Political behavior, perceived similarity to the candidates, and defensiveness: The curious case of a group of first-time voters in a bellwether-swing-state in 2016

ABSTRACT

Using a sample of 258 first-time voters in a bellwether swing state during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, we examined the extent to which people assumed that the major presidential candidates shared their values and defensiveness about these assumptions. Participants estimated their agreement with the two major-party candidates, completed an online quiz about their beliefs, and then received feedback about their actual agreement with the candidates. Consistent with hypotheses, Trump supporters overestimated their agreement with Trump and underestimated their agreement with Clinton on political issues. To the extent that they did so, they showed greater negative affective and defensive reactions to feedback. On the other hand, Clinton supporters unexpectedly underestimated their agreement with Clinton and only slightly underestimated their agreement with Trump. Also surprisingly, Clinton Supporters were largely unmoved learning that they misestimated their agreement with Clinton.

KEYWORDS:

• Political projection
• perceived similarity
• defensiveness
• self
• 2016 election

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here

Notes

1. Overall, 315 people participated in portions of the broader study, here we restrict the report to the students who completed the primary measures.

2. Only 4 participants completed the study on November 8 and all data was collected prior to the polls closing locally.

3. 7pm is the time when the local voting polls closed.

4. As an aside, whether someone was a latecomer to Clinton support did not significantly moderate the effects presented here. However, we chose not to report those analyses because they are quite underpowered, with only 54 participants who were Clinton supporters during the I Side With portion of the study who were also present at the first time point and responded to all regression-relevant measures. Such an analysis also ignores the fact that Clinton was already the presidential candidate at the outset of the study and that many of her supporters might have already come reluctantly after their favored democratic candidate was not nominated.

5. Barring the creation of time travel.