JK Rowling has sung the praises of a recent study which found that reading the Harry Potter books lowers Americans’ opinions of Donald Trump.
The bestselling novelist has already made her feelings on Trump clear, writing in an open letter in June that the presidential candidate is “fascist in all but name”. “His stubby fingers are currently within horrifyingly close reach of [the US’s] nuclear codes. He achieved this pre-eminence by proposing crude, unworkable solutions to complex threats. Terrorism? ‘Ban all Muslims!’ Immigration? ‘Build a wall!’,” wrote Rowling. “He has the temperament of an unstable nightclub bouncer, jeers at violence when it breaks out at his rallies and wears his disdain for women and minorities with pride. God help America. God help us all.”
This weekend, Rowling pointed on Twitter to a study into whether reading the Harry Potter books influences Americans’ attitudes to Trump. Harry Potter and the Deathly Donald was recently published in PS: Political Science and Politics.
So anyway, this has made my day.https://t.co/mJSCdHLVPz
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) August 19, 2016
The University of Pennsylvania’s Professor Diana Mutz polled a nationally representative sample of 1,142 Americans for the study, in 2014, and again in 2016. She asked them about their Harry Potter consumption, and using a zero to 100 scale, about their attitudes on issues from the death penalty to the treatment of Muslims, and in 2016, their feelings about Donald Trump.
Democrats, Republicans and independents had all read the Harry Potter books in roughly equal numbers, found Mutz. She also discovered that each Potter book that her respondents had read lowered their feelings about Trump by two to three points on the 100-point scale.
“This may seem small,” she said. “But for someone who has read all seven books, the total impact could lower their estimation of Trump by 18 points out of 100.”
Mutz said that even when she controlled for issues including gender, education and age, all of which predict Americans’ attitudes to Trump, the “Harry Potter effect” remained.
Mutz writes in the study that similarities between Trump and Potter’s nemesis Voldemort “have not gone without notice during the 2016 campaign”, with the term Trumpdemort gaining traction, and “even Trump supporters … buying into the analogy, purchasing Trump posters featuring their candidate in front of an American flag as backdrop, with a quote from the Dark Lord himself: ‘There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.’”
She points out similarities between the fictional wizard and the Republican candidate for president, including how Voldemort “supports the eradication of mixed blood wizards”, and how “in comparison, Donald Trump has called for a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration”.
“It may simply be too difficult for Harry Potter readers to ignore the similarities between Trump and the power-hungry Voldemort,” she writes in the study.
Mutz found that the Potter films, by contrast, did not lead to Trump opposition – possibly, she believes, because “reading inherently requires much higher levels of attention and allows for greater nuance in characters, many of whom are neither wholly good nor wholly bad”, and “due to length, movies must leave out material from the full books, and they are more likely to emphasise action over the characters’ internal dilemmas and introspection”.
Mutz ends her study by speculating that “these findings raise the hope that Harry Potter can stop the Deathly Donald and make America great again in the eyes of the world, just as Harry did by ridding the wizard world of Voldemort”.
“Throughout the series, love and kindness consistently triumph over aggression and prejudice,” she said. “It’s a powerful, positive theme, and thus not surprising that readers understand the underlying message of this storyline, and are moved by it. These pro-unity views come through loud and clear in the storyline and have also been publicly voiced by the author of the series, JK Rowling, who has … espoused anti-Brexit and anti-Trump political views. Harry Potter’s popularity worldwide stands to make a difference not just in the US election, but in elections across Europe that involve aggressive and domineering candidates worldwide.”
