Motivated Reasoning and Party Politics

John Sides writes at The Washington Post:

In a nationally representative online survey of 1,011 Americans conducted by Qualtrics between Dec. 6 and 12, we asked respondents, “In last month’s election, Donald Trump won the majority of votes in the electoral college. Who do you think won the most popular votes?”

Twenty-nine percent said Donald Trump won the popular vote. This is a slightly larger proportion than in a recent Pew survey in which 19 percent said Trump won the popular vote.

Respondents’ correct understanding of the popular vote depended a great deal on partisanship. A large fraction of Republicans — 52 percent — said Trump won the popular vote, compared with only 7 percent of Democrats and 24 percent of independents. Among Republicans without any college education, the share was even larger: 60 percent, compared with 37 percent of Republicans with a college degree.

At Vox, Andrew Prokop sums up YouGov survey data:

Digging into the crosstabs a bit — you can check out the July 2014 ones here, and the December 2016 ones here:

• The number of Republicans who viewed Putin "very unfavorably" shrank from 51 percent in July 2014 to just 14 percent in December 2016.
• The number who view Putin favorably rose from 10 percent to 37 percent.
• And the number who say they don’t know what to think about him stayed about constant, from 15 percent to 16 percent.

To be clear, Putin is still viewed unfavorably by a plurality of Republicans. Still, that’s a massive improvement in his ratings since 2014.

In September, Benjamin Oreskes reported at Politico:

In a stunning reversal, a large majority of Republicans are repudiating their party’s traditional support for free trade, and falling sharply in line with nominee Donald Trump’s insistence that trade costs Americans more jobs than it creates.

Meanwhile, Democrats, whose representatives in Congress have traditionally been far more skeptical of trade deals — and largely voted against giving President Barack Obama the “fast-track” authority to negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership last year — are now far more apt than Republicans to see the benefit of trade, according to an exclusive poll conducted for POLITICO and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Forty-seven percent of Republicans surveyed said that trade deals have hurt their communities over the last 10 years, compared to only 24 percent of Democratic voters. Only 18 percent of Republicans surveyed said that trade deals helped, while 33 percent of Democrats believe free trade helps.

The poll results, which come ahead of Monday night’s highly anticipated presidential debate, show a stark turnabout in public opinion from a decade ago, when George W. Bush was president and Republican lawmakers — with the notable exception of some lawmakers from textile industry states — championed free trade. In 2006, a Pew Research Center poll showed Democrats — who traditionally have stronger ties with organized labor — to be considerably more negative about free trade than Republicans.
Now, the POLITICO-Harvard poll shows, 85 percent of Republicans say that free trade has cost the U.S. more jobs than it has created, compared to 54 percent of Democrats.