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The violent conclusion of Trump's 2017-2021 presidency has produced sobering reassessments of American democracy. Elected officials' actions necessarily implicate public opinion, but to what extent did Trump's presidency and its anti-democratic efforts reflect shifts in public opinion in prior years? Were there attitudinal changes that served as early-warning signs? We answer those questions via a 15-wave, population-based panel 2007-2020. Specifically, we track attitudes including system legitimacy and election fairness, assessments of Trump and other politicians, open-ended explanations of vote choice and party perceptions, and Whites’ racial attitudes. Across measures, there was little movement in public opinion foreshadowing Trump's norm-upending presidency, although levels of out-party animus were consistently high. Recent shifts in public opinion were thus not a primary engine of the Trump presidency's anti-democratic efforts or their violent conclusion. Such stability suggests understanding the precipitating causes of those efforts requires attention to other actors including activists and elites.

Two prominent, compatible accounts contend that Asian Americans and Latinos are not strongly connected to America's political parties and that their partisanship is responsive to identity threats. Donald Trump's political ascent presents a critical test, as Trump reoriented the Republican Party by foregrounding anti-immigrant hostility. Here, we test these perspectives using one of the first-ever population-based panels of Asian Americans and Latinos fielded 2016 to 2018. Across various empirical tests, we uncover surprising strength and stability in respondents’ partisan identities. In a period of pronounced anti-immigrant rhetoric, these groups remained steadfast in their party affiliation. We also show that pan-ethnic identities were stable over this period, that partisanship can shape subsequent pan-ethnic identities, and that few respondents describe the parties with reference to ethnic/racial groups in either year. By 2016, pan-ethnic identities were already stably integrated with partisanship, with little evidence of situational shifts in response to identity threats.

The ability to cast a mail ballot can be an important safeguard to the franchise. But because there are often additional procedural protections to ensure that a ballot cast in person is counted, voting by mail can also jeopardize people's ability to cast a ballot that is counted. An experiment carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates both of these forces. Philadelphia city officials randomly sent approximately 47,000 Philadelphia voters postcards encouraging them to apply to vote by mail in the lead-up to the June 2, 2020 primary election. While the intervention increased the share of Philadelphia voters who cast a mail ballot by 0.4 percentage points (p=0.017)--or 3%--many of these additional mail ballots counted only because a last-minute policy intervention allowing mail ballots postmarked by Election Day to count.

COVID-19 has compelled officials to institute social distancing policies, shuttering much of the economy. At a time of low trust in government and high political polarization, Americans may only support such disruptive policies if recommended by politicians of their own party. A related concern is that some Americans may resist advice coming from "elite" sources such as government officials, public health experts, or the news media. We test these possibilities using novel data from an April 2020 online survey of 1,912 Pennsylvania residents. We uncover partisan differences in views on several coronavirus-related policies. Yet overall, respondents report strong support for social distancing policies and high levels of trust in medical experts. Moreover, a survey experiment finds no evidence of more negative reactions to or less support for social distancing policies when they are advocated by elites, broadly defined. Instead, respondents over 65 prove more likely to adopt expert-advocated positions.

Political scientists have increasingly deployed conjoint survey experiments to understand multi-dimensional choices in various settings. We demonstrate that the Average Marginal Component Effect (AMCE) constitutes an aggregation of individual-level preferences that translates into a primary quantity of interest to empirical election scholars: the effect of a change in an attribute on a candidate or party's expected vote share. This property holds irrespective of the heterogeneity, strength, or interactivity of voters' preferences and regardless of how votes are aggregated into seats. Overall, our results indicate the AMCE's central role in understanding elections, a conclusion buttressed by a corresponding literature review. We also provide practical advice on interpreting AMCEs. Finally, we propose, formalize, and evaluate the feasibility of using conjoint data to estimate alternative quantities of interest to electoral studies, including the effect of an attribute on the probability of winning.

Changes in partisan outcomes between consecutive elections must come from changes in the composition of electorate or changes in the vote choices of consistent voters. The extent to which electoral change is driven by composition versus conversion has critical implications for political systems including the nature of the electoral connection and politicians' strategies while campaigning and governing. Here, we analyze electoral change between the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections using administrative data. At the precinct level, the smallest geography at which vote counts are available, we merge election returns with individual-level turnout records from 37 million registered voters in six key states. While both factors aided the GOP in 2016 in some places, our analysis suggests that pro-GOP conversion among two-election voters was particularly impactful, especially in states including Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania where the pro-GOP swings were largest. Conversion among two-election voters remains critical to electoral change.

Immigration and demographic change have become highly salient in American politics, partly because of the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump. Previous research indicates that local influxes of immigrants or unfamiliar ethnic groups can generate threatened responses, but has either focused on non-electoral outcomes or has analyzed elections in large geographic units such as counties. Here, we examine whether demographic changes at low levels of aggregation were associated with vote shifts toward an anti-immigration presidential candidate between 2012 and 2016. To do so, we compile a novel, precinct-level data set of election results and demographic measures for more than 26,000 precincts in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. We employ regression analyses varying model specifications and measures of demographic change. Our estimates uncover little evidence that influxes of Hispanics or non-citizen immigrants benefitted Trump relative to past Republicans, and in fact suggest that these changes helped his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

The U.S. welfare state provides key benefits indirectly. The Affordable Care Act (ACA), for example, uses a package including exchanges, subsidies, and penalties to increase health insurance enrollment. Prior research indicates that indirect policies do not produce feedback effects on public opinion, but the ACA was unusually salient and complex. Can such indirect policies produce feedback effects, and are any such effects heterogeneous? Here, we use several data sets and inferential strategies to show that groups especially affected by the exchanges and the associated insurance mandate did shift their ACA attitudes, albeit in opposing directions and with more limited effects than descriptive analyses suggest. Among our findings, those who experienced rising local prices became more opposed to the ACA while those who stood to benefit from some changes to the individual markets became more favorable. Overall, positive changes in attitudes were offset by demographically concentrated, negative shifts among the uninsured.

In his campaign and first few years in office, Donald Trump consistently defied contemporary norms by using explicit, negative rhetoric targeting ethnic/racial minorities. Did this rhetoric lead white Americans to express more or less prejudiced views of African Americans or Hispanics, whether through changing norms around racial prejudice or other mechanisms? We assess that question using a 13-wave panel conducted with a population-based sample of Americans between 2008 and 2018. We find that via most measures, white Americans' expressed anti-Black and anti-Hispanic prejudice declined after Trump's political emergence, and we can rule out even small increases in the expression of prejudice. These results suggest the limits of racially charged rhetoric's capacity to heighten prejudice among white Americans overall. They also indicate that rather than being a fixed predisposition, prejudice can shift by reacting against changing presidential rhetoric.

Divisions between Whites and Blacks have long influenced voting. Yet given America's growing Latino population, will Whites' attitudes toward Blacks continue to predict their voting behavior? Might anti-Latino prejudice join or supplant them? These questions took on newfound importance after the 2016 campaign, in which the Republican candidate's rhetoric targeted immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere. We examine the relationship between Whites' prejudices, immigration attitudes, and voting behavior using a population-based panel spanning 9 years. Donald Trump's candidacy activated anti-Black but not anti-Latino prejudice, while other GOP candidates had no such effect. This and other evidence suggests that Whites' prejudice against Blacks is potentially activated even when salient political rhetoric does not target them exclusively. These results shed light on the continued political impact of anti-Black prejudice while deepening our understanding of the mobilization of prejudice. %They also illustrate a psychological mechanism through which rhetoric targeting one group may evoke longstanding cognitive associations about another.

Extensive research on racial threat suggests that white Americans living near black Americans adopt more negative racial attitudes. Theoretically, local inter-group exposure has been conceptualized as acting contemporaneously, despite political socialization research indicating that experiences in adolescence are especially influential. Here, we test the impact of adolescent racial contexts on whites' prejudice using two data sets. The first is the Youth-Parent Socialization Panel Survey, which followed one cohort from 1965 to 1997. The second is a population-based panel with novel measures of inter-group proximity conducted between 2007 and 2013. Our analyses demonstrate the enduring influence of adolescent contexts: while the racial composition of whites' current counties is not a consistent predictor of racial prejudice, the racial composition of their county during high school is. Exposure during one's formative years appears to increase racial prejudice decades later, providing new insight about the roots of racial threat and prejudice.

Issue frames are a central concept in studying public opinion, and are thought to operate by foregrounding related considerations in citizens' minds. But scholarship has yet to consider the breadth of framing effects by testing whether frames influence attitudes beyond the specific issue they highlight. For example, does a discussion of terrorism affect opinions on proximate issues like crime or even more remote issues like poverty? By measuring the breadth of framing effects, we can assess the extent to which citizens' political considerations are cognitively organized by issues. We undertake a population-based survey experiment with roughly 3,300 respondents which includes frames related to terrorism, crime, health care, and government spending. The results demonstrate that framing effects are narrow, with limited but discernible spillover on proximate, structurally similar issues. Discrete issues not only organize elite politics but also exist in voters' minds, a finding with implications for studying ideology as well as framing.

Retrospective voting is a central explanation for voters' support of incumbents. Yet despite the variety of conditions facing American cities, past research has devoted little attention to retrospective voting for mayors. Local economic conditions are widely reported, making them one likely source of retrospective voting. To test that possibility, we turn to the largest data set to date on big-city mayoral elections between 1990 and 2011. Neither crime rates nor property values consistently influence incumbent mayors' vote shares, nor do changes in local conditions. However, low city-level unemployment relative to national unemployment correlates with higher incumbent support. The urban voter is a particular type of retrospective voter, one who compares local economic performance to conditions elsewhere. Moreover, these effects are present only in cities that dominate their media markets. At a time when the audiences for local media are declining, this research suggests that those outlets play a critical role in facilitating retrospective voting.

Can randomized experiments at the individual level help assess the persuasive effects of campaign tactics? To answer that question, we analyze a field experiment conducted during the 2008 presidential election in which 56,000 registered voters in Wisconsin were assigned to persuasive canvassing, phone calls, and/or mail. We find that persuasive appeals by canvassers had two unintended consequences. First, they reduced responsiveness to a follow-up survey among infrequent voters, a substantively interesting behavioral response that has implications for the statistical analysis of persuasion experiments. Second, the persuasive appeals possibly reduced candidate support and certainly did not increase it. This counter-intuitive finding is reinforced by multiple statistical methods and suggests that contact by a political campaign can engender a backlash.

Immigrants' perceptions of discrimination correlate strongly with various political outcomes, including group consciousness and partisan identity. Here, we examine the hypothesis that immigrants' perceptions of discrimination vary across U.S. localities, as threatened responses by native-born residents may increase perceived discrimination among neighboring immigrants. We also consider the alternative hypothesis that barriers to the expression and detection of discrimination decouple native-born attitudes from immigrants' perceptions about their treatment. We test these claims by analyzing three national surveys of almost 11,000 first-generation Latino, Asian, and Muslim immigrants. The results indicate that immigrants' perceptions of discrimination hardly vary across localities. While anti-immigrant attitudes are known to be geographically clustered, immigrants' perceptions of discrimination prove not to be. This mismatch helps us narrow the potential causes of perceived discrimination, and it suggests the value of further research into perceived discrimination's consequences for immigrants' social and political incorporation.

A large literature has examined the factors that influence immigration attitudes. Yet prior tests have considered only a few immigrant attributes at a time, limiting their capacity to test several hypotheses simultaneously. This paper uses conjoint analysis to test the influence of nine randomized immigrant attributes in generating support for admission. Drawing on a two-wave, population-based panel survey, it demonstrates that Americans view educated immigrants in high-status jobs favorably, while they view those who lack plans to work, entered without authorization, come from Iraq, or do not speak English unfavorably. The results are consistent with norms-based and sociotropic explanations of immigration attitudes. Remarkably, Americans' preferences vary little with their education, partisanship, labor market position, ethnocentrism, or other attributes. Beneath partisan divisions over immigration lies a consensus about which immigrants to admit, a fact which points to limits in both theories emphasizing economic threats and those emphasizing cultural threats.

In recent decades, the diversity of Americans' news choices has expanded substantially. This paper examines whether access to an ideologically distinctive news source --- the Fox News cable channel --- influences vote intentions. It focuses on whether any such effect is concentrated among those likely to agree with Fox's viewpoint. To test these possibilities with individual-level data, we identify local Fox News availability for 22,595 respondents to the 2000 National Annenberg Election Survey. For the population overall, we find a pro-Republican average treatment effect that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Yet, when separating respondents by party, we find a sizable effect of Fox access only on the vote intentions of Republicans and pure independents, a result that is bolstered by placebo tests. Contrary to fears about pervasive media influence, access to an ideologically distinctive media source reinforces the loyalties of co-partisans and possibly persuades independents without influencing out-partisans.

Experiments demonstrate that elite rhetoric can influence public opinion through framing and related processes. Yet outside laboratories or surveys, real-world constraints might limit elites' ability to reshape public opinion. The 2009-12 health care debate provides an opportunity to observe the interplay of elite rhetoric and public opinion. To do so, this paper couples automated content analyses with population-based survey data from thousands of Americans. Multiple empirical tests uncover limited but real evidence of framing effects. The language Americans use to explain their opinions proves generally stable, although there is also evidence that the public adopts the language of both parties' elites in a roughly symmetric fashion. Elite rhetoric does not appear to have strong effects on Americans' overall evaluations of health care reform, but it can influence the reasons they use to justify their evaluations. Methodologically, the automated analysis of elite rhetoric and open-ended survey questions shows considerable promise in illuminating elite-mass interactions.

Certain explanations of Americans’ immigration attitudes emphasize threats to national identity and culture. But we do not know the specific sources of cultural threat, and we do not know whether it operates locally. In case studies of new immigrant destinations, native-born residents commonly voice concerns about the prevalence of Spanish, suggesting that foreign languages might be one such source of threat. This paper uses survey experiments to provide the first causal test of the impact of written Spanish on Americans’ immigration attitudes. One experiment was conducted online with a nationally representative sample while a second was embedded in an exit poll. The experiments show that Spanish has differential impacts depending on Americans’ prior contact with it. Among those who hear Spanish frequently in day-to-day life, seeing written Spanish induces anti-immigration attitudes. These findings suggest that language can foster cultural threat, and they highlight a mechanism through which local encounters can be threatening.

Perceptions of national economic performance are a cornerstone of American public opinion and of Presidential approval. Yet much of our knowledge about economic perceptions comes from political surveys conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to the recent increase in income inequality. This paper updates our understanding of economic perceptions by combining the 1978-2010 Michigan Surveys of Consumer Attitudes with various economic indicators. It first uses aggregate data to show that despite rising inequality, Americans of all incomes continue to agree about national economic performance. In past work, snapshots from elections create the impression that these assessments of economic performance are influenced only by income growth among the wealthy. Examining more than 215,000 respondents over three decades, however, we learn that income growth among the poor is frequently more influential. This paper thus identifies an attitudinal mechanism by which the poor’s economic condition can profoundly influence American politics.

This paper investigates the impact of one election procedure designed to enfranchise immigrants: foreign-language election materials. Specifically, it uses regression discontinuity design to estimate the turnout and election impacts of Spanish-language assistance provided under Section 203 of the Voting Rights Act. Analyses of two different data sets - the Latino National Survey and California 1998 primary election returns - show that Spanish-language assistance increased turnout for citizens who speak little English. The California results also demonstrate that election procedures an influence outcomes, as support for ending bilingual education dropped markedly in heavily Spanish-speaking neighborhoods with Spanish-language assistance. Small changes in election procedures can influence who votes as well as what wins.

In recent decades, many developed democracies have experienced high immigration, and public attitudes are likely to shape their responses. Yet prior studies of ethnocentrism and stereotyping make divergent predictions about how differentiated anti-immigration attitudes are. Some approaches contend that culturally distinctive immigrants will consistently generate increased opposition, while others predict that natives' reactions will depend on the cultural distinction in question and associated stereotypes. This paper tests these hypotheses using realistic, video-based experiments with representative American samples. The results refute the expectation that more culturally distinctive immigrants necessarily induce anti-immigration views: exposure to Latino immigrants with darker skin tones or who speak Spanish does not increase restrictionist attitudes. Instead, the impact of out-group cues hinges on their content and related norms, as immigrants who speak accented English seem to counteract negative stereotypes related to immigrant assimilation.

Does a black mayor’s inauguration influence American cities’ policies? The heated rhetoric surrounding some black-white elections suggests that it might. Past research is divided. Yet this question has not been addressed in years or with many observations. This paper uses novel data sets including 167 elections and 108 black mayors to examine their impact on fiscal and employment policies. Empirically, it uses multiple approaches including regression discontinuity design. In most observable policy areas, the inauguration of a black mayor leads to policies that are indistinguishable from cities where black mayors do not govern. Police hiring represents an exception, with black mayors hiring more black officers. These results suggest a disconnect between the racially polarized elections that produce black mayors and the governance that follows. They raise concerns about the potential of city elections to induce accountability, and they reinforce the centrality of criminal justice as an urban political issue.

U.S. cities are limited in their ability to set policy. Can these constraints mute the impact of mayors’ partisanship on policy outcomes? We hypothesize that mayoral partisanship will more strongly affect outcomes in policy areas where there is the less shared authority between local, state, and federal governments. To test this hypothesis, we create a novel data set combining U.S. mayoral election returns from 1990 to 2006 with city fiscal data. Using regression discontinuity design, we find that cities that elect a Democratic mayor spend a smaller share of their budget on public safety, a policy area where local discretion is high, than otherwise similar cities that elect a Republican or Independent. We find no differences on tax policy, social policy, and other areas that are characterized by significant overlapping authority. These results suggest that models of national policymaking are only partially applicable to U.S. cities. They also have implications for political accountability: mayors may not be able to influence the full range of policies that are nominally local responsibilities.

This paper uses the post-Katrina migration as an exogenous shock to test theories of contact and racial threat while minimizing concerns about selection bias. Drawing on a new survey of 3,879 respondents, it demonstrates that despite the national concern about issues of race and poverty following Katrina, people in some communities that took in evacuees became less supportive of spending to help the poor and African Americans. There is no evidence that direct contact with evacuees softened attitudes. Yet hypotheses based on racial threat are not sufficient, since they cannot explain why the evacuees provoked an anti-crime reaction in Houston and an anti-spending reaction in Baton Rouge. The results instead suggest a novel hypothesis that threatened responses to newcomers hinge on both local conditions and the coverage of their arrival in the local media. In-depth interviews, content analyses of media coverage, and a pre-Katrina survey provide additional evidence supporting this "politicized places" approach.