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As attempts to combat partisan gerrymandering transition from proposals to the Supreme Court to state-based districting commissions, it is time to ask two questions. First, how well did commissions in the 2010 round of redistricting perform as neutral decision makers? We answer that question with applications to each of the three independent commissions (AZ, CA, and WA) and four other commission forms (IA, NJ, NY, and VA) in place for post-2010. We take as the neutrality criterion the idea that a commission would produce a district plan that comports with a partisan outcome that could be expected from a set of approximately 10,000 computer generated plans adhering to minimalist constraints of contiguity, compactness, and equal populations. Our results indicate three of seven commissions produced suspect results that redounded to the benefit of one party or the other: pro- Democrat in Arizona; pro-Republican in New Jersey and Virginia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This article seeks to understand the effect unified government has on seat loss in midterm elections. Methods: Using data from the 1950 to 2018 midterm elections, I use Ordinary Least Squares regression models to determine the effect of unified government on seat loss. Results: I find that unified government increases the number of seats a president's party loses during a midterm election. In addition, unified government reduces the number of seats saved by presidential approval and increases surge and decline effects. Conclusion: Unified government explains why Democrats have traditionally performed worse during midterm elections. The results also indicate that rather than a surge and decline, midterm elections are a counter‐surge to the surge in support the president's party receives in the previous presidential election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are female candidates less likely than male candidates to attract votes or win elections? We conduct a large-n longitudinal analysis employing survey and observational data from every two-party congressional race over a 12-year period (2006–2018) and connect individual-level theory and evidence with aggregate-level results. We demonstrate that candidate gender significantly influences congressional vote-choice and election outcomes. Holding other variables constant, we show that male Republican and male independent voters are significantly less likely to vote for female Democratic candidates, but do not assess a similar penalty on female Republican candidates. Perceived ideological distance does not explain the lack of support for female Democrats—however, variation in candidate quality does: Female Democratic candidates can attract the support of male Republican and male independent voters when they have a qualifications advantage, but are penalized when they are merely "as qualified." At the aggregate-level, female Democratic candidates with a qualifications advantage are as likely as males to win elections; but are significantly less likely than males to win when qualifications are held constant. The proportion of male Republicans and male independents in a district determines the extent of the penalty, with women's electoral prospects declining as this proportion increases. Women can win, but they need to be highly qualified and strategic about the races in which they emerge. These findings contribute to our understanding of the micro- and macro-level factors that shape women's electoral fortunes; and advance the goal of representational equality by helping candidates and campaigns concentrate their efforts on the most winnable voters and districts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial/ethnic minorities and women continue to be underrepresented in public office in the United States. Here, we evaluate the role of general election political party support for women and minorities in structuring these inequalities, as a key part of general election success is support from party networks. With detailed data on party support and the demographics of congressional candidates, we use two difference-in-differences strategies to leverage within-district and candidate-constant change over time. Thus, we are able to separate the effect of race/ethnicity and gender from other factors we demonstrate to be associated with party support. We find that, all else equal, Democratic and Republican minority nominees do not receive less support than their white counterparts. We also find that white women receive more party support from Democrats than Democratic men or minority women in the general election and that this support is more responsive to changes in electoral competitiveness. These findings suggest that party elites may provide additional support to candidates from underrepresented groups in the general election to broaden their appeal to voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a new data set of state political party bylaws and demographics of state party chairs, I evaluate whether women were more likely to run for Congress during the 2018 midterm elections from parties with higher levels of gender diversity. I construct three measures of gender diversity, whether each party was chaired by a woman, granted committee membership to an allied women's group, and required gender parity among their committee members. Democratic parties are more likely to be chaired by a woman and to require gender parity among their members, but Republican parties are more likely to grant membership to allied women's groups. Considering the implications of these rules, I find Democratic women were more likely to run for Congress representing parties that grant membership to an allied women's group and parties chaired by a woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is tough‐on‐China campaign rhetoric cheap talk or a signal of policy attention? Analyzing China‐related campaign advertisements during the 2010 midterm elections and subsequent cosponsorship of China‐related bills, we find that campaign ads are a noisy predictor of legislative attention. Challengers who attacked on China were more likely to cosponsor China‐related legislation, while incumbents who were attacked for being soft on China took tougher positions on China after reelection. By demonstrating the correspondence between anti‐China campaign appeals and subsequent legislative attention, our findings add to a growing body of evidence linking campaign rhetoric to members' legislative agendas. This research note provides the first evidence demonstrating the connection between campaign appeals and legislative attention on a foreign policy issue like China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 elections brought to an end one of the most divisive and historic campaigns in the modern era. Former Vice President Joe Biden was elected the 46th President of the United States with the largest number of votes ever cast in a presidential election, defeating incumbent President Donald Trump in the process. The record turnout was especially remarkable in light of the ongoing pandemic surrounding COVID-19 and the roughly 236,000 Americans who had died of the virus prior to the election. This article examines the electoral context of the 2020 elections focusing on elections in both the House and Senate. More specifically, this article examines the candidates, electoral conditions, trends, and outcomes in the primaries as well as the general election. In doing so, we provide a comprehensive descriptive analysis of the climate and outcome of the 2020 congressional elections. Finally, the article closes with a discussion of the broader implications of the election outcomes on both the incoming 117th Congress as well as the upcoming 2022 midterm election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study of the 2018 congressional midterms demonstrates how voting patterns and political attitudes vary across a spectrum of urban and rural areas in the United States. Rural America is no more a monolith than is urban America. The rural-urban gradient is better represented by a continuum than a dichotomy. This is evident in the voting results in 2018, just as it was in 2016. We found that the political tipping point lies beyond major metropolitan areas, in the suburban counties of smaller metropolitan areas. Democrats enjoyed even greater success in densely populated urban areas in 2018 than in 2016. Residents of these urban areas display distinctive and consistent social and political attitudes across a range of scales. At the other end of the continuum in remote rural areas, Republican candidates continued to command voter support despite the challenging national political environment. Voters in these rural regions expressed social and political attitudes diametrically opposed to their counterparts in large urban cores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the enduring connection of localism and place-based roots shared between many elected leaders and their constituents, which previous work has either ignored or improperly specified. I argue that representatives of the U.S. House with these roots—meaning authentic, lived experience in their districts prior to their officeholding—sustain more supportive constituencies in primary election stage. Using an original 7-point index of local biographical characteristics of incumbents seeking renomination from 2002 to 2018, I find that deeply-rooted incumbents are less than half as likely to receive a primary challenge, and on average perform more than 5 percentage points better in their primary elections when they are challenged. These gains take place even after taking district partisanship, national political conditions, incumbent ideology, and other primary factors into account, and should induce scholars to reconsider the importance of local representation even amidst a nationalizing political culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research asserts that coalitions of party leaders, interest groups, and activists will cooperate to support the nomination of mutually acceptable candidates in primary elections. In this article, I utilize an original data set containing FEC contributions and expenditures data for 1648 candidates who ran in open seat primary elections for the US House from 2006 to 2016 to measure the extent and effects of coordination among interest groups and party organizations. I find that Democratic-aligned interest groups and party leaders coordinate more often and with a more positive substantive effect than their Republican counterparts. Moreover, I provide evidence that, with the advent of super PACs in the second half of the 2010 primary cycle, a small number of interest groups can act as a latent threat to broader coalitions that unite behind a candidate using independent expenditures to outspend the broader coalitions. This increased resource parity has tangible representational consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Losing elections is a political reality for most candidates. While much fanfare was made of the historic number of women who won in 2018, three times as many women ran and lost. And although we know much about the reasons that motivate women to run in the first, far less is known about the decision-making processes of women who lose and run again. How do women who were once motivated rebound for another campaign and election? We address this question, working with a unique, exploratory data set of interviews with women who ran for Congress in 2018 and lost. Our analysis offers some important insights on how women who rebound think about their loss, and their decision-making processes. We find compelling evidence that women's paths to office continue to differ from men's, reminding us of the shortcomings of a one-size-fits-all model for candidate emergence or reemergence. We conclude with the foundation of a gendered theory of electoral persistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The record high number of women who ran for the U.S. Congress during the midterm elections led many journalists to proclaim 2018 as another "Year of the Woman." Although not every female candidate was successful, this large number of women running for office provides the opportunity to advance our understanding of the ways in which women present themselves to their voters. Using the "Biography" pages of more than 1,500 2018 congressional campaign websites, we use a structural topic model to examine how these candidates present themselves to their constituencies. In doing this, we find great variance in the presentation styles of women running for Congress in 2018. We also find that prior political experience, more so than gender, is the primary driver in influencing how candidates (both men and women) present themselves. Experienced candidates use similar styles that highlight their past political work while amateur candidates are more likely to use "values-driven" language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-constituent donors constitute an increasingly important fundraising base for members of the U.S. House. These donors are theorized to be seeking "surrogate representation" by buying additional representation rather than relying solely upon representation provided by their own House members. However, precisely why they contribute in this way remains unclear. Using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Studies (CCES) 2008–2014 in a series of logistic models, I investigate whether self-reported donors make contributions to House races outside of their home states for policy or partisan reasons. I uncover evidence that surrogate seekers make their out-of-state contributions to recover partisan representation and to gain additional partisan and policy representation. Further, conservative issue stances significantly increase the likelihood of out-of-state giving more so than liberal stances suggesting conservative donors have less difficulty identifying surrogate representatives. Taken together, the results suggest surrogate seekers are strategic and politically sophisticated with respect to their giving choices and motivations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The 2018 House midterm elections were notable for the number of female candidates who ran and for the extraordinary sums of campaign funds these candidates raised. Both were fueled by the women's marches of 2017 and 2018, the #MeToo movement, and intense opposition to Trump (Adkins and Dulio 2020; Herrnson et al. 2020; Jacobson 2019). In this paper, we explore the intersection of these two phenomena. We show that non-incumbent Democrats, particularly women, running in U.S. House races in 2018 were especially successful raising small donations. Examining preliminary data for the 2019–20 cycle, we then show that the new Democratic freshmen elected in 2018—now incumbents—have sustained their small-dollar fundraising efforts, with women again outpacing men. We conclude by discussing the extent to which heightened reliance on small donations may mark a durable shift in fundraising practices and if so, how such a shift might impact the future politics of the House. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the longstanding underrepresentation of blacks in Congress, political science research has not settled on the cause. While there is increasing evidence that racial attitudes affect vote choice in today's congressional elections, how this effect interacts with the race of the candidates is unknown. This study addresses this debate by analyzing novel survey, census, and candidate data from the Obama era of congressional elections (2010–2016) to test whether racially prejudiced attitudes held by whites decrease their likelihood of supporting black Democratic candidates and Democratic candidates as a whole. In line with theoretical predictions, this paper finds that Democratic House candidates are less likely to receive votes among white voters with strong racial resentment toward blacks, and black Democratic candidates fare even worse. These findings help to explain the persistence of black legislative underrepresentation and contribute to theories of partisan racial realignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though African-American and Latino electoral success in state legislative and congressional elections continues to occur almost entirely in majority-minority districts, minorities now have new opportunities in districts that are only 40–50% minority. This success can primarily be explained in terms of a curvilinear model that generates a "sweet spot" of maximum likelihood of minority candidate electoral success as a function of minority population share of the district and the proportion of the district that votes Republican. Past racial redistricting legal challenges often focused on cracking concentrated racial minorities to prevent the creation of majority-minority districts. Future lawsuits may also follow in the steps of recent successful court challenges against racially motivated packing that resulted in the reduction of minority population percentage in a previously majority-minority district in order to enhance minority opportunity in an adjacent non-majority-minority district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas the preponderance of studies on public appeals evaluates their impacts on mass public opinion, we investigate behavioral responses—in particular, the willingness of donors to contribute to candidates for public office. As appeals, we identify and code the online messages from all 2018 candidates for Congress, winners and losers alike, about both Donald Trump himself and his signature policy initiative, immigration reform; and as behavioral responses, we track candidates' daily itemized fundraising totals. What Republican candidates for Congress say about Trump, we find, bears significantly on their ability to raise money. In the immediate aftermath of complimenting the president, Republicans secured a modest increase in fundraising; when they criticized him, however, they promptly suffered a substantial decline. We do not observe comparable evidence for Democratic candidates. Our findings are robust to a wide variety of measurement and modeling strategies, and expand our understanding of the political stakes of public appeals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of important limitations in using observed contribution behavior or surveys to assess how donors respond to candidate issue positions, we present novel experimental evidence about how habitual donors (individuals who contribute above average amounts, multiple times, and in consecutive elections) respond to candidate issue positions. Using a vignette design, we provide causal evidence about the support for two types of divergence from typical candidate issue position bundles—being too extreme or bipartisan. We show "typical" candidates outperform all others in terms of likelihood of attracting donations, primary votes, and general election votes. We also find that donors' responsiveness to positions vis-à-vis a non-donor sample is not solely driven by partisan intensity and key demographics (i.e., high educated, high income, age, etc.). These results provide evidence that party-consistent positioning among candidates and incumbents may be reinforced by donors' opposition to issue positions that diverge from the party-standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of gender-ideology stereotypes suggest that voters evaluate male and female candidates in different ways, yet data limitations have hindered an analysis of candidate ideology, sex, and actual election outcomes. This article draws on a new dataset of male and female primary and general election candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives from 1980 to 2012. I find little evidence that the relationship between ideology and victory patterns differs for male and female candidates. Neither Republican nor Democratic women experience distinct electoral fates than ideologically similar men. Candidate sex and ideology do interact in other ways, however; Democratic women are more liberal than their male counterparts, and they are advantaged in primaries over Republican women as well as Democratic men. The findings have important implications for contemporary patterns of women's representation, and they extend our understanding of gender bias and neutrality in American elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este artículo analizamos una parte de la nor-matividad que rige a las candidaturas indepen-dientes (ci) para diputados locales en México. Por un lado, examinamos el porcentaje de firmas de apoyo ciudadano que exige la ley y el tiempo que se otorga para obtenerlo. Por el otro, mostramos evidencia sobre la implementación de este nuevo derecho político en las elecciones para diputados locales de 2015 y 2016. Los objetivos son desta-car la diferencia normativa y práctica entre los es-tados, medir el nivel de dificultad para lograr el registro como candidato independiente y, mediante la comparación de dos casos similares, destacar algunas variables que podrían explicar la disparidad en el número de este tipo de candidatos. / This paper analyzes part of the legislation on independent candidates for local congressional seats in Mexico. The author examines the number of signatures required and the time constraints for placing a candidate on the ballot and explain how this new political right was exercised in the 2015 and 2016 local congressional elections. The objectives are to underline the normative and practical differences among different states, measure the level of difficulty in registering independent candidates, and, by comparing two similar cases, point out a few variables that might explain the disparity in the number of this kind of candidacies.