Just gonna throw this out there … this study was from 2019 but have seen several similar outcomes since then …
“…
Overall, Americans dramatically overestimate the extremity of their opponents' views. Both Democrats and Republicans overestimate the proportion of their political opponents holding immoderate views by about 20 percentage points or more. Independents, on average, misjudge Democrats' and Republicans' views by about 16 percentage points.
For example, the proportion of Democrats who agree that "most police are bad people" (15%) is less than a third of what Republicans suspect (52%). Similarly, the proportion of Republicans who deny that "racism exists" (21%) is less than half what Democrats estimate (49%).
We call this the "perception gap" in American politics -- the yawning chasm between Americans' suspicions and reality.
…
Consider the following question: What is the term length of a US senator?
We found that, ironically, the perception gap of people who answered this question correctly (six years) is 20% higher than those who don't. In other words, the more people know about the political system, the worse they may be at guessing what their opponents actually believe.
Similarly,
people who regularly post political content on social media counterintuitively have a 50% wider perception gap than those who don't.
The perception gap is also wider among people who consume various types of media. For example,
people who follow the news "most of the time" are almost three times less accurate than those who do so "only now and then." …”
Daniel Yudkin writes that Democrats and Republicans dramatically overestimate the extremity of their opponents' views, a concept he calls the "perception gap," the chasm between American suspicions and reality.
amp.cnn.com