Suppression or Manipulation? Comparing Perspectives on US Election Security Between Biden and Trump Voters
The 2020 U.S. national election is one of the most-watched and debated voting events in history, with record turnout leading to a body of engaged citizens. This monumental moment, coupled with increasingly widespread social media use, makes the online discourse invaluable to political scientists studying voter behaviors and public opinion.
While online forums can provide important arenas for online political discussion and engagement, a potential consequence of social media use is the manifestation of echo chambers. In an echo chamber, the partisan networks represent closed systems that reinforce within-party messages and limit exposure to alternative views. In this environment, social media users on different sides of the political spectrum will develop fundamentally separate, and potentially distorted, interpretations of political events.
In amplifying select dimensions of a political event, echo chambers can have a direct impact on election integrity beliefs. After President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, Hillary Clinton’s voters worried about foreign manipulation and voter suppression. In 2020 and President-Elect Joe Biden’s victory, Trump voters remain vocally concerned about voter fraud and polling equipment tampering.
While it is possible to study these concerns by directly collecting and analyzing large volumes of social media data, efforts our research group is actively pursuing, this methodology tends to amplify the most active, loudest users that may hold more extreme views. Thus, to analyze the concerns of everyday voters, our group pursued a parallel methodology: a large scale post-election survey of over 5,000 registered voters (details of our survey methodology and weighting scheme found here).
In this survey, we find that roughly 75% of respondents, a clear majority, used at least one social media platform daily. We find little difference in social media use patterns between Trump and Biden voters. Essentially, the supporters of two presidential nominees engage with social media at a similar frequency and intensity.
However, when asked whether they received a message that led to concerns over the fairness of the 2020 election, a clear difference between voters emerges. Over 40% of Trump voters, and only 20% of Biden voters, reported receiving a message that made them concerned about the fairness of the 2020 national election. Even with nearly identical patterns in social media use between Trump and Biden voters, Trump voters were twice as likely to receive a message that heightened their anxiety about election integrity.
Going a step further, we asked each respondent to describe the content of the concerning message. We again find clear and stark differences between the two groups of voters. Democrats were more likely to receive a message about voter suppression or foreign manipulation, while Trump voters were far more likely to receive a message about explicit fraud, non-citizens voting, duplicate voting, or voting machine tampering. Again, this points to the different realities the two groups of voters experience, with contrasting concerns amplified across partisan networks.
The United States is becoming increasingly politically divided. While Americans across the political spectrum are equally likely to use social media, the content they find on these platforms is drastically different. The concerns over the fairness of the 2020 election represent the latest manifestation of this stark divide, and understanding these differences is the first step in addressing the increasing polarization of the American public.
