Happy(?) election day!
As you may have noticed, our country has been gripped by intense political polarization for quite some time. According to a recent study in Political Behavior, on the other side of the polarization coin is wishful thinking—the belief that your party will emerge victorious—and the two phenomena are related.
“As I read about wishful thinking, I realized there’s a flip side when it comes to politics,” study author Seth Warner of the University of Connecticut explained in a statement. “If you’re a Democrat, you want Democrats to win. If you’re a Republican, you want Republicans to win. But today, it’s just as likely that if you’re a Democrat, you don’t want Republicans to win. If you’re a Republican, you don’t want Democrats to win. There’s a negative valence to wishful thinking that to this point hasn’t been explored.”
Read more: “Envy at the Ballot Box”
To explore it, Warner took a deep dive into partisan voters’ expectations for who would prevail in elections from 1952 through 2024. He found that the percentage of partisan voters expecting their party or candidate to win steadily ratcheted up during this period. “The percentage of voters with hopeful expectations spiked in 2012 and sits as high as 90 percent today,” he wrote. In 1952, for example, only 60 percent of voters thought their preferred presidential candidate would land in the White House. By 2024 that number climbed above 80 percent.
According to Warner, this wishful thinking is fueled by two aspects of polarization: the increase in the number of people voting solely for their party’s candidates and the negative feelings they have toward members of the opposing party.
Of course, this can cause some real problems in a two-party democracy where one side’s high hopes are dashed to bits around half the time. To find out what impact wishful thinking might have on polarization, Warner consulted interviews with the same group of voters from a period punctuated by acute electoral whiplash: the 2016, 2020, and 2024 elections. He found that the greater the expectations voters had during one election, the greater the animosity they felt toward the opposing party in the next election.
In other words, these great expectations seem to be mediating polarization. Previous research has suggested that election losses can turn down the heat on political polarization, but Warner’s findings indicate that wishful thinking plays an intervening role, protecting partisan priors from the cruel sting of reality.
There was a slight difference between Republicans and Democrats, however. While Democrats seemed to have gotten over their 2016 dismay by 2020, Republicans held on to their negative feelings after losing in 2020. “In short, the effects of unmet expectations wore off on Democrats by the 2020 cycle, but the disappointment was still being felt by Republicans in 2024,” Warner wrote. “Of course, the exceptional nature of the 2020 aftermath—with Donald Trump’s disgraceful claims of mass voter fraud—make it an edge case.”
How much of an edge case remains to be seen. 
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