Race and the Tea Party in the Old Dominion: Split-Ticket Voting in the 2013 Virginia Elections

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 2013, Virginia Republicans nominated two Tea Party conservatives for statewide office: Ken Cuccinelli and Earl Walker Jackson, Sr. They differed in two significant respects: (1) Cuccinelli has more political experience, and (2) Cuccinelli is white and Jackson is black. For this article, we used this quasi-experimental opportunity to examine the racial resentment explanation for Tea Party support. We found no evidence of voting patterns consistent with this characterization of Tea Party supporters. There was no significant gap between Tea Party support for Cuccinelli and Jackson, and Tea Party supporters were far more likely to cast ballots for both candidates than they were to choose one or the other. In fact, we found that racial resentment ispositivelyassociated with support for Jackson. In this election, neither Tea Party support nor racial resentment negatively affected support for the black Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.