Linking Votes
A drag on the ticket? Estimating top-of-the-ticket effects on down-ballot races
Kevin DeLuca, Daniel Moskowitz & Benjamin Schneer
American Journal of Political Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists commonly attribute the poor performances of a party's down-ballot candidates to low-quality or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidates, but empirical evidence on this conventional wisdom is scant. We estimate the effect of candidate quality and ideology in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections on co-partisan vote shares in down-ballot U.S. House races. While naive estimates imply that top-of-the-ticket candidates influence down-ballot outcomes, after accounting for correlations in candidate quality/ideology across offices, we estimate near-zero statewide top-of-the-ticket effects on U.S. House elections. We similarly observe near-zero top-of-the-ticket effects in the further-down-ballot settings of state-legislative and county-legislative elections. Overall, voters exhibit a strong capacity to discern differences in quality and ideology across offices and incorporate this information into their vote choice throughout the time period under investigation. However, in line with other research, this link between candidate quality/ideology and election outcomes has weakened considerably in recent years.
Presidential approval, party brands, and candidate quality in U.S. national elections
Carlos Algara et al.
Research & Politics, November 2025
Abstract:
This article considers (1) presidential approval, (2) party brand differentials, as measured by the generic ballot, and (3) the presidential candidate polling differentials during the general election campaign to forecast the 2024 U.S. presidential and congressional elections. While all these three mass public opinion variables are leveraged to forecast collective partisan election outcomes, we consider the variables together as theoretically distinct determinants of partisan fortunes at both the executive and legislative levels and make the following contributions. First, using novel time-series data of mass opinion since 1937, we show that all three variables are weakly correlated and thus distinct conceptual and empirical measures of mass public assessments of partisan stimuli. Second, we use these three mass opinion variables to specify a unified model of U.S. national elections which better predicts variation in electoral outcomes compared to the standard forecasting approaches, finding that congressional election outcomes are predicted by party brands while presidential elections are predicted by presidential approval and the presidential candidate polling differentials heading into election day. Lastly, we validate our forecasting model using out-of-sample and 2024 forecasting predictions against other standard forecasting approaches.
The Drug Crisis and Voting Behavior
Thiago Moreira, Spencer Hamilton Goidel & Brenna Armstrong
Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this paper, we explore the electoral consequences of the opioid epidemic in the United States, particularly its relationship with the Republican vote share in US presidential elections. We argue that the worsening opioid crisis is associated with a shift toward the Republican Party, and that these gains result from a decline in both Democratic support and voter abstention. We test these expectations using county-level presidential election results and individual-level data. The findings show that increasing overdose death rates are associated with an increase in Republican votes and a decline in Democratic votes and voter abstention. Additionally, the survey analyses reveal that this relationship is strongest among independents. Independents are also more likely to support stricter border security and higher spending on law enforcement as drug death rates increase. Our study contributes to the growing literature on the political consequences of the drug crisis in the US by demonstrating how overdose death rates are associated with voting behavior, and identifying which voters are most likely to change their vote in response to this worsening situation.
The Housing Equation: Affordability's Role in Electoral Choice
Alan Tidwell et al.
University of Alabama Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
This study examines how housing costs influence voting patterns in U.S. presidential elections, with particular attention to differences between renters and homeowners. Prior research generally links rising housing prices to greater incumbent support, consistent with homeowners' incentives to preserve housing wealth. Our analysis, however, shows that in counties with a higher proportion of renters, rising house prices diminish support for incumbents. This effect is most pronounced in politically competitive swing states and among younger voters, for whom barriers to homeownership are especially salient. Measures of housing affordability yield parallel results: declining affordability erodes incumbent support among renters, while homeowners do not exhibit comparable reactions. By contrast, increases in rental rates do not consistently produce voter backlash, suggesting that renters' political behavior reflects broader aspirations toward homeownership, aligned with the American Dream narrative. These findings highlight the asymmetry of financial stakes across tenure groups and underscore the electoral salience of housing affordability in shaping political outcomes.
Political Information and Network Effects
Georgy Egorov et al.
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
Why do political campaigns so often yield unexpected results? We address this question by separately estimating the direct effect of a campaign on targeted voters and the indirect effect on others in the same social environment. Partnering with a local NGO during Argentina’s 2023 presidential election, we randomized the distribution of leaflets providing an expert assessment of the likely consequences of certain proposals by the outsider candidate Javier Milei. Exploiting Argentina’s unique sub-precinct election reporting system, we show that the campaign reduced Milei’s support among directly treated voters, as expected, but increased his support among untreated voters in treated precincts, producing a backfiring, net-positive effect for Milei. A pre-registered replication confirmed these opposite-signed effects. Using theory and a survey experiment, we show that the minority of voters who disbelieved the campaign were more motivated to discuss it with peers, convincing them to support Milei. This mobilization effect appears especially likely when campaigns criticize outsider candidates. Our results highlight how campaigns aimed at anti-elite candidates can unintentionally mobilize support for them.
Revisiting name recognition and candidate support: Experimental tests of the mere exposure hypothesis
Costas Panagopoulos, Donald Green & Philip Moniz
Research & Politics, November 2025
Abstract:
Often lacking adequate information to guide their votes, voters may be susceptible to subtle psychological influences, including name recognition. For decades, scholars have found that voters are more likely to cast ballots for candidates whose names they recognize. These arguments imply that exposure to little-known candidates’ names increases electoral support. But research has seldom demonstrated a causal effect consistent with this “mere exposure” hypothesis, particularly under real-world conditions. We conduct three sets of experiments exposing subjects to the names of challengers in a range of electoral contexts across the United States. Results yield little support for the hypothesis that exposure increases electoral support. As name recognition may be insufficient without party labels, we also conduct experiments providing the candidates’ party affiliations, again finding little evidence of an effect. These findings cast doubt on the hypothesis that candidates, particularly challengers, who merely make their names known will thereby win more votes.
Do Tuition Subsidies Raise Political Participation?
Daniel Firoozi & Igor Geyn
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025, Pages 354-378
Abstract:
Civic externalities motivate education expenditures, but estimates of the civic returns to large-scale education subsidies are scarce. We use 16 million financial aid applications and a regression discontinuity (RD) design to estimate how a tuition-free college program impacts political participation. We find that each of the 2.6 million awards increased a student's voter turnout rate by 4–12 percentage points in 2020, raising total turnout and Biden's margin of victory in the awarding state. We find evidence consistent with peer socialization, among other mechanisms, and show that the civic externalities of education spending can be large enough to sway elections.
From the Classroom to the Ballot Box: Turnout and Partisan Consequences of Education
Ethan Kaplan, Jörg Spenkuch & Cody Tuttle
NBER Working Paper, October 2025
Abstract:
We estimate the impact of education on voter turnout and partisanship using a regression discontinuity design based on school-entry cutoffs and exact date of birth. Drawing on nationwide administrative voter registration data, we find that individuals who were slotted to enter school one year earlier are more likely to vote and more likely to register as independents. These reduced-form effects may be driven by changes in educational attainment or by differences in the quality of individuals’ educational experiences. We leverage age-related heterogeneity in effect sizes to isolate the role of educational attainment. Our results imply that an additional year of schooling increases turnout by about 3 percentage points.
The potential existential threat of large language models to online survey research
Sean Westwood
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 25 November 2025
Abstract:
The advancement of large language models poses a severe, potentially existential threat to online survey research, a fundamental tool for data collection across the sciences. This work demonstrates that the foundational assumption of survey research — that a coherent response is a human response — is no longer tenable. I designed and tested an autonomous synthetic respondent capable of producing survey data that possesses the coherence and plausibility of human responses. This agent successfully evades a comprehensive suite of data quality checks, including instruction-following tasks, logic puzzles, and “reverse shibboleth” questions designed to detect nonhuman actors, achieving a 99.8% pass rate on 6,000 trials of standard attention checks. The synthetic respondent generates internally consistent responses by maintaining a coherent demographic persona and a memory of its prior answers, producing plausible data on psychometric scales, vignette comprehension tasks, and complex socioeconomic trade-offs. Furthermore, its open-ended text responses are linguistically sophisticated and stylistically calibrated to the level of education of its assigned persona. Critically, the agent can be instructed to maliciously alter polling outcomes, demonstrating an overt vector for information warfare. More subtly, it can also infer a researcher’s latent hypotheses and produce data that artificially confirms them. These findings reveal a critical vulnerability in our data infrastructure, rendering most current detection methods obsolete and posing a potential existential threat to unsupervised online research. The scientific community must urgently develop new data validation standards and reconsider its reliance on nonprobability, low-barrier online data collection methods.
The Roots of the Modern American Presidential Campaign
Francisco Pino & Laura Salisbury
NBER Working Paper, November 2025
Abstract:
Campaign tours have become an essential component of U.S. presidential elections. How and when did they begin? We explore the early history of in-person political campaigning in the United States by reconstructing the first presidential campaign tours from historical newspaper clippings. We analyze the decision to campaign, the determinants of where candidates campaigned, and the outcomes of early in-person campaigns. We document an evolving norm of campaigning. This norm evolved well after the expansion of the railroad network. While a national railroad network was a necessary precondition for campaigning to evolve, our findings point to other factors — such as growing urbanization and the decline of federal patronage machines — playing a more important role in the growth of campaigning. We find evidence that being visited on a campaign tour increased voter turnout in a county. However, we do not find a clear effect of campaign visits of a given candidate on his electoral performance.