This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Wishing really hard for something won't necessarily make it come true, but a new study from a UConn researcher indicates up to 90% of voters expect their side to win an election, a percentage that's significantly increased over the last 15 years. "I'm hard-pressed to say why this type of wishful thinking is good," says Seth Warner, an assistant professor in UConn's Department of Political Science.
"It could be a somewhat healthy coping mechanism, I suppose. Uncertainty creates stress in our lives, and wishful thinking probably alleviates some of that stress. But I'd say the reasons this is bad are probably far more numerous." Warner's study, "Partisan Wishful Thinking in Polarized Times," published in the journal Political Behavior, looks at national surveys of the electorate taken between 1996 and 2024 and finds that as wishful thinking has grown since 2012, when President Barack Obama sought his second term, so too have political polarization and hatred for the opposing side—one fueling the other.
It's a theory he started to consider in 2011 when he was in a bookstore a full year before the following year's presidential election and noticed on the shelf a countdown timer to the end of President Obama's first term. The idea, he noted, was that Republicans would buy the timer because they presumed Obama wouldn't win a second term. That got him thinking about why Republicans would expect such a thing.
Obama's approval rating was at 50%, he'd handily won the previous election, and his Republican opponents, which included the party's eventual nominee Mitt Romney, weren't polling very well in head-to-head matchups. "The simple answer is they wanted him to lose," Warner says. "That's why they expected it.
We want things, and so we expect them." Four years later came Donald Trump's rise to the White House, and in the years that followed, Warner says he took note when media outlets published stories about the Make America Great Again movement, stories that probed at questions like when it would collapse, how it would collapse, and what would happen afterward. When none of those things happened, he says he wondered why outlets would continue to produce such content. The answer, he assumed, was simple: People were clicking.
"I started thinking about whether people's expectations outpace reality in the direction they want," he says. "What I found was something called 'wishful thinking,' and the central idea is that if you want something to happen, you're also more likely to expect it to happen. "You see this with sports teams," he explains.
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