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Research shows Americans see political opponents as more extreme than reality. Learn how closing this 'perception gap' can restore civil discourse.
Getty Images, Luis Alvarez
Closing Perception Gaps Strengthens the Whole Democracy Ecosystem
Sep 22, 2026
Perception gaps — misunderstandings about our fellow Americans across the political spectrum — are damaging the fabric of our country. Correcting these gaps is essential to preserving the kind of democracy that respects free speech, individual dignity, and civic responsibility.
At their core, perception gaps reflect a tendency to see those in the other party as more extreme and worse than they actually are. Too often, Americans assume their political opponents are more hostile, closed-minded, dishonest, or even supportive of political violence and rule-breaking than in reality. These caricatures drive fear and division.
The good news is that these gaps can be reduced.
Research shows that when people are presented with accurate information about each other — especially more than once — these corrections can stick. And when they do, the benefits are significant.
As Co-Founders at More Like US, we focus on motivating civil discourse, particularly on college campuses. Our approach is straightforward: when people stop viewing each other through a distorted, negative lens, they become more willing to engage. Right now, too many Americans avoid political conversations not because of apathy, but because they expect hostility. Reduce that anxiety, and you open the door to real dialogue.
This has broader implications across many areas important to a healthy democracy:
Civic engagement, social cohesion, and trust:
Strong communities depend on trust and relationships. When Americans see each other more accurately, and not through partisan stereotypes, they are more likely to engage, cooperate, and build the kind of social capital that keeps a nation strong.
Civics education and media literacy:
Good education should teach not just facts, but most importantly how to think critically. That includes recognizing confirmation bias. If students already have distorted views of others, they are more likely to accept mis- and disinformation that reinforces those views. Correcting perception gaps helps build a more discerning, informed citizenry.
Media and cultural narratives:
The stories we tell matter. Media can deepen division or help reduce it. American history shows both kinds of examples – from demeaning portrayals that fueled division, to powerful examples of leadership and character that inspired unity and respect. We should encourage portrayals that reflect the dignity and complexity of all Americans.
Fixing broken incentives in politics and media:
Today’s news, social media, and political systems too often reward outrage and division. That creates incentives to exaggerate differences and demonize opponents. When Americans recognize that most people are not as extreme as portrayed, there is greater appetite for reforms, whether that involves improving election systems, changing media incentives, or demanding more accountability from leaders.
Reducing political violence and preserving order:
Fear is a powerful driver of extreme behavior. When people believe their safety or way of life is under threat, they may justify actions they otherwise would not condone. By correcting exaggerated perceptions of threat, we can lower the temperature and reinforce a commitment to peaceful, lawful engagement.
The bottom line is simple: a free society depends on citizens who see each other accurately.
Closing perception gaps will not solve every problem, but it is a practical, evidence-based step toward a more stable, unified, and resilient America.
No matter which issues you care about most, there is a good chance this approach can help move them forward.
James Coan is a co-founder and executive director of More Like US. Coan can be contacted at James@morelikeus.org
Ann Schockett is a co-founder and co-chair of More Like US.
Dane Erickson is a co-founder and co-chair of More Like US.
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The sky clears behind the U.S. Capitol after rainy weather on Sept. 2, 2026, in Washington, D.C.
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We Didn't Get This Angry Because Americans Changed: We Got This Angry Because Washington Did
Sep 22, 2026
Something unusual has happened on the opinion pages of The New York Times recently.
Three very different writers have described three seemingly different American problems.
Kurt Andersen wrote about the “soft secession” already underway as red and blue states increasingly resist one another and the federal government. Michelle Goldberg, contemplating a new crop of novels about civil war and national breakup, described a constitutional system whose rigidity has come to feel like a cage — a country in which it is becoming easier to imagine escape from the existing order than reform of it.
And most recently, David French has written about another pathology: the transformation of political opposition into tribal identity.
French focuses primarily on the American right. He describes a movement that began by opposing the excesses of progressive “wokeness” but increasingly came to define itself as simply “anti-left.”
Once defeating the other side became the overriding objective, principle became negotiable. The enemy of my enemy became my friend. Extremists who might once have been shunned became useful allies so long as they aimed their fire in the right direction.
French’s essay is not an argument for constitutional restructuring. But it points toward a question we rarely ask: What if soft secession, constitutional paralysis, and political tribalization are not three different problems? What if they are three symptoms of the same structural problem?
New evidence suggests that the political temperature really is rising.
As The Economist reported recently, researchers examining more than 150 years of congressional speeches and millions of social media posts found that angry statements in Congress have risen 50 percent since 2013. The share of partisans who say the other party makes them angry has climbed to 76 percent. And anger is rewarded: angry tweets by members of Congress receive 59 percent more retweets than emotionally neutral ones.
The anger is accompanied by an extraordinary level of distrust. A new Gallup survey reported by Axios found that 89 percent of Americans say government corruption is widespread — a 20-year high — including 91 percent of Democrats, about 90 percent of independents, and roughly eight in 10 Republicans.
Neither finding proves that our political structure is responsible. But together they give us another reason to ask whether that structure helps sustain the anger and distrust.
Two nearly equal political coalitions with profoundly different ideas about government are locked in a perpetual winner-take-all contest for control of a single national government powerful enough to impose one coalition’s choices on the other.
We keep trying to lower the political temperature without asking whether the political architecture itself keeps turning up the heat.
Consider what is at stake in an American presidential election.
The winner does not merely choose tax rates or agricultural policy. Control of Washington can determine abortion policy, gun regulation, immigration enforcement, environmental regulation, voting rules, education policy, administrative power, and the composition of the Supreme Court for decades.
For committed partisans, losing therefore does not mean merely accepting four years of policies they dislike. It can mean being governed on questions they regard as fundamental by people they increasingly believe are hostile to their values.
Under those circumstances, why wouldn’t politics become tribal?
If the opposing coalition can govern you on matters you consider existential, portraying it as dangerous is not merely a campaign tactic.
It becomes politically rational.
And once the other side becomes dangerous enough, almost anything can be justified in stopping it.
French describes this process vividly on the right. While his examples come from today’s right, the underlying dynamic is broader: when politics becomes existential, political coalitions have powerful incentives to excuse behavior in allies that they would condemn instantly in opponents.
The obvious prescription is more tolerance. Better leaders. Better civic education. More dialogue. All would help. But perhaps we are asking individual citizens and politicians to overcome incentives that our governing system continually recreates.
There is another way.
I call it an American Union, where Red and Blue America each adopt a modern constitution reflecting the preferences of its own durable governing majority while remaining joined in the things that continue to benefit nearly everyone — a joint continental defense, a common currency, an integrated market, and freedom of movement.
Critics may be quick to argue that such an approach is simply secession. It is not. Conventional national breakup separates political systems and leaves the parties to decide which common institutions, if any, to rebuild. An American Union would reverse that sequence: preserve the institutions both sides still value, then divide constitutional authority over the questions on which they cannot agree.
Two constitutions would be drafted and presented to the states. Each state would choose, through a democratic process, the constitutional order under which it wished to live and, with that choice, its affiliation within the Union.
Red America would govern Red America. Blue America would govern Blue America.
But Americans could continue living, working, investing, and traveling throughout both. Goods and capital would cross an integrated internal market, as they do today. The dollar could remain the common currency. Continental defense could operate through a joint command, similar to what the United States and Canada have done for nearly 70 years under NORAD. A binding compact would govern the relationship between the two republics and prohibit either from using force against the other.
Why go this far?
Because conventional constitutional reform has become close to impossible. Article V requires two-thirds of both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states. That means the 13 least populous states, together containing less than 5 percent of Americans, can block an amendment.
And procedure is only part of the problem.
Suppose Article V disappeared tomorrow and we were invited to write a modern American constitution from scratch. What would it say?
Would abortion be constitutionally protected? What about gun rights? How powerful should presidents be? Should the Electoral College survive? How should Supreme Court justices be selected? What voting rights should be guaranteed? How much power should remain with states? What protections should exist for religious liberty?
There is little reason to think more than 340 million Americans could produce a single answer to those questions commanding anything close to the consensus necessary for constitutional legitimacy.
That is the cage Goldberg identifies.
The Constitution is extraordinarily difficult to change precisely when Americans disagree most profoundly about what it should say. An American Union begins by accepting a fact we generally refuse to contemplate: perhaps Americans do not need to answer every foundational political question identically in order to remain joined as Americans.
Another objection is that America is not really red and blue. It’s purple.
Millions of Democrats live in Texas and Florida. Millions of Republicans live in California and New York. Democratic cities sit inside Republican states. Republican counties sit inside Democratic states. No boundary could produce ideologically homogeneous republics.
But homogeneity is neither possible nor desirable.
The objective would not be to move every liberal into one republic and every conservative into the other. Each republic would contain substantial political minorities, which is why strong constitutional protections for speech, religion, due process, political participation, equal treatment, and independent courts would have to be foundational.
Americans would also retain a genuine right of exit. Someone who concluded that life under the other republic’s constitutional order better reflected his values could move there without abandoning the broader American economy or losing the ability to live and work across the continent. During the transition, relocation assistance could be available to those who genuinely wished to move so that no one felt trapped on the wrong side of a new political boundary.
Most people, I suspect, would stay exactly where they are.
And there is another possibility: an American Union could make staying put easier if it changed the incentives that now pull both coalitions toward their extremes.
Critics will understandably fear that Red America would race toward the far right while Blue America raced toward the far left. But that assumes today’s political incentives would survive constitutional reconstruction intact. There is good reason to think they would not.
Once the opposing national coalition was no longer the enemy that had to be defeated, the political fault lines within each republic would begin to matter more. Red America would contain conservatives of very different kinds; Blue America would contain liberals and progressives with competing priorities. Parties seeking durable governing majorities would have to assemble coalitions within those more varied electorates. The relevant political center could shift inward, toward each republic’s median voter rather than toward the activists most animated by defeating the other side.
Remove the national winner-take-all prize and much of the reason for treating the other side as an existential enemy disappears with it. Extremism would also carry costs. Either republic could lose residents, businesses, and investment if its governing choices became intolerable to enough people.
Nor would either republic be politically pure. Millions of Democrats would remain in Red America, and millions of Republicans in Blue America.
They would not simply disappear from political life. They would be voters to persuade — and potentially decisive constituencies for candidates willing to move beyond their ideological bases. That gives both republics another reason to govern toward the middle rather than the fringe.
Politics would not become harmonious. Nor should it. Americans would still argue about taxes, regulation, inequality, policing, education, immigration, and countless other questions.
Conservatives would still criticize liberals. Liberals would still criticize conservatives. But the central political question could change.
Instead of “How do we stop those people from governing us?” it could become: “How should we govern ourselves?” That is a very different kind of political conflict.
And it speaks directly to the phenomenon French describes.
If politics ceases to be primarily about preventing a hated national enemy from acquiring power over you, the incentive to embrace anyone who helps defeat that enemy weakens too.
An American Union would preserve what still binds us — one defense, one currency, one market, freedom of movement — while reducing the number of fundamental questions on which one side gets to rule the other, and finally permit us to modernize our constitutional republic.
If we genuinely want to lower America’s political temperature, perhaps we should stop asking only how Americans can behave differently. We should ask whether the system that governs them should be different too.
We Didn't Get This Angry Because Americans Changed: We Got This Angry Because Washington Did was originally published by The Western Journal and is republished with permission.
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Sharp Gender Divide Among Latino Voters
Sep 21, 2026
A new analysis from the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI) and the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) reveals significant political differences between Latinas and Latino men in California — especially among younger voters and those without bachelor’s degrees. The findings, drawn from the May 2026 Berkeley IGS Poll of 1,912 Latino registered voters, challenge the notion that California’s Latino electorate behaves as a single political bloc.
California Latinas are more likely than Latino men to prioritize protecting immigrant communities, opposing the Trump administration’s agenda, and defending democracy and voting rights. According to the report, 69% of Latinas say protecting immigrant communities is “very important,” compared with 52% of Latino men. On “fighting the Trump agenda,” the gap is identical: 68% of Latinas versus 51% of Latino men. Democracy and voting rights receive the strongest support across both groups, with 87% of Latinas and 77% of Latino men rating the issue as very important.
“These findings show why California’s Latino registered voters cannot be understood as a single political constituency,” said G. Cristina Mora, professor of sociology and co-director of IGS at UC Berkeley. “Gender tells us part of the story, but the differences become much clearer when we also consider voters’ age and educational attainment. That more complete picture is essential to understanding the priorities of the Latino electorate.”
The gender divide is most pronounced among voters under 30. Among younger Latinas, 88% say protecting immigrant communities is very important, compared with 60% of Latino men — a 28‑point difference. On fighting the Trump agenda, the gap widens to 30 points: 82% of Latinas under 30 versus 52% of Latino men. And on defending democracy and voting rights, 92% of Latinas under 30 rate the issue as very important, compared with 74% of Latino men.
The report also finds substantial differences among voters without bachelor’s degrees. Seventy‑three percent of Latinas without a bachelor’s degree say protecting immigrant communities is very important, compared with 51% of similarly educated Latino men. On fighting the Trump agenda, the gap is 19 points (69% versus 50%). On democracy and voting rights, the difference is 12 points (88% versus 76%). By contrast, college‑educated Latinas and Latino men express more similar views, with gender gaps narrowing to between four and seven points depending on the issue.
These findings complicate broad narratives about the political attitudes of working‑class Latino voters. Even among voters with similar levels of education, Latinas and Latino men can place substantially different importance on the same issues.
“Although this survey represents California registered voters, the patterns it identifies deserve national attention,” said Nicholas Vargas, associate professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies at UC Berkeley and co-author of the report. “As both parties compete for Latino voters in races that will determine control of Congress, they should not assume that Latinas and Latino men — or voters of the same age and educational background — are responding to the political environment in the same way.”
Language adds another layer of distinction. Among English‑dominant voters, Latinas are 20 points more likely than Latino men to prioritize both protecting immigrant communities and fighting the Trump agenda (68% compared with 48%). Among Spanish‑dominant voters, the gender difference shrinks to just two points on both measures.
The study identifies several possible explanations for these differences, including the types of workplaces, community institutions, and information sources that connect Latinas and Latino men to political issues.
Sharp Gender Divide Among Latino Voters was first published by California Latino News and is republished with permission.
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Brain science explains why voters reward charisma over results — and why the leaders who "fix" the most get credit for the least. A behavioral look at elections.
alvaro gonzalez/Getty Images
The Résumé Should Outvote the Smile
Sep 21, 2026
There's an old joke about a couple who finally solved years of arguing over decisions. "Since you're the man of the house," the wife said, "you handle the big things -- our stance on foreign wars, who we send to the Senate. I'll take care of the small stuff: groceries, the mortgage, where we live, what we eat." The husband agreed happily, certain he had won the better half of the deal. A few years later he realized the trade had gone entirely the other way. He held forth on geopolitics at dinner parties while his wife quietly ran every detail that actually touched his life: what he ate, where he lived, how his money was spent. What looked like ultimate authority was, in practice, near-total abdication over the things that shaped his days.
Voters make the same trade, and pay for it the same way. We keep hiring leaders for the qualities we would want in a spouse -- warmth, charm, a commanding voice, the sense that they see us -- instead of the qualities we would want in a mechanic: someone who can find what is broken and fix it before the whole system fails. We evaluate candidates the way we choose intimate partners, not the way we hire people to run complex, high-stakes systems.
A Brain Built for the Wrong Timescale
This is not just a cultural blind spot. It has a biological driver. Brain-imaging research over the past two decades has linked our response to an inspiring speaker with a fast release of dopamine and oxytocin, the same chemical reward system engaged by a great meal, a new romance, or a win at the slot machine. A charismatic leader delivers that hit in real time, on stage, in a two-minute clip that circulates for days. Studies of split-second judgment go further still: shown a candidate's face for less than a second, with no policy information at all, people guess election winners correctly roughly seven times out of ten, based purely on a snap read of competence and warmth.
Good policy does not work on that clock. A tax reform, an infrastructure project, or a shift in interest rates typically takes twelve to eighteen months before its effects show up in the data, and years longer before ordinary voters feel them in daily life. The Federal Reserve itself estimates that the full impact of a single interest-rate change can take up to two years to reach the broader economy. By the time results arrive, the brain has already moved its emotional credit to whoever gave the most recent good speech, whether or not that person had anything to do with the actual work. Slow, structural improvement carries no dopamine spike, so it goes uncredited. Fast, emotional performance carries a large one, so it gets over-credited. The mismatch is not a character flaw in any one voter. It is a design feature of a brain built for a much smaller, much slower world.
When the Audition Beats the Résumé
This mismatch explains why screen presence so often beats governing experience at the ballot box. In 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger won the California recall election with under half the vote in a field of more than a hundred candidates, arriving with zero governing experience and a résumé built entirely in front of a camera. He left office seven years later with the state carrying a budget deficit in the tens of billions of dollars, a gap that outlasted his tenure and shaped California's finances for years afterward. Ronald Reagan followed a similar route into the same office in 1966, defeating the incumbent governor by nearly a million votes on the strength of his screen presence and radio-honed delivery, not his record in public administration, of which he had none. His later political career is remembered as substantively consequential, which complicates any tidy conclusion. Charisma and competence are not always opposed. They are simply poorly correlated at the exact moment people cast a ballot, which is precisely when it matters most.
The clearest case of all sits in Tamil Nadu, India. In 1977, film star M. G. Ramachandran, known across the state as MGR, was elected chief minister after three decades of building a screen persona as the untouchable defender of the poor. His fans did not distinguish the role from the man. When he died in December 1987 at age 70, roughly one million people flooded Chennai's streets for his funeral, some standing in line for over a day. By multiple contemporary press accounts, around 30 grieving fans took their own lives in the days after his death, unable to process the loss. That grief was never about tax policy or administrative competence. It was the sudden loss of a one-sided emotional attachment as real, to the people who felt it, as losing a parent.
Charisma Is a Luxury Good
The divide runs along economic lines too, and this is the part most commentary on charisma leaves out. Voters with enough material security to treat politics as a form of entertainment can afford to prioritize a leader's decorum, stage presence, and rhetorical polish. For the much larger share of any electorate whose week is defined by grocery prices, rent, fuel costs, and job security, charm is an expensive luxury they cannot afford to indulge. They need competent mechanics who can diagnose and repair broken systems, not a warm and reassuring presence who makes them feel better about a system that keeps failing them. When the roof is leaking, you do not hire the contractor with the best smile. You hire the one who actually stops the leak, even if he is short with you on the phone.
Evolution built us for small tribes of a few hundred people, where a warm, confident face reliably signaled a trustworthy ally worth following into danger, and where the entire consequence of a bad choice was visible within days. That heuristic misfires today, in a world of roughly 8.2 billion people governed by institutions too large, too specialized, and too interconnected for any one charismatic figure to run on instinct and stage presence alone. The scale has changed by many orders of magnitude. Our wiring has not.
What Breaks the Spell
None of this means charisma is worthless, or that voters are foolish for responding to it. Communication matters; a leader who cannot explain a plan cannot build support for it. The fix is not to prize dullness over eloquence. It is to separate the two judgments that charisma tends to fuse into one: does this person make me feel confident, and has this person actually delivered results before. Structured evaluation helps here in the same way it helps in hiring for any other high-stakes role: a specific record of past performance, checked against verifiable outcomes, weighs more than a stage presence, no matter how persuasive that presence feels in the room.
We keep choosing leaders for spouse-like qualities and then act surprised when we get senator-like failures. The bill for that confusion comes due in stalled reforms, wasted budgets, and a public that trusts government less with every cycle, in country after country. Fixing it does not require voters to stop feeling anything at the ballot box; feeling is not the enemy. It requires one honest substitution, repeated at every election: stop asking who you would most want to have dinner with, and start asking who you would trust to fix what is actually broken. Until we make that substitution a habit rather than an exception, we will keep overpaying for charisma and underinvesting in the competence that actually improves lives. The résumé should outvote the smile.
Meda Parameswara Reddy, Ph.D. is Director of the Reddy Center for Critical and Integrated Thinking. A former R&D executive holding 30 U.S. patents, he focuses on the analysis of human behavior, public health, and global affairs, drawing on an interdisciplinary background. He published in multiple RealClear platforms, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., Fulcrum, The Humanist, AFRO American, South Asia Monitor (on editorial board, and host of a show), and others.
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