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> and thought many people were going to say no?

Apparently, many Democrats thought Republicans would say no. That's what's being measured.

But that is because, for example, many republicans (7/10?)[0] think that the democrats are racist but they are more likely to consider democrats discriminating against whites. A republican is more likely to say that sexism exists, but against men, rather than women. A republican is more likely to say that climate change exists, but isn't anthropogenic -- which is tantamount to climate change denial. The definition of what "properly controlled immigration" means is also unclear; for a republican it may be more likely to mean only let white people in or to reject all muslims. To be clear I'm not saying that all republicans believe these things, it's only that there is at the very least an extremely vocal group of people on the right who would answer these questions in the same way as someone on the left, but for vastly different reasons.

The definitions of what these words actually mean are in dispute between the two groups. Someone on the left may be answering the question as "what do they actually believe, regardless of how they would answer the question." I know that's how I'd reply to a survey like this. I certainly wouldn't have in the moment considered if they would have a warped view of the words.

>[0] https://perceptiongap.us/media/w5xgckq3/fig7d.png (Am I mischaracterizing this graph with respect to racism?)

side note, I fall into the post-doc group who would say that my colleagues and friends generally agree with me politically. But from my perspective, it's because we are more united on what the right ways to handle the problems actually are rather than because we are politically isolated. I consider myself a libertarian, but I generally vote blue; I've got friends who disagree with my general ideological stances but who understand that particular policies are better than nothing. I think that the story that this [1] graph is telling is that the more educated you become, the more you realize that only one of two parties in the united states is proposing sane solutions to the problems we face; whereas republicans in general are the ones who have a perception gap. Probably because they're more likely to be misinformed by the media they consume. [2]

[1] https://perceptiongap.us/media/pboj2mgp/fig5c.png

[2] https://perceptiongap.us/media/3aaiax5h/fig4c.png

But remember, the whole point of the question is "What do you think they are going say in response to this question?"

Part of that is correctly interpreting how they are going to understand the question.

If you can't understand how the other side is going to read the question correctly, it's still a fail.

If you're using a blunt instrument to measure a nuanced result, you're going to lose some of your nuance.

If I say "Dogs are members of Canis familiaris" and someone else says "no, those are wolves" and a 3rd person asks me "How likely is that guy to know what Canis familiaris is" based on me asking him the question "Do you know what Canis familiaris is?" I'm going to get the answer wrong 100% of the time, because of my "perception" of things.

This is meaningless however, because some facts are facts, and not everything is "shades of gray". Also vice versa.

Saying "there's a perception gap" when two people aren't even having the same conversation doesn't feel like the blame should be on either person. In this case, the observer who's trying to draw a conclusion is drawing a pointless conclusion/asking trap questions.

"Democrats and Republicans both agree there are problems."

That's a meaningless statement - everyone everywhere agrees there are problems!

The all-important fact is that people on either side disagree about what the problems even are. So the difference is not in the solutions, but rather in the entire idea of what needs to be solved in the first place.

I can agree when the problems brought up are phrased reasonably, but to ask questions like "does racism still exist" is just going to get you meaningless data.

I dunno. The linked article seems like p hacking to me.

>The difference is that the Republican solution is criminalizing homelessness and other things that treat the symptoms, or handwaving it away and "letting the free market fix it.

Not a Republican, but it's almost like the article created a living caricature of the phenomenon it was describing.

Show me a real, evidence and facts based solution to homelessness that Republicans have come up with and I'll edit it into my comment and remove that part.

Utah versus California and it’s not even close

Roughly 20% of Republicans said no, so there's that.

Surveyed Democrats guessed that almost 50% would, and even self-identified Independents guessed that roughly 40% would.

It just doesn't seem like a useful metric to me. Even if we agree that both Democrats and Republicans want to, say, end racism... what does that get us? That we both have a basic moral compass?

The problem is the high level interpretation doesn't get us anywhere. The devil is in the details, and Republicans are, for example, fully willing to gerrymander and engage in other forms of voter suppression that affect minorities disproportionately. The fact that they say one thing and do another shows they don't really mean what they say, or are so eager to throw away their morals in the pursuit of political expediency that it might as well not matter whether they mean it or not.