There aren't actually that many gay Democrats or rich Republicans

There are not as many &quot;typical&quot; democrats and republicans as you think.

(Image credit: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images)

published 7 April 2016

Americans have wildly wrong perceptions of the membership of the Democratic and Republican Parties, dealing more in stereotypes than reality.

For example, Americans estimate that about four in 10 Republican voters make at least $250,000 per year. It's actually more like two in 100. On the other side of the aisle, Americans guess that almost a third of Democrats are in the LGBT community. In real life, it's only 6 percent.

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This data comes from a new study by Douglas J. Ahler and Gaurav Sood, researchers from UC-Berkeley and Stanford University, respectively. Ahler and Sood found the misperception is highest when partisans are imagining the other party, but both groups make significant mistakes about their own side, too. And the more news-savvy a person is, the more likely they are to conceptualize each party in these inaccurate stereotypes.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.