Abstract
This article studies the importance of entertainment TV for the selection of political leaders in the context of an important case study: Donald Trump's win in the 2016 presidential election and his previous role as host of the popular TV show “The Apprentice.” We find a positive correlation between TV ratings of The Apprentice and the county-level Republican vote share in 2016, but this correlation vanishes once we control for pre-existing voting and NBC viewership patterns. This null result is robust to different model specifications, measures of exposure to The Apprentice, and an extensive investigation of heterogeneous effects. Viewership of The Apprentice is also unrelated to Congressional election results, as well as support for Trump in survey data and the Republican primaries. These findings highlight the context-dependent importance of television for political leadership.
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