Racial attitudes & political cross-pressures in nationalized elections: The case of the Republican coalition in the Trump era

While scholars have found that Trump was able to capitalize on the racial attitudes of white voters, it is less clear how these racial attitudes influenced vote-choice across partisan and ideological cleavages in the electorate. It is also unclear whether racial attitudes affected voting at the congressional level or electoral outcomes at the aggregate level. Using a novel measure of racial attitudes at the subnational level and survey data, we make three clear findings: (1) Trump and Republican congressional candidates benefited from conservative racial attitudes both at the aggregate level and among white voters, (2) this electoral benefit for Republicans persisted during the 2018 midterm elections, and (3) the effect of attitudes on vote-choice did not significantly vary across partisan and ideological cleavages in the white electorate. Our findings suggest that, even during the era of highly nationalized and partisan elections, racial attitudes are still a mechanism by which Republicans can win significant electoral support among Democrats and relatively liberal voters in the white electorate. These findings have implications for the growing salience of race in the Republican electoral coalition.     

Jumping on the Trump Train or Ditching the Donald: Campaign Rhetoric and the 2016 Congressional Election

The 2016 general election presented an unusual challenge to Republican congressional candidates: whether to market one’s campaign as aligned with or against Donald Trump’s controversial candidacy. In this paper, we determine what district and member-level factors influence candidate endorsements of Trump for president. Second, we study if the endorsements hurt candidates on Election Day. We find that underlying political partisanship, as measured by Mitt Romney’s 2012 vote share in congressional districts, predicts much of incumbents’ support for Trump, and that candidates’ support did not harm them in the general election.     

The Effectiveness of a Racialized Counterstrategy

Our article examines whether a politician charging a political candidate's implicit racial campaign appeal as racist is an effective political strategy. According to the racial priming theory, this racialized counterstrategy should deactivate racism, thereby decreasing racially conservative whites’ support for the candidate engaged in race baiting. We propose an alternative theory in which racial liberals, and not racially conservative whites, are persuaded by this strategy. To test our theory, we focused on the 2016 presidential election. We ran an experiment varying the politician (by party and race) calling an implicit racial appeal by Donald Trump racist. We find that charging Trump's campaign appeal as racist does not persuade racially conservative whites to decrease support for Trump. Rather, it causes racially liberal whites to evaluate Trump more unfavorably. Our results hold up when attentiveness, old‐fashioned racism, and partisanship are taken into account. We also reproduce our findings in two replication studies.     

Hunting where the ducks are: activating support for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary

ABSTRACT

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 Republican primary defied the predictions of many politicians, pundits, and political scientists. Yet, while Trump’s nomination was hard to predict, it is not difficult to explain. We show that Trump’s campaign message succeeded by activating longstanding, but often unappreciated, sentiments among Republican voters about immigration and economic entitlements. In particular, his support was concentrated among Republican voters with hawkish views on immigration and relatively liberal views on economic policy. Moreover, these views preceded support for Trump, rather than the other way around. Drawing on an original panel survey, we show that attitudes about immigration and economic entitlements measured in 2011 strongly predicted support for Trump in 2016. Although Trump’s coalition struck many observers as odd, it was predicated on a set of attitudes that is not unusual among Republican voters. He simply hunted where the ducks are.     

Proximity voting in the 2010 U.S. House elections

Utilizing data that allows for the placement of both of the candidates running and voters on the same ideological scale, I model proximity voting in the 2010 House elections. I demonstrate that though the literature predominantly emphasizes partisanship and incumbency, relative distance from the candidates also plays a significant role in the voting decision. Additionally, I show that these proximity effects are conditional upon the type of candidate running and the individual's partisan attachment. In total, these results show that while the rates of partisan voting and incumbent victory are high in House elections, voters do consider ideological proximity and can punish candidates who take positions that are too far out of line.     

The rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of U.S. elections in the 21st century

One of the most important developments affecting electoral competition in the United States has been the increasingly partisan behavior of the American electorate. Yet more voters than ever claim to be independents. We argue that the explanation for these seemingly contradictory trends is the rise of negative partisanship. Using data from the American National Election Studies, we show that as partisan identities have become more closely aligned with social, cultural and ideological divisions in American society, party supporters including leaning independents have developed increasingly negative feelings about the opposing party and its candidates. This has led to dramatic increases in party loyalty and straight-ticket voting, a steep decline in the advantage of incumbency and growing consistency between the results of presidential elections and the results of House, Senate and even state legislative elections. The rise of negative partisanship has had profound consequences for electoral competition, democratic representation and governance.     

President Obama on the ballot: Referendum voting and racial spillover in the 2014 midterm elections

The 2014 elections were widely viewed as a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama. Republicans ran against the incumbent president, and many view the Republican Party's victories in 2014 as a mass rejection of President Obama's policies. We argue that this account of the 2014 elections is incomplete. We advance the theory of racial spillover—that associating an attitude object with President Obama causes public opinion to polarize on the basis of racial attitudes—to explain both vote choice and referendum voting in the 2014 elections. In an analysis of the CCES and an original survey, we show that congressional vote choice was strongly racialized in 2014. We go on to show that perceptions of the election as a referendum on President Obama were also racialized, and that these perceptions mediated the link between racial animus and 2014 congressional vote choice. This represents the first study to show that racialized congressional evaluations continued into 2014 and we provide direct evidence that attitudes about President Obama mediated the effect of racial animus on congressional vote choice. We conclude by discussing the implications for referendum voting, racial spillover, and the 2014 midterm elections.     

Registrants,Voters, and Turnout Variability Across Neighborhoods

Although political participation has received wide-ranging scholarly attention, little is known for certain about the effects of social and political context on turnout. A scattered set of analyses—well-known by both political scientists and campaign consultants—suggests that ones neighborhood has a relatively minor impact on the decision to vote. These analyses, however, typically rely upon data from a single location. Drawing on official lists of registered voters from sixteen major counties across seven states (including Florida) from the 2000 presidential election, we use geographic/mapping information and hierarchical models to obtain a more accurate picture of how neighborhood characteristics affect participation, especially among partisans. Our research shows that neighborhoods influence voting by interacting with partisan affiliation to dampen turnout among voters we might otherwise expect to participate. Most notably, we find Republican partisans in enemy territory tend to vote less than expected, even after accounting for socioeconomic status. Our findings have implications for campaign strategy, and lead us to suggest that campaign targeting efforts could be improved by an integration of aggregate- and individual-level information about voters.     

Donald Trump,contempt, and the 2016 GOP Iowa Caucuses

ABSTRACT

Theories of discrete emotions distinguish contempt from other negative emotions, and recent evidence shows that contempt toward candidates played a major role in two US Senate races in 2014. Contempt felt by respondents was the most significant emotion predicting voting against three of the four major party candidates, and had effects independent of other emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and hope. In the present paper, the 2016 Republican Iowa Caucus provides the opportunity to examine contempt in a different context: an intra-party primary campaign, where candidates share the important characteristic of party affiliation. We find that while voters perceived all leading GOP candidates as expressing at least some contempt, Donald Trump was seen as expressing the most contempt by far. Voters also felt contempt for at least some candidates of their own party. When they did so, it predicts significantly lowered probabilities of voting for Cruz, Trump, and Rubio, and increased probabilities of voting for one or more of their opponents. Implications of these findings for theory and research on the role of contempt and other specific emotions in voting behavior are discussed.     

Testing a Predictive Model of Voter Behavior on the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

Utilizing a predictive model of voter behavior, this study identified the motivations behind a sample of voters who cast a ballot for George W. Bush and AI Gore in the 2000 presidential campaign. The motivations of the voters were differentiated on the basis of the “value” they sought in a president. In other words, just as companies in the “commercial marketplace” have to create value to attract customers, so does a candidate in the “political marketplace” who is seeking to carve out a niche for himself that separates him from his competition. Pairwise discriminant analysis is used to identify the motivations behind the choice behavior of voters at both the candidate and party level. The results reveal the complimentary roles that the political party and each candidate's campaign organization played in their respective marketing strategies.     

Racial attitudes and emotional responses to the 2016 Republican candidates

ABSTRACT

We argue that both Obama ‘08 and Trump ‘16 benefited from unusually high enthusiasm generated during their respective campaigns, and these emotions conditioned underlying racial attitudes – albeit in different ways – to pave the way to the White House. Racial animosity is usually studied in the context of minority candidates, but in the 2016 election, Donald Trump (a white candidate) frequently made direct attacks on immigrants and foreigners. This study examines how emotions generated during the campaigns and racial resentment, which we consider a preexisting attitude, shaped voter evaluations of the 2016 presidential candidates in the general election and Republican primaries. Drawing on original telephone survey data from the highly salient GOP Iowa caucuses and national opinion data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES), we find that racial resentment interacted with positive emotions (enthusiasm) to increase support for Trump. The effect of racial attitudes in predicting favorable evaluations of Trump disappeared or diminished to a quarter of its original size when emotional responses to the candidate were measured. The study generalizes a framework about the interactive effect of existing racial attitudes and campaign-generated emotions to apply to both white and minority candidates.     

Reprecincting and Voting Behavior

Despite the expansion of convenience voting across the American states, millions of voters continue to cast ballots at their local precincts on Election Day. We argue that those registered voters who are reassigned to a different Election Day polling place prior to an election are less likely to turn out to vote than those assigned to vote at the same precinct location, as a new precinct location incurs both search and transportation costs on reassigned voters. Utilizing voter file data and precinct shape files from Manatee County, Florida, from before and after the 2014 General Election, we demonstrate that the redrawing of precinct boundaries and the designation of Election Day polling places is not a purely technical matter for local election administrators, but may affect voter turnout of some registered voters more than others. Controlling for a host of demographic, partisan, vote history, and geospatial factors, we find significantly lower turnout among registered voters who were reassigned to a new Election Day precinct compared to those who were not, an effect not equally offset by those voters turning to other available modes of voting (either early in-person or absentee). All else equal, we find that registered Hispanic voters were significantly more likely to abstain from voting as a result of being reassigned than any other racial group.     

Anticandidate voting in the 1984 presidential election

Data from a national survey conducted in 1984 form the basis for a new analysis of anticandidate voting in presidential elections, i.e., voting focused more on a candidate one opposes than on a candidate one prefers. Anticandidate voting is viewed as the end product of a process whereby voters attempt to reduce discomfort that cross-pressures generate within their decision frameworks. In 1984, nearly a third of all likely voters said they were primarily motivated by a desire to voteagainst one of the two presidential candidates, a rate of anticandidate voting similar to that observed in the Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964 but well below that of the 1980 Reagan-Carter election. However, factors related to anticandidate voting in the past were not consistently linked to anticandidate voting in 1984. We conclude that the presence of Ronald Reagan exerted such a strong influence on the 1984 campaign that processes that would normally be observable, such as anticandidate voting, were overridden.     

Getting things straight: The effects of ballot design and electoral structure on voter participation

This paper considers the implications of the straight-party voting option (STVO) on participation in judicial elections. Voters using straight-party options (by definition) do not vote for candidates in nonpartisan elections. Consequently, ballot roll-off in these elections is more likely to occur when people are given the chance to vote the party ticket and complete the voting process quickly. This is the case because nonpartisan judicial elections are considerably less salient than statewide and federal partisan elections. This article separates out the effects of the institutional structure of the election on political participation with the effects of ballot design. We find that in nonpartisan elections, the straight-party option decreases voter participation since voters who utilize the straight-ticket option may erroneously believe that they have voted for these nonpartisan offices, or simply ignore them. However, in nonpartisan elections without straight-ticket voting, participation is increased compared to nonpartisan elections with straight-ticket voting. Additionally, both forms of nonpartisan elections have less participation than partisan elections, all of which have the straight-ticket option. Thus, voter participation is affected not only by the type of election, but the type of voting rules in the election.     

Negative campaigns,interpersonal trust,and prosocial behavior: The mediating effect of democratic experience

Previous studies of negative election campaigns have not addressed the possible effects of campaign environments on interpersonal trust and prosocial behavior between voters. We provide the first evidence of these effects through an incentivized lab experiment conducted among student subjects in Egypt in 2014 and in the United States in between 2016 and 2018. This comparison allows us to tease out the mediating effect of subjects’ prior experience with competitive elections. In our Egypt experiment, trust in other voters significantly decreased (by 15%) when voters were primed with a negative personality campaign as compared to a neutral baseline. Interpersonal trust also decreased in negative policy campaigns (by 8%). Among US subjects however, such effects do not materialize. Our explanation of these divergent outcomes is that the priming effect of negative election campaigns on interpersonal trust takes place when the experience of competitive elections is still quite new.     

Steady State or Second Order? The 2003 Elections to the National Assembly for Wales

This article examines the second National Assembly for Wales election in May 2003. It focuses on the campaign and results, examining the relationship between the process and dynamics of devolution, and identifiable significant shifts in Welsh politics. It compares the 2003 results with those in the first election in 1999 and isolates a number of phenomena, such as turnout and support for the parties most closely associated with the region, that help establish whether the second election signals a return to 'traditional' voting or whether there remains a pattern associated with so-called 'second order' ballots.     

Income inequality and election outcomes in OECD countries: New evidence following the Great Recession of 2008–2009

Using data on national parliamentary election outcomes in 32 OECD countries from 1975 to 2013, we investigate the importance of economic voting. We focus on the relevance of income inequality which has resurfaced to the forefront of public debate since the last global economic downturn. Additionally, we examine whether the degree of economic voting varies with the political orientation of the incumbent government. Finally, we check whether the Great Recession of 2008–2009 alters the degree to which voters hold the incumbent government, specifically left parties, responsible for poor economic performance and rising inequality. We find that economic growth is the most robust variable for economic voting, before and after the Great Recession. The vote share for left-leaning parties declines when income inequality rises during normal economic times. However, voters are more likely to vote for left-wing incumbents if domestic income inequality and unemployment rate rose during the Great Recession.     

The impact of at-large elections: vote dilution or choice dilution?

Multi-member, at-large legislative elections result in election outcomes different from outcomes in single-member district elections for two reasons: they cancel out the voting strength of geographically concentrated groups of voters (e.g., party groups, racial groups), and they make it difficult for a voter to vote for an individual candidate, rather than for one of the competing lists of candidates. An electoral setting in Long Island, New York, presents an opportunity to test which of these two aspects of at-large elections—vote dilution or choice dilution—accounts for the usual pattern of one party (or group) winning all the legislative seats at stake.     

Rainfall,population density and voter turnout

We create a dataset linking rainfall amounts to constituency-level election data for Irish general elections over the period 1989–2016. Rainfall is shown to significantly reduce voter turnout. The marginal effect of rainfall on turnout is greater in densely populated constituencies, where a rainy day decreases turnout by as much as three percentage points (or five percent). Using a theoretical framework based on a rational voting model, we propose two possible explanations for this effect. Firstly, if rural voters have higher civic duty than urban voters, they may be immune to rain on election day. Secondly, mode of transport may play a role. Urban voters are more likely to travel on foot or bicycle, whereas rural voters typically travel by car. Therefore, the cost to voting associated with rainfall may be higher in urban areas. Constituency-level data on mode of transport from 1997 to 2016 provides some empirical support for this hypothesis.     

The undecided voters and the economy: Campaign heterogeneity in the 2005 British general election

Research and conventional wisdom suggest that undecided voters are especially prone to campaign persuasion. Little has been done, however, in the way of uncovering the decision pathways followed by these voters. In this paper we seek to assess the undecided voters’ alleged campaign susceptibility and, most importantly, to explore which campaign considerations inform their final voting decisions. Our central finding is that their behaviour is driven to a larger extent by economic performance and less by leadership or other valence evaluations. This finding has important implications for parties’ campaign strategies in an era where the ranks of undecided voters are steadily expanding from one election to the other.