the power of groupthink

Each presidential-election year the ANES asks voters to place themselves on a spectrum with “many more services” on the left to “reduce spending a lot” on the right, and then to place the two main political parties somewhere on that spectrum. About 15% decline, or say they have not thought about it. The same number, more or less, will place themselves but cannot place the parties, meaning that 30% of the electorate does not have a good sense of where Republicans and Democrats stand on the most fundamental question about the role of the state.

Of those who do answer, quite a few have a weak grasp of the parties’ governing philosophies. After the election, defeated Democrats spent some time fretting over the 80,000 votes they lost in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, handing Mr Trump a win in the electoral college. They wondered whether the FBI’s late intervention on Mrs Clinton’s e-mails swung the election. But a far larger number of voters did not really know what either party stood for. The ANES also asks voters whether the Republicans or Democrats are more conservative, and found that some 15% of Trump voters thought the Democrats were the more conservative party (as did 6% of Clinton voters). Add in the don’t knows, and 16% of Clinton voters and 24% of Trump voters were not sure which party was more conservative.

LOL

read more https://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21724115-observers-donald-...