FOR some voters, fact and feeling are one and the same. To them unseen forces can be omnipotent and scientific explanations a mere distraction. But until recently, this sort of “magical thinking” knew no political party. That may be changing. Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, argues in a forthcoming book that Donald Trump’s unexpected rise to the top of the Republican Party is “further evidence of the ontological split in American politics” between conspiracists and empiricists. The central schism in American politics may be less between liberals and conservatives than “intuitionists” and “rationalists”, Mr Oliver argues. After all, the intuitionists now have a candidate: From his “birther” idea that Barack Obama was not born an American to his recent insinuations that the president is in cahoots with Islamic State, Mr Trump’s political political career has been grounded in conspiracy theory. Many of his supporters seem to be similarly unpreoccupied with truth.

Following Mr Oliver’s work, we asked YouGov to poll American voters and measure different elements of magical thinking, including conspiracism and “pessimism”, or the tendency to believe that terrible things, like a terrorist attack or war with Russia, would happen soon.

Conspiracy has a perhaps an unfair association with fringy, foil-hatted types; in fact 60% of the 2,600 people surveyed in our sample expressed belief in at least one of the six theories we asked about. Alongside questions about chemtrails, telepathy and the disproven vaccine-autism relationship, we also asked whether the September 11 attacks were an inside job, the American government has made contact with aliens and whether Wall Street colluded to crash the global economy in 2008 (the most popular, with 35% agreeing).

Both pessimism and belief in conspiracy theories were associated with support for Mr Trump, even when we controlled for party identification, religion and demographics. Indeed 55% of voters who scored positively on our conspiracism index favoured Mr Trump, compared with 44% of their less superstitious peers.

Perhaps most interestingly, our magical-thinking measures were not statistically significant predictors of support for Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential candidate—suggesting a shift among the feelings-first contingent. “Trump is something other. Trump is bringing in emotions and concerns that were not well-represented on the traditional left-right scale before”, says Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University.

Of course, a simple psychological profile will never quite capture all the complexities of political identity. Black voters, for example, tend to score much higher in conspiratorial beliefs than whites, but are still resistant to supporting Mr Trump (his polling among African-Americans remains stubbornly stuck in the single digits). All of our “magical thinking” measures were also strongly related to education, suggesting that the divide between the intuitionists and rationalists is, as Mr Oliver suggests, similar to the one between pre- and post-Enlightenment thinking.

Hillary Clinton supporters ought not to get ahead of themselves, however. Those who said they would vote for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, scored lower than Mrs Clinton’s supporters in belief in conspiracy theories, pessimism and Christian fundamentalism. It would appear that neither right nor left has a monopoly on rationality. Welcome to the post-truth world.