Andrew Gelman and pals have a new paper out that looks at one aspect of partisan polarization: perceptions of the opposite party vs. reality. What they found shouldn't surprise anyone. In a nutshell, Democrats think Republicans are more conservative than they really are, and Republicans think Democrats are more liberal than they really are. Here's a sampling:
On access to birth control, for example, there's actually only a small difference between Ds and Rs (blue bar). However, the perception of difference is huge (beige bar).
Most likely this is the fault of two things: (a) the media, and (b) thought leaders being more extreme than ordinary voters. If you watch Fox or MSNBC, all you see is the most extreme members of the opposite party, and those people tend to be politicians and professional pundits with militant views. Naturally you come away thinking that the opposite party is completely nuts.
This is the main factor behind the growth in affective polarization that I mentioned a few days ago. Half the population hates the opposite party compared to only a quarter before Newt Gingrich and Fox News came on the scene. Both Gingrich and Fox focused mostly on demonizing liberals, and eventually outlets like MSNBC started doing the same in the opposite direction. So now we're convinced that our opposites are entirely evil even though that's mostly true only among the fringiest of them. Our friends and neighbors are often not nearly as distant from our own views as we think.
Minor differences - Hmmmm.
Then I'm guessing that the typical RepubliQan has no idea who they are voting for? They have no idea that Trump is a serial liar, a serial tax cheat, a serial wife cheater and basically a criminal? The typical RepubliQan doesn't actually support gutting food stamps, pushing abortion, abortion, abortion? They don't actually want to ruin public education & the Post Office, kill labor unions, gut child labor laws, etc.
I might buy this argument if I didn't watch RepubliQans line up behind Trump. I might buy it if I didn't watch RepubliQans get re-elected while pledging to ruin the ACA and gut healthcare for 30,000,000 people. I have watched RepubliQans pledge to gut the social safety net - and get re-elected.
I'll have to forget what I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears - not likely to happen.
Who has Q-Anon views?
23% of Republicans
13% of Independents
7% of Democrats
>> 23% of Republicans<<
A basket of deplorables.
This is the first time I've been really disappointed with Kevin. MSNBC is in NO way a mirror image of Fox News. There is virtually ZERO boosting of far-left radicalism on MSNBC, and I see very little exaggeration of political realities (except perhaps too much spinning to make things seem better than they are). Fox, on the other hand, is for the most part devoted to demonizing Democrats, promoting falsehoods, and boosting trump.
Agreed. This is the worst kind of "both-siderism". A quarter of people on the right say violence might be necessary to fix the country's problems. Nothing like that on the left. While I agree with Kevin that 1994 was the beginning of our current problems he is wrong about the extreme left and right are mirror images of each other. Disappointed doesn't even begin to cover my feelings in regard to his claims.
The problem isn't only that Kevin is "both-sidesing" this issue. It's that his both-siderism doesn't even make sense. He seems to be suggesting that conservatives misapprehend what liberals think because those conservatives are...watching MSNBC?
In fact, what's actually happening is conservatives are watching Fox News, which then completely mischaracterizes liberal positions on issues so as to make them look extreme. Kevin seems to be leaning toward that explanation by the end of his post, but it's really not entirely clear.
Beyond this, I'm not really sure how valuable this study is other than showing the illogic of the average conservative voter. As Solarpup says below, the fact that their "actual" beliefs might not be as extreme as their liberal friends "perceive" their beliefs to be doesn't really matter if the people conservatives consistently vote for -- that is, the people who actually make and carry out policies -- *do* have extreme beliefs. I mean, if you support abortion rights (or progressive taxation, or strengthening entitlements, or reigning in corporations, etc.), why would you keep voting for people who don't? We just saw the results of a referendum in Ohio where abortion won overwhelmingly. Yet Republican electeds in the state are talking about simply disregarding the results. Will this cause a backlash among the many conservative voters who voted to protect abortion rights? I highly doubt it.
I watch MSNBC often and they have repeatedly pointed out that polls show a solid majority of Americans agree with standard Democratic positions. I am also a natural skeptic (my parents told me I never believed in Santa Claus as far as they could tell) so if someone on MSNBC makes a claim that sounds off I always fact check. I find that most of the time the reporting is fair.
I have a feeling Kevin doesn’t really watch MSNBC.
You don't have to watch MSNBC or Fox News to know what they are saying. They both show clips from the other's shows, often to point out how looney the other side's views are. (Or at least the views of a specific guest, which they then try to conflate to be emblematic of the whole party.)
I think you're making the same point as I am. If you watch Fox News play out-of-context clips from MSNBC shows, you're going to get a skewed view of what "liberals" believe.
While it's probably true that liberals will get a skewed picture of conservative beliefs from watching MSNBC, I don't think the disconnect is nearly as great.
But, again, this whole debate is strange. The original study suggests that average conservatives and liberals basically have the same views of income taxation, for example. I take this to mean that both your average conservative and your average liberal both support progressive taxation of income. Yet the entire Republican Party is devoted to implementing policies that are the exact opposite of what their voters ostensibly prefer.
And this doesn't work the same in the opposite direction. Take guns, for example (a policy that, I'll note, is glaringly absent from Kevin's chart). Conservatives perceive the average liberal voter as wanting to "take away" all guns. Yet there is not a single liberal politician of any stature arguing for such a policy. In fact, most liberal politicians go out of their way NOT to offend conservative gun nuts by advocating for small incremental changes and half-measures. The source of conservatives' misperception that liberals are "coming for their guns" is left up to the reader.
My neighbors are Republican. I know they're not anywhere near MAGA. But our Republican representatives are, and that's what counts.
I voted for Claire McCaskill, they voted for Josh Hawley. They are actually very nice neighbors, and we get along with them quite well. They are genuinely nice people, who look out for their neighbors. But they voted for an evil scumbag, I did not.
And even on the "fringe" of both sides, it's just not the same. I disagree with a lot of the strategies and tactics of the far left. But at the end of the day, I think the goals of an AOC are pretty straightforward and laudable: she'd like everyone to have a basic level of health care, a full time job pay sufficiently to support a minimum reasonable lifestyle, and the police to remember the "protect and serve" part of their oath. I disagree with some of the strategies she has for achieving those goals (this country is never going to adopt Universal, government run health care in my lifetime), but the goals are reasonable.
I can't say the same for the far right. And again, I know that Josh Hawley truly doesn't represent all the beliefs of my neighbors, but that's who they voted for, and that's who we got.
Agree. Tribalism is at least as important as the media (Fox primarily), and unhinged MAGA thought leaders.
Just a couple of days ago I had a great discussion with a very nice woman who lives near me. At least it was great until she told me that the police in St. Louis where she used to live couldn’t arrest speeders because of George Soros getting a black prosecutor put in power.
I don’t know any Democrats who believe in that kind insane claim.
Also I have relatives that are otherwise sane who believe that Hillary and Bill Clinton have had scores of people murdered. No Democrat I know has ever claimed anything like that about Trump.
I can vouch for the fact that the police in St. Louis do nothing about bad driving -- speeding, running red lights, left turns from right turn lanes, right turns from left turn lanes, etc., etc., have all become incredibly common post-pandemic. But the lack of enforcement has nothing to do with George Soros or our prosecutor. We just don't have enough police for traffic enforcement, period. They've got their hands full with other crime, so traffic enforcement is down the list.
Combine that with the Libertarian streak here -- traffic cameras have been disallowed, since you always have the right to confront your accuser, and you can't put a camera on the witness stand.
Personally, I am big supporter of traffic cameras, *if* you make them big & obvious & you put signs everywhere pointing them out. I.e., make them about safety, not revenue generation. (The latter is also a big worry in St. Louis. The lower income minority communities are partly against them because they have no faith that they wouldn't be targeted at their neighborhoods.)
It's not the Republicans so much as the people they vote into office. The far right branch of the party has outsized influence during the primaries. There are a lot of wealthy extremists who have the resources to ensure a good primary turn out for any extreme candidate, and they have no qualms about eliminating any more moderate Republican who crosses them.
This is rather obvious from interviews with more moderate Republican House members terrified of crossing the extreme wing of the party during the ongoing budget negotiations. They know that they will voted out in the next primary if they don't go along with the disaster. It's no secret.
This is why we are seeing pro-labor and pro-abortion measures as ballot initiatives in red states. The lawmakers are far to the right of even most of the people who voted for them. Why don't they just vote for moderate Democrats? Ask Fox News.
Regardless of where opinions lie, you're supposed to watch what they do, not what they say.
As such, I'm not understanding how the move to ban contraception, birth control, and abortions should not be interpreted as the GOP's embrace of maximalist positions. And the only way to protect these rights is to codify them.
The same goes for LGBTQ+ rights -- you either have them or you don't. All I see are GOP acts to curtail LGBTQ+ rights until they have eliminated all of them, or until these rights are explicitly codified.
"So now we're convinced that our opposites are entirely evil even though that's mostly true only among the fringiest of them"
Like the
*checks notes*
Speaker of the House. Even if 55% of Ohio voters explicitly support legal access to abortion, 62% of them elected a Governor who explicitly wants to outlaw it and 53% for a President who appointed half of the Supreme Court Justices that overturned Roe and Casey. I care far less about the overall views of the average Republican electorate and far more about the views of the people they empower to outlaw my existence
This is an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence.
And that evidence should be founded, for rank-and-file voters of each party, for who they vote for, and for elected representatives of both parties, what policies they enact.
You are what you do. The distance between both parties must be based on what they're trying to enact into policy and who they are voting for to enact that policy, not on some hazy "what they say is in their hearts" metric.
Have there been any serious attempts to restrict (or even ban) contraception, as distinct from abortion?
Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.
Screw the data. If suffering is increased by even small differences of positions and ideologies, there is an OCEAN to cross.
👍👍👍👍👍
Kevin seems to be confusing the views of people who (say they) vote for a party with the policy positions of the party itself. For example, the Republican Party denies there can be such a thing as gay mariage. The Democratic Party recognises it. Trying to reflect such diametrically opposed positions on a bar chart is an exercise in futility that serves only to blur reality.
First of all, it was pretty recently that virtually every democrat denied there can be such a thing as gay marriage. But, if you're talking about present day, the majority of republicans support gay marriage. So not sure what you are basing your statement on.
Talk to the Speaker of the House.
About three quarters of Republicans in both chambers voted against the Respect for Marriage Act earlier this year.
Polarization is a result of deliberate Republican strategy. How can they get lower-income voters to vote for the politicians who will pass economic measures that are to their detriment? They do this by dividing voters on race and religion - Republicans stand for White Christian Supremacy. Republicans have been doing this for over fifty years and commercialization is part of it. Republican changed the media rules to allow Fox News and right-wing talk radio. Of course the basic tribal instincts can be exploited for profit as well as political advancement.
Liberal activists have responded in kind, also placing more emphasis on cultural rather than economic matters. The big "liberal" media are corporate-friendly and are glad to do horse-race and culture-war reporting rather than give coverage to left-leaning economics. The media puffed up the reputation of Trump as real-estate dealer and then as a strong leader in a reality show.
Any exaggerations in the perceptions of the opposite side are results of the polarization, not causes of it. When tribalism is really activated, as in war, everything the other side does is bad and everything your side does is good. This kind of polarization usually involves elevation of some leader perceived as quasi-superhuman. In the past this usually required a considerable amount of political acumen, but modern media of various kinds can elevate all sorts of people to stardom.
Most people who vote for Republicans are very friendly, nice, amiable good neighbor types who will wave cheerily while you're being dragged off to the gas chamber, and might have called the secret police themselves.
That's why you see those bars that are closest together, abortion and assistance to the poor. The two things that most directly alleviate physical suffering and which they think they will never experience and that maximize suffering for people they would never think about --because we've all gotta die sometime.
If I'm reading the Fig. 1 at the bottom of the linked post correctly, Republicans largely have a much more accurate view of Democrats than Democrats have of Republicans. If that's right, your both-sides interpretations are clearly wrong. So what would make D citizens think R citizens have more extreme views than they do, while R citizens largely have accurate views of D citizens? You won't get me to believe that MSNBC has been more effective at misrepresenting Rs than Fox News has been at misrepresenting Ds. So that leaves thought leaders: Rs elevate and elect thought leaders that are much more radical than they are, while Ds largely elevate and elect thought leaders that are more in-line with their views.
I think that the gulf between Republican politicians and voters really is quite large. Haven't studies been done for ages showing that voters prefer the platform of the Democrats, but don't vote for it when the election happens? It's all about "vibes," or whatever. Republicans are self-sufficent, patriotic, and manly, after all! And, ultimately, voters just don't believe that someone could really believe the things that Republican politicians call for. And perhaps they are right. Republican politicians are awful quick to change their beliefs when it hits close to home: a gay son, a wife who needs an abortion to protect her life, a government-funded nursing home for mom, residential treatment for their drug-addicted child instead of prison.
I think what that chart is saying is that in the top half, where opinions are more similar, Democrats have greater misperception of actual Republican opinion, but in the bottom half, where opinion is more distinct, the perceptions of the other party's view is more accurate.
It seems to mean, if that's the right way of looking at it, that Republicans pay more attention to less divisive issues where Democrats have less motivated interest, while Democrats are focused on the things that cause more obvious harm.
But I'm stumped by what the third column means.
As I mentioned elsewhere, I have opposed Republican policies for a long time and “hated” Republican candidates. But I’ve had friends and been friendly with Republican co-workers and family members. And when we talked politics it was without rancor.
But this is different. If someone has seen what’s been going on since Trump was first elected and will still vote for him I cannot be friends or friendly with that person. They are scum.
For crissakes even Liz Cheney, the person who most exemplified an evil Republican to me can see it. A vote for Trump is a vote to kill America.
I grinned when I saw people like you suddenly flip and gush over what a "reasonable and sensible" person Liz Cheney was.
Stupid reply.
There isn't gushing in iamr4man's message.
On average, Democrats did. Not always gush - many swooned.
I would never in a dozen lifetimes vote for Liz Cheney for any office, not even dog catcher. Nonetheless, when she stood up to Trump I cheered, as did most D's. We can recognize a lesser evil when we see it.
But is that what swooning is? No. I don't think that word means what you think it means.
And I shook my head in disbelief when I saw Trump supporters call her a RINO. Amazing the lower depths Trump has taken the Republican Party.
Yes. I'm a repoublican and totally agree with you.
A question:
What if the people in question actually haven't "seen what’s been going on since Trump was first elected?"
If they watch Fox, they aren't exposed to the kinds of things you likely have in mind. This is a gigantic problem with the way our news culture is currently organized.
"If they watch Fox, they aren't exposed to the kinds of things you likely have in mind."
They are exposed to them in various ways, but they mentally, and sometime physically, block all these various ways.
An example:
Almost surely, Trump's comment about the vermin won't be discussed on Fox.
But he’s saying it to them directly now, isn’t he? In the past, when stuff like “suckers and losers” came out he could deny it, talk about our “great veterans” and hug the flag and his supporters could think that stuff was “fake news”. But he and his people saying the quiet parts out loud. Hard to believe anyone paying even the mildest attention would fail to see it. I expect Fox to report it as a virtue.
I come from east Tennessee, which once was the home of Howard Baker moderate Republicans. (People tend to forget that not long ago we were a real swing state.) There are still a good many here, and I'll even cut them some slack for voting for Trump the first time. But anybody still supporting him is beyond my ability to tolerate. And there's way too many of them.
I also live in a blue city in a red county and it's not hard to see which party is more fringy. Hint: it's not the ones in blue.
Oak Ridge? I grew up there, and I have a FIL and SIL who still live there.
Kevin, you're giving me whiplash. One moment you're posting a Trump tweet that is best compared to something Hitler said and now you're telling me that most Republicans aren't as extreme as Dems think.
But those Republicans support Trump, by a country mile. If most Republicans are willing to support someone who is a hair's breadth from fascist, I think they are probably as extreme as I think they are.
Perhaps the moral of this story is it ain't the Republicans, it's the Republican primary voters.
Big assumption in this research is that what people say about themselves in a survey is their true self.
Its certainly possible that this is wrong for many people.
If I tell a survey that I dont support internment camps for foreigners, but I enthusiastically support people that do....what is my true self?
Is the media to blame for this? Thought leaders?
+100. I once reviewed the questions on one of those sites pushing the idea that we misunderstand the "actual" views of the other side. Very, very mushy questions. As others have pointed out, the electoral result of the opinions of "conservatives" is plenty extreme, and, realistically, represents what they actually believe better than how they answer vague poll questions.
After the primary it's a binary decision. There are very few people that agree with every single stance and opinion of either of the candidates.
You really think that the parties are in the same position on birth control? There are exactly ZERO Democrats with any influence who want to make birth control illegal, yet GOP states have pushed to ban the morning after pill that is contraception, want to ban the right of teenagers to get prescribed birth control without parental notification, and continue to push "abstinence only" education that bars discussion of birth control.
And MSNBC has former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough leading their day, and former right wing radio host Charlie Sykes as a regular guest. FOX News fires conservatives for not toeing the MAGA line.
Rep. Mike Lawler, R-NY and a moderate, was on MSNBC this morning! Elise Jordan was a speechwriter for Condoleezza Rice and is a daily part of Morning Joe. Chris Christie practically lives on MSNBC.
The idea that only crazy right wing MAGAs are shown on MSNBC is ridiculous.
Kevin, wasn't it just a couple days ago that you were comparing Donald Trump to Hitler? In light of the things Trump has been saying lately, that comparison is totally fair.
As long as Trump remains the leader of the R Party, we really are oceans apart from them.
so republicans in ohio didn't actually force an impregnated 10 year old to leave the state for an abortion?
and todd rokita, the indiana republican AG, didn't actually attack the doctor who performed the procedure?
and texas didn't actually pass a $10k bounty law, which the republican scotus allowed to be enforced?
and red states don't actually dictate which kid can use which bathroom?
or try to punish drag queens for sexualized displays when every american beach is covered with nearly naked bodies?
or defend towering bronze monuments to men who raped children and sold their mothers as livestock?
guess i just don't understand the meaning of 'extremism'
As far as I can see the paper only shows data for the whole population in an attempt to soothe bad feelings bout polarization. A serious analysis would have to analyze the perception of Ds and Rs separately, wouldn't they?
Secondly for the "real" position of a party they use the opinions of the "foot soldiers" that are part of their test group. What would be far more telling is the difference between perception and reality as it concerns elected officials, i.e. the people who are actually in a position to influence policy. My guess is that people would have far more correct ideas about the positions of congress critters and senators than about the position of random anonymous partisans. E.G on abortion elected Rs are 100% anti-abortion* while "foot solders" quite obviously are not.
* Why? Because you can't win as R if your are pro choice.
"So now we're convinced that our opposites are entirely evil even though that's mostly true only among the fringiest of them."
The problem I have with that is that the Republicans elect the fringiest of their ranks to public office (Trump, Mike Johnson, Comer, Jordan, MTG, Gaetz, etc. etc.) but where are the equivalent Democratic officials? Bernie Sanders? Weak tea.
When the Republicans needed a left wing bogeyman to attack after 9/11, to take the heat off Bush and deflect from any public discussion of his failures, they had to dig deep to find Ward Churchill because actual elected officials from the Democratic Party came together and supported Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq and refrained from attacking him on any grounds. Now there is no reason for a Ward Churchill. The Republicans just lie and attack Democrats as hard core Communists when they are barely to the left of Saint Ronnie and probably to the right of Eisenhower Republicans. There is no fringe in the Democratic Party