Personality profiles of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: Fooled by your own politics

We had 354 Americans rate the personalities of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. We compared ratings of Trump voters, Clinton voters, and a politically moderate subsample to the left-wing experts' ratings reported in Nai and Maier (2018). We examined the association between raters' reported political orientation and personality ratings of both candidates. We found strong correlations between political orientation of the rater and ratings of the personalities of both Trump and Clinton. We also found that the sample of experts reported in Nai and Maier (2018) rated Trump lower in conscientiousness and agreeableness than our Clinton voters did. These experts also rated Trump lower in conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability than our politically moderate raters. Our findings show that political preference is strongly associated with the personality ratings of candidates among both expert and non-expert raters. •Political orientation is highly correlated with ratings of candidates' personalities.•Expert raters rate Trump similarly to Clinton voters.•Expert ratings diverge substantially from ratings of political moderates.•Political groups show clear consensus in Donald Trump's high extraversion.