward residents, lean into this Connector pattern. AmeriCorps’ Civic Engagement and Volunteering study based on Census Bureau data, shows Alaskans attending public meetings, contacting public officials, and taking action with neighbors to improve their communities at higher rates than the U.S. population as a whole. Shearer said that dataset, along with Alaska’s high overall volunteering rate, helped validate her team’s national findings, as it did this reporter’s work measuring how much higher volunteerism (83%) and donating to local social good organizations (90%) that we documented in Seward’s Gross National Happiness in 2025. Those results found that roughly one in ten year-round residents from Moose Pass to Lowell Point prioritizes wellbeing and community connection over traditional economic measures. Which means here in Alaska, we likely have a lot more connectors and fewer spectators or outsiders than the rest of the country.

Even the least politically engaged Alaskans are still voting. Shearer’s broader takeaway from the national data applies just as well locally: “In national and local politics, you have a large engaged group that votes. Forty percent of the spectators in their study report that they are voting.”

For a community organizer, that is worth remembering. A neighbor who never comments online or attends a meeting may still be casting a ballot every cycle, quietly doing their part. And Alaska has many more undeclared voters than voters for either party. But it won’t be that obvious which way folks are leaning until election day.

Religious practice offers another nuance that’s an indicator of how Seward’s civic participation might be different when compared to other folks in rural Alaska. Pew’s national data shows Connectors attending religious services at high rates, 43% at least monthly, similar to Mobilizers. But Alaska bucks that pattern statewide. The state ranks 35th out of 50 in overall religiousness and 43rd out of 50 for monthly religious attendance, according to Pew’s state-by-state religiosity data, a trend one of Ms. Shearer’s Pew colleagues, Chip Rotolo, recently described as part of a longer-term decline in Alaskan religiosity that mirrors national trends (our colleagues at the Juneau Independent wrote about this a few months ago. That suggests Seward’s likely Connectors may be showing up through the many secular community institutions that support social good programming, like the SeaLife Center, our fire departments in town and Bear Lake, helping support large number of different community-wide sports and recreation programs, and the tribal programming put on by the Qutekcak Native Tribe, or the Chugach Regional Resource Commission, rather than through their congregations.

A caveat worth taking seriously if you read the Pew Report. Shearer was candid about the limits of applying her national findings to Southeastern Kenai. “Both surveys used in this report focus on our ATP national data, which is considered nationally representative and not designed to be state representative,” she said. “To speak to the state, we would want 300 or 400 in the Alaska sample, but in this case, 0.2%, or 9 people from Alaska, completed this survey.” Alaska’s population is roughly 0.22% of the U.S. total, so the state’s representation in the sample is proportionate, but nine respondents cannot support state-level conclusions on their own. Shearer noted the survey did gather American Indian and Alaska Native respondents (127 nationally) and used weighting to ensure inclusive reporting, but she was clear that any Alaska-specific claim, including the Connector hypothesis discussed above, is an informed inference drawn by comparing several independent local and state data sources, not a direct finding from the Pew survey itself. And that is just what we did in writing this report.

Well-built national studies like this report help all of us think as a community about who is showing up, why they show up sometimes and not others, and what we might ask to get them involved. And like any good reading of these types of national media, it helps to cross-check against Seward’s local studies and what we feel in our guts, to interpret what you’re reading and how it might help all of our social good organizations find the right volunteers, and to understand why so few folks are out talking about our local and state decision-making in the coming election.

John Fraser is a psychologist, architect, an independent reporter for the Seward Folly, and Vice President of NZP4H, the publisher of the Homer Independent Press.

Read more here:

How Americans Engage With News, Politics, Religion and Civic Life | Pew Research Center