- Post-election survey identifies stark "perception gaps" between how Republicans and Democrats are seen — and how they see themselves.
- These wide disparities in perception likely influenced the election result and may have proven decisive — especially the pervasive belief that Democrats cared more about sexual politics than they did about inflation and immigration.
- Narrowing these perception gaps requires more than "one-off" positive experiences with one's political opposite. Longer-term relationships that span ideological divides seem crucial in that regard, such as those often taking place in religious congregations across the nation.
Most Americans can be pretty confident when it comes to grasping how their political opposite thinks. But that confidence is probably misplaced. A new survey of more than 5,000 voters conducted the week after the U.S. election found remarkable disparities between the actual beliefs of Democrats and Republicans compared with the perceptions others held about them.
More in Common has been working to understand the “forces driving us apart” ever since British politician Jo Cox was murdered by a man angry at her political views — yelling “Britain first” right before stabbing her. In Cox’s first speech before the British Parliament one year earlier, she said, “We have far more in common than that which divides us.”
Yet even “substantive commonality across lines of division” can easily get “obscured,” says Stephen Hawkins, More in Common’s director of research. This is especially true within media and political ecosystems often incentivized to divide (more outrage equals more attention, which equals more money/power).
“There needs to be a concerted effort to reorient the public towards the reality that we are actually in,” argues Hawkins, “as opposed to the reality that is often portrayed and constructed because of those incentives.”
That helps explain why More in Common has focused so much on understanding what they call “perception gaps,” which they define as “the disparities between what Democrats and Republicans imagine the other side to believe and what that side actually believes.”
Here are four standout examples from their post-election survey:
1. ‘Democrats don’t care about inflation as much as I do’
Americans of both parties saw inflation as their top concern, the report emphasizes. That included men and women of all racial backgrounds, generations, geographic regions, classes and political parties. Yet they often perceived this issue as a higher priority for Republicans than Democrats — ranking inflation and economy as the sixth and ninth top priorities for Democrats.
As has been pointed out by many observers in recent weeks, this alone may be the most parsimonious explanation for the election’s outcome.
2. ‘Democrats care more about sexual politics than almost anything else’
So, what do American think Democrats care about more than economic issues? In addition to abortion (first perceived priority), this survey suggests many Americans believed Democrats’ other top priority was LGBT/transgender policies. Yet in this survey of what Democrats said they actually cared about most, sexual and gender minorities came 14th on the list. This misperception, which Hawkins says was the largest “perception gap” they found, was also held widely, including among key demographics such as Gen Zers, Hispanics and women.
Opens in new windowAmong other things, this suggests that parties’ ideological wings are disproportionately influencing public perceptions, according to More in Common researchers. In this case, Americans appear to have “conflated” Democratic priorities generally with those of the most liberal group of activists, whose top priorities (abortion, climate change, health care, inequality, inflation and LGBT/transgender policies) mirror closely how Americans perceive Democrats more broadly.
Opens in new windowThese are not incidental and secondary misperceptions. “Among the late deciders who voted for Trump,” Hawkins tells Deseret News, “46% of them said they thought that LGBTQ issues were a top priority for Democrats. Only 13% said that they thought inflation was a top priority.”
3. ‘Republicans worried about immigration are driven by deep-seated hostility’
Parallel to the widespread concern around inflation, there’s also more consensus around immigration in America than is sometimes assumed — with 70% of respondents in this survey seeing the U.S./Mexican border as either a major or emergency-level problem.
Opens in new windowThis is another place that popular opinion is being overly shaped by the ideological wing of a party, these researchers suggest, with most Americans overestimating how much Republicans are focused on immigration (due perhaps to how the strongest, most vocal conservatives feel about it).
In the other direction, conservatives tend to think Democrats support open borders more than they do — although this misperception has faded in recent years, as Republican perceptions have gotten more accurate since 2019. At the same time, Democrat perceptions of Republicans on this issue have grown less accurate over time, as illustrated below.
Opens in new windowThe level of concern documented in this survey, the More in Common team points out, is about “America being in control of immigration, rather than an anti-immigration sentiment.” Consistently, they point out that a “clear majority of Americans (58%) support the U.S. accepting refugees as well as orderly pathways for immigration into the U.S. — including significant numbers of Republicans.” Furthermore, 88% of Republicans surveyed here believe that “properly controlled immigration can be good for America.”
4. ‘Those people just don’t love America like I do’
It’s especially striking how much people within both parties underappreciate the extent of common ground available when it comes to American identity. On one hand, Republicans underestimate Democrats’ pride in being American “massively,” the researchers observe, while Democrats “greatly” underestimate Republicans’ willingness to recognize the country’s weaknesses.
Opens in new windowThis is only a subset of the American “perception gaps” that have been identified — with a number of others showing up in their previous 2019 survey. That includes:
- Republicans severely overestimate how many Democrats believe that “most police are bad people,” as Hawkins and Daniel Yudkin wrote in the Atlantic recently.
- Democrats overstate how many Republicans really deny that “racism is still a problem in America.”
- Democrats wildly overestimate how many Republicans want to “gloss over” examples of racism, slavery, segregation, internment camps, etc., in our history, Hawkins says, and instead “just teach American exceptionalism.” Democrats thought only a third of Republicans want to teach the history of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks as being exceptional leaders in our country, whereas 93% of Republicans actually do.
- In the other direction, Hawkins notes that Republicans think that Democrats only want to teach about uglier elements of history, and don’t want to teach about the Bill of Rights or the American founding. The reality, confirmed by their survey data, is that Americans are “on the whole very sensible about teaching an American history that is true to the facts, and that teaches the ugliness along with the exceptional parts of our history.”
It’s this “fracturing of our societies” into mutually hostile, antithetical worldviews that continues to motivate their own investigations, Hawkins tells the Deseret News — describing their growing concern at witnessing a “kind of despair” and “cynicism setting in” on a global level. They believe these hardening misunderstandings are playing a meaningful role in our escalating national estrangement and political volatility.
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Opens in new windowClosing the perception gaps
So, how do these perception gaps actually close? Hawkins points to the unique impact of “sympathetic outgroup exemplars” — a fancy way to describe especially kind and decent folks who happen to be voicing a perspective we’re skeptical of. In experiments they’ve done where citizens are exposed to someone thoughtful on the other side, these researchers found measurable “humanizing” effects on how warmly someone came away feeling toward their political opposite.
But that only lasted a “couple of days.” Rather than relying on a “one-off” experience like this to soften hearts, Hawkins says that a more enduring correction of perceptions requires a “full community intervention.”
In other words, you need something more than just “meeting a decent liberal once” if you’re a strong conservative — or “running into a nice enough conservative person” if you’re a strong liberal. People need opportunities to be in more sustained relationships with ideologically diverse men and women — the kind that provide regular positive experiences helping them see each other accurately.
This starts to sound a lot like the kind of religious congregations that University of Arkansas professor Rebecca Glazier wrote about earlier this summer — suggesting they “may be one of the few places left where people incidentally encounter those who hold different political views — essentially forcing them into contact with people from the other party and giving them the opportunity to really see them as people, instead of just political opponents.”
It would help, of course, not to be constantly taking into our minds selectively curated media streams that showcase our political opposites at their worst — e.g., every insult, crime and moral incongruity of liberals (or conservatives) paraded before us in unending news updates, all of which effectively portrays the other party as cartoonishly hypocritical at best, and outright diabolical at worst.
However enthralled many Americans can be with hyper-partisan news media, there’s evidence they’re hungry for something better. For instance, two-thirds of Americans (66%) in this same survey wish the media reported more about connecting across differences.
Opens in new windowIf you’re curious about whether you have a perception gap of your own, More in Common offers a three-minute quiz to test how your personal views of Democrats and Republicans stack up against reality. Even though I tend to be more optimistic when it comes to the goodness of humanity, I was surprised at how consistently my own perceptions underestimated the generosity and thoughtfulness of my fellow countrymen and women (right in line with the exaggerated harshness documented in these surveys).
This is exactly what More in Common hopes to address — “disabusing people of false understanding of the degree of division in their societies,” Hawkins tells me, so that such hyper-polarization doesn’t leave us vulnerable to even more danger in the future.