But I wanted to highlight this research in part because I think it speaks to the political moment we are in, and the study’s findings fit well with other recent research on political polarization. I suspect that some of these results just show Americans’ innumeracy - most blacks are Democratic-leaning, but most Democratic voters are not black. You might say, “This is just one study.” And it is.

In short, “the parties in our heads,” as Ahler and Sood write, are not the parties in real life. People also overstated the numbers of these stereotypical groups within their own party - Democrats thought 29 percent of their fellow Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual - but they weren’t off by as much as members of the other party. Democrats estimated that 44 percent of Republicans make more than $250,000 a year. Republicans thought 38 percent of Democrats were gay, lesbian or bisexual, while the actual number was about 6 percent. How the parties see each otherīased on polling from March 2015 How many Democrats are …Īhler and Sood confirmed the 44 percent across Republican categories estimated by Democrats.īlacks made up about a quarter of the Democratic Party, but Republicans estimated the share at 46 percent. What they found was that Americans overall are fairly misinformed about who is in each major party - and that members of each party are even more misinformed about who is in the other party. For example, what percentage of Democrats are black, or lesbian, gay or bisexual? What percentage of Republicans earn more than $250,000 a year, or are age 65 or older?

They had the polling firm YouGov ask American adults to estimate the size of groups in each party. A Pew Research Center poll from last year found that about 40 percent of both Democrats and Republicans belong to their party because they oppose the other party’s values, rather than because they are particularly aligned with their own party.īut what if Americans’ views of the parties, particularly whichever one they don’t belong to, are, well, kind of wrong? That’s the argument of a study by scholars Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood that was recently published in The Journal of Politics. This partisan divide is such a big part of people’s political identities, in fact, that it’s reinforced simply by “ negative partisanship,” or loyalty to a party because you don’t like the other party.

My secret identity worth watching