Both Democrats and Republicans Can Pass the Ideological Turing Test

Here's one way to test how well Republicans and Democrats understand each other: have each side try to pretend to be the other side, and then see if anyone can tell the difference between the real partisans and the pretenders. We find that both sides can do a convincing impression of the other side. We randomly assigned a large sample of Democrats and Republicans to write 100-word statements based on one of two prompts: either "I'm a DEMOCRAT because..." or "I'm a REPUBLICAN because...". We then showed these statements to another large sample of partisans, who were unable to tell the real statements from the fake ones.