I think I’m with David Bernstein on this. I suspect that voters of all political stripes have many misperceptions; and of course their misperceptions align with their political views — they’re more likely to believe things that they’d like to be true.
My guess, for instance, is that more Democrats than Republicans erroneously think that by not renewing the assault weapons ban, Congress (1) legalized automatic weapons — it didn’t, since the ban was only on semiautomatics, guns which are not materially different from guns that have been legal throughout this time — or that (2) assault weapons play a role in the majority or even a large minority of crimes (the actual number seems to be around 4% or less). That’s just an example; my point is simply that Republicans have their likely errors and Democrats have theirs.
Any such errors are of course unfortunate; but I have no reason to think that the errors generally are more common among one side than to another. It’s possible to show that one side of the political divide is indeed more prone to such errors than the other: You’d need to do a study which includes errors that would seem appealing to each side, and then see whether Republicans fall for the errors that would tempt them, and the Democrats resist those that would tempt them. But I haven’t seen any such study, and the study cited in the post below certainly doesn’t try to do this sort of balanced analysis.
UPDATE: Kaimi Wenger (Tutissima Cassis) has more.
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