Comments like this piss me off, just like anybody who rushes to post "Have you heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect?" in the comments without fully understanding the implications. The commenter bolds this line from the abstract (aka, not even bothering to quote the actual paper itself):

Our evidence demonstrates that hostile feelings for the opposing party are ingrained or automatic in voters’ minds, and that affective polarization based on party is just as strong as polarization based on race.

And the commenter makes this conclusion:

The study was conducted by reproducing studies that were used to prove racial implicit bias and swapping out racial identifiers for political party identifiers and every study showed that implicit bias based on political view was much stronger (as much as 150%) than that of implicit bias based on race.

Last time I checked, "just as strong" did not mean "as much as 150%", but regardless, when you swap out words like "implicit affect" for "implicit bias", surprise, it means something different. What does "implicit bias" mean according to the paper?

Implicit attitudes are the "[t]races of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects" (Greenwald and Banaji 1995).

What does bias mean according to the lowest bidder dictionary website?

a particular tendency, trend, inclination, feeling, or opinion, especially one that is preconceived or unreasoned

unreasonably hostile feelings or opinions about a social group; prejudice

Words are interchangeable, aren't they? Hey, I can cherry pick quotes from the paper too:

From our perspective, the di erence in the magnitude of the partisan and racial divides in implicit a ect is especially telling. Racial identity is acquired at birth and racial attitudes are deeply ingrained (see Baron and Banaji 2006). For partisanship to approach (and surpass) race, the underlying animosity must be more substantial than previously thought. Yet, the data show that negative associations of opposing partisans are faster (more automatic) than negative associations of African Americans.

Given the contrasting positions of the parties on issues relating to race and the clear racial divide in party affiliation, it is possible that the level of out-party animosity reflects a concatenation of racial and partisan or ideological affect. At the level of explicit attitudes, there is significant overlap between measures of anti-black sentiment and ideological sentiment (e.g., Carmines, Sniderman, and Easter 2011). At the level of implicit attitudes, however, our evidence suggests that the overlap between partisan and racial affect is minimal.

Therefore our wise commenter concludes:

Given these results is it reasonable to believe that the lack of political diversity in academia is not an example of systematic (albeit implicit) discrimination?

Words, what do they mean?