Why? One theory — my theory — is that skepticism about the results stems from the fact that a lot of people don’t really know anyone supporting the other candidate. If you live in a community where you and all of your friends backed Trump, if you go online to Facebook or Breitbart or Twitter and it’s all Trump Trump Trump, you’re going to quite naturally be skeptical when you see reports about Clinton doing well. And vice versa.
In our post-election poll, conducted with the Schar School for Public Policy at George Mason University, we asked respondents how many of their close friends were supporting Clinton or Trump. Overall, the numbers were about equal: a bit over half of respondents had a lot or some close friends who backed either candidate.
But that’s mostly because supporters of one candidate knew a number of other people who backed that same candidate — and not many who supported that candidate’s opponent. Two-thirds of backers of Clinton had close friends who also mostly backed Clinton, and didn’t have many close friends who backed Trump.
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