Hillary Clinton

But a forthcoming study from the journal PS: Political Science and Politics makes a better case for how lessons learned from fiction can influence people’s political preferences. The researcher Diana Mutz, a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, found that Harry Potter book readers are actually more inclined to dislike Trump. This was the case even after Mutz controlled for variables such as age, education, gender, party identification, evangelical identification, and ideology.

Given that these typical predictors didn’t change the outcome, Mutz floats the likelihood that the lessons of the novels—embracing tolerance and inclusivity, rejecting physical and psychological violence—might explain the correlation between reading Harry Potter and disliking Trump. Basically: People familiar with the series’ narrative of good-vs-evil might recognize aspects of the books’ portrayals of “evil” in Trump. Mutz discusses how, in Rowling’s novels, the protagonists are constantly defending the outsiders of the wizarding world. “The ongoing battle between good, as personified by Harry and his friends, and evil, as personified by Lord Voldemort, is at root about the importance of group purity,” she writes, drawing connections to Trump’s statements about banning Muslims from entering the U.S., building a Mexican border wall, and other racially inflammatory comments.