• 

When one prefers a political candidate, 'moral inconsistencies' between the person and the candidate are resolved and patched up to create a sense of alignment with the candidate itself. 

A study published in Political Psychology, a scientific journal, examines how voters - Republicans and Democrats - revise their perceptions of political candidates and leaders to align with their moral beliefs. 

The study also took into account the elections in 2016, which found that Republicans - but not Democrats - revised their moral beliefs to reduce inconsistency with candidate Donald Trump. 

“A lot of work in political science research shows how voters are often ‘followers,’ adjusting their views on issues to match the messages they get from their party’s leaders. We wanted to see if that pattern extended to moral beliefs as well, as morality is usually assumed to be more stable and thus exerting a causal influence on political preferences such as candidate choice,” explained William Kidd and Joseph A. Vitriol, the authors of the study. 

The study was conducted by analyzing data from the 2016 US elections.

“You could see this assumption play out in the 2016 campaign, where both the media and the Clinton campaign treated Republican votes as ‘gettable’ due to differences between the typical Republican positions on moral issues and what positions Trump held. However, we expected voters would be motivated to resolve those differences in some way (either adjusting their own views or how they viewed the candidates) in order to justify their original decision of which candidate to support.”

This study was conducted by analyzing data from the 2016 US elections. The study recruited 3,557 US citizens as their attitudes in July, September, October, and November 2016 were measured. It was done on 4 waves. 

In the first wave of the study, voters' moral foundations were obtained and measured. 

In the second wave, participants were randomly assigned to report how they perceive Clinton or Trump's moral foundations (depending on the group they were assigned to). 

In the third wave, both measures of moral foundations were repeated. 

In the fourth wave, voters' choices of candidates were taken.

“Political leadership is moral leadership,” the researchers told PsyPost

The results showed that participants projected their moral foundations on their favored candidate: self-reported moral foundations acted as predictors for perceptions of Trump's moral foundations in wave two, and this was also observed among participants oriented towards Clinton.

Trump supporters appear to incline their moral beliefs to achieve further proximity with Trump's moral foundations (as perceived). Perceptions of Trump during the second wave altered how supporters perceived their own moral beliefs at the third. 

However, this trend was not found among Clinton supporters.

“Political leadership is moral leadership,” the researchers told PsyPost. “Many voters revise even their fundamental views of what they describe as right and wrong based on their perceptions of the candidates they support. Ideas and positions that might have seemed out of bounds can become normalized very quickly if they receive support from political leaders.”

“That voters adjust their ‘perceptions’ of the candidates is also likely a reason partisan conflict often seems so intractable, as voters from each party may not even share a common understanding of the candidates in question, limiting any form of reasoned debate.”

“It’s hard to determine if the differences we find between Clinton and Trump supporters are due to differences between Democrats and Republicans more broadly or if the results reflect unique qualities of those particular candidates,” Kidd and Vitriol explained. “We’ve found evidence in our follow-up work in the 2020 election for both possibilities, with Biden supporters seeming to show a bit more congruence in self-candidate moral beliefs than Clinton supporters did but still less than Trump supporters show.”