When Demographic Misconceptions Lead To Really, Really Bad Election Outcomes
a B|E brief
A recent social media post first sparked by commentator Jemele Hill here …
… ended up going viral and prompting a wave of thoughts from a countless number of commentators, influencers and unremitting data geeks jumping in on the conversation she started to cause more reflection …
But the point itself is profound and well-stated: surveys suggest we’re actually overestimating the demographic footprint of key racial, income, religious and other social groups. That’s translated into extreme consequences unraveling American politics and re-shaping election outcomes in a number of uncomfortable ways.
In case you were wondering, this graph was actually cited from a little-known YouGov poll conducted back in 2022 - two years before this election cycle.
We’d wager that it’s very likely Republicans and Trump campaign strategists discovered this poll and dissected it very carefully.
As YouGov’s Director of Survey Data Taylor Orth wrote at the time …
Misperceptions of the size of minority groups have been identified in prior surveys, which observers have often attributed to social causes: fear of out-groups, lack of personal exposure, or portrayals in the media. Yet consistent with prior research, we find that the tendency to misestimate the size of demographic groups is actually one instance of a broader tendency to overestimate small proportions and underestimate large ones, regardless of the topic.
However, it’s not just white people who are feeling surrounded and threatened by minority groups. The minority groups themselves feel they have a larger presence than they really do, which may also present some complicated repercussions, especially in terms of media and social media behavior and how these groups are acting politically and economically. We need to talk about that. Orth continues …
If exaggerated perceptions of minority groups’ share of the American population are due to fear, we would expect estimates of those groups’ share that are made by the groups’ members to be more accurate than those made by others. We tested this theory on minority groups that were represented by at least 100 respondents within our sample and found that they were no better (and often worse) than non-group members at guessing the relative size of the minority group they belong to.
Black Americans estimate that, on average, Black people make up 52 percent of the U.S. adult population; non-Black Americans estimate the proportion is roughly 39 percent, closer to the real figure of 12 percent. First-generation immigrants we surveyed estimate that first-generation immigrants account for 40 percent of U.S. adults, while non-immigrants guess it is around 31 percent, closer to the actual figure of 14 percent.
Lots of questions on that last point that we’ll, perhaps, wander through in a later brief. Still, safe to say we didn’t see that one coming. But, yes, we agree with Hill that these types of demographic misperceptions can lead to very disruptive and dangerous attitudes that carry over into untenable election outcomes and policy choices. Ultimately, there is a high probability that white voters - the majority of who shifted, heavily, for Trump - felt overwhelmed by the demographic presence of non-whites and everyone else perceived as not falling into classic American value systems.