On the day of the US midterms, the Dutch science site Scientias explained a study by political scientist Seth Warner of the University of Connecticut on partisan wishful thinking: treating what we want as what is likely. Across survey data from several elections, about 90 percent of voters now expect their own presidential candidate to win, up from roughly 70 percent twenty years ago. The more someone dislikes the other party, the surer they are of victory.

Among losers, high expectations go together with more hostility afterwards. Warner suggests that treating victory as a given may make defeat harder to accept and feed distrust in results, though the study does not prove cause and effect. For freethinkers it is a neat case of a bias we usually spot in others: letting desire pose as evidence.

Source: Judith van Ankeren, Scientias.nl (Dutch) (2026-11-03)

Summarised by the FTI newsdesk.