Democratic Presidential Candidates Research Articles

The Big Peach Divided: Demographic-Electoral Transitions and Geographic Polarization in Atlanta Metropolitan Area Counties

Like much of the Southern United States, Georgia was once overwhelmingly Democratic. Towards the end of the 20th century, however, it became a stronghold for the Republican party. By the late 2010s, the Peach State was transformed into an electoral battleground, delivering crucial victories to both parties in federal and statewide elections. In 2020, Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state in 28 years. The Atlanta Metropolitan area has been at the center of these political shifts due to rapid and ongoing demographic changes that reflect and amplify the urban-rural divide. Voters in the region are geographically concentrated in a Democratic-dominated core and a Republican-dominated exurban periphery. Caught in between these zones are suburban areas, which are growing and diversifying at a rate much faster than the national average. As they do so, they are joining the Democratic core, while Republican voters are increasingly concentrated in smaller, outlying counties. These patterns are re-defining the state’s politics and provide an accelerated example of what we will likely see in other metropolitan areas of the United States in the future.

Racial Bias and U.S. Presidential Candidate Preference

Abstract Much research has suggested that Republican candidates in U.S. presidential elections benefit from voter bias against non-White groups. The present study supplements this research by including in the analysis bias against Whites. Estimates from the American National Election Studies 2020 Time Series Study indicated that a nontrivial percentage of the U.S. population has a bias that disfavors Whites, with this bias more prevalent among Democrats than Republicans. Further analyses estimated the extent to which the type of voter racial bias that favors Republican presidential candidates offsets the type of voter racial bias that favors Democratic presidential candidates. Estimates for the 2020 U.S. presidential election indicated that the two-party vote share for Donald Trump was higher among voters who rated Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians/Asian-Americans equal to each other on 0-to-100 feeling thermometers than among the full population of two-party voters, suggesting that Donald Trump was disadvantaged on net by the electorate including racially biased voters. These results call into question research that has used an unrepresentative set of racial attitudes to suggest that, in recent U.S. presidential elections, only Republican candidates have benefitted from racial bias among the electorate.

Fertility Rates in Red and Blue States: Before and After COVID-19

The fertility rate is a common measure of population growth or decline. Before the pandemic, the U.S. fertility rate steadily declined and dropped an additional 4 percent in 2020, the year the first case of COVID-19 was reported in the U.S. Fertility rates in 2021 rebounded 1 percent from the rate in 2020, but did not move in tandem across all states. This study aims to determine how fertility rates changed one year before, during, and after the pandemic between red states and blue states that voted, respectively, for the Republican or Democratic presidential candidate in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections. Fertility rates were, on average, significantly higher all three years in red states than in either blue states or purple states, namely states that changed color from red to blue between 2016 and 2020.

Political Memoir, Celebrity, and the Reclamation of Feminism: Gendered Self-representation in Julia Gillard’s My Story and Hillary Clinton’s What Happened

Abstract Offering a close textual analysis of My Story (2014), the memoir of Australia’s first woman Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, and What Happened (2017), by the 2016 US Democratic Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, this article explores their attempts—as is becoming common for celebrities—to use the memoir form to attempt to regain some control over their public personas and their feminisms. Focusing on the kind of feminist selves they seek to bring into being through these memoirs, this article examines the rhetorical strategies they each deploy to disrupt the dominant gendered narratives that came to circulate during their time in power and beyond.

Diplomatic Security Failure in Benghazi, Libya, September 11, 2012

AbstractTerrorists attacked the United States diplomatic compound and adjoining CIA Annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012. Despite repeated warnings from officials about the security risks in Tripoli and Benghazi, we argue that intelligence, security, and organizational deficiencies within the Department of State created vulnerabilities contributing to the deaths of four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stephens. Scholarly assessment of these failures has been precluded as a consequence of the incident’s use in partisan attacks. Republicans in Congress used investigations into the incident to damage presumed 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then President Obama’s secretary of state. Setting aside political considerations and examining the failures that led to the attack is important to protect diplomatic personnel abroad in the future.

The Effects of Polarized Evaluations on Political Participation: Does Hating the Other Side Motivate Voters?

Abstract This study examines whether rising polarization in Americans’ partisan judgments has positive implications for political participation. Drawing on cross-sectional and panel survey data, we find evidence that polarized judgments are related to pre-election intent to vote, as well as to post-election self-reported voter turnout. Polarized evaluations also predict greater reporting of participation in campaign activities beyond voting. Polarization in candidate evaluations consistently has more of an impact than affective polarization. However, our results suggest that polarization in evaluations of both parties and candidates includes an expressive component that does not necessarily translate into political action. Roughly one-quarter to one-third of the actual change in turnout can potentially be attributed to polarization in evaluations of Republican and Democratic presidential candidates.

Public attitudes toward organized labor

AbstractObjectiveDespite declining and historically low membership, labor unions remain important and relevant actors in American politics. Accordingly, we have learned a good deal about the economic and political consequences of labor unions and union membership. However, we know less about the dynamics, determinants, and political consequences of public attitudes toward organized labor.MethodsI use a variety of survey data to (1) track public support for labor unions over time, (2) to examine the microlevel determinants of labor attitudes, and (3) to examine how such attitudes shape voting behavior in national elections.ResultsFirst, I show that American public opinion has consistently been “pro‐labor” and that such sentiment is growing in recent years, despite historically low levels of union membership. Second, I show that while the strongest individual‐level correlate of union support is labor union affiliation, pluralities, and in some cases majorities, of nonunion‐affiliated Americans hold “pro‐labor” attitudes as well. Finally, I show that labor union attitudes significantly predict (among both union and nonunion‐affiliated Americans) support for the Democratic presidential candidate, net of partisanship, ideology, core political values, and macroeconomic conditions.ConclusionOverall, these results show that low levels of union membership do not imply an “anti‐union” mass public. These findings also demonstrate that attitudes toward labor unions are politically consequential.

Gender dynamics on Twitter during the 2020 U.S. Democratic presidential primary

The Twitter social network for each of the top five U.S. Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 was analyzed to determine if there were any differences in the treatment of the candidates. This data set was collected from discussions of the presidential primary between December 2019 through April 2020. It was then separated into five sets, one for each candidate. We found that the most discussed candidates, President Biden and Senator Sanders, received by far the most engagement from verified users and news agencies even before the Iowa caucuses, which was ultimately won by Mayor Buttigieg. The most popular candidates were also generally targeted more frequently by bots, trolls, and other aggressive users. However, the abusive language targeting the top two female candidates, Senators Warren and Klobuchar, included slightly more gendered and sexist language compared with the other candidates. Additionally, sexist slurs that ordinarily describe women were used more frequently than male slurs in all candidate data sets. Our results indicate that there may still be an undercurrent of sexist stereotypes permeating the social media conversation surrounding female U.S. presidential candidates.

Parliamentary Dress

Parliamentary Dress

Have You Come a Long Way, Baby, Since 2008?: One Major Step Forward with Missteps Along the Way

ABSTRACT The 2020 American election saw a record-breaking number of women vying for the Democratic presidential nomination and ended with Kamala Harris shattering the second-highest, hardest glass ceiling—the vice presidency. This significant event should not be taken for granted, but it is a mistake to assume sexism is no longer prevalent in American politics. This essay furthers our 2009 analysis of media frames that applied Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s archetypes of women leaders—iron maiden, sex object, mother, pet—to coverage of women seeking the presidency and vice presidency since 2008. We find substantial evidence that the iron maiden and sex object are still common frames and evolved based on changing trends, specific women, and racial stereotypes. We conclude by arguing these frames have real-world implications for how women candidates are evaluated and how they might impact a woman’s chances to win the presidency.

Homelessness, Politics, and Policy: Predicting Spatial Variation in COVID-19 Cases and Deaths.

When COVID-19 began to spread in the United States, the first public health orders were to hunker down at home. But for the vulnerable people experiencing homelessness, especially those sleeping outdoors, retreating to a private dwelling was not possible. This suggests that places with greater homelessness would also have elevated COVID-19 infections. This paper examines how spatial variation in unsheltered homelessness was related to the cumulative number of cases and deaths from COVID-19. Although Continuums of Care (CoCs) with more households receiving welfare, without internet service, and more disabled residents had a higher rate of COVID-19-related cases and deaths, CoCs with more unsheltered homelessness had fewer COVID-19-related deaths. More research is needed to explain this counterintuitive result, but it may reflect the bicoastal pattern of homelessness which is higher where government intervention, community sentiment, and compliance with rules to promote the common welfare are greater. In fact, local politics and policies mattered. CoCs with more volunteering and a higher share of votes for the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate also had fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths. Yet, other policies did not matter. Having more homeless shelter beds, publicly assisted housing units, residents in group quarters, or greater use of public transportation had no independent associations with pandemic outcomes.

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

Labor's End: How the Promise of Automation Degraded Work

The evolving roles of US political partisanship and social vulnerability in the COVID-19 pandemic from February 2020-February 2021.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had intense, heterogeneous impacts on different communities and geographies in the United States. We explore county-level associations between COVID-19 attributed deaths and social, demographic, vulnerability, and political variables to develop a better understanding of the evolving roles these variables have played in relation to mortality. We focus on the role of political variables, as captured by support for either the Republican or Democratic presidential candidates in the 2020 elections and the stringency of state-wide governor mandates, during three non-overlapping time periods between February 2020 and February 2021. We find that during the first three months of the pandemic, Democratic-leaning and internationally-connected urban counties were affected. During subsequent months (between May and September 2020), Republican counties with high percentages of Hispanic and Black populations were most hardly hit. In the third time period -between October 2020 and February 2021- we find that Republican-leaning counties with loose mask mandates experienced up to 3 times higher death rates than Democratic-leaning counties, even after controlling for multiple social vulnerability factors. Some of these deaths could perhaps have been avoided given that the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions in preventing uncontrolled disease transmission, such as social distancing and wearing masks indoors, had been well-established at this point in time.

A New Democratic Era?

This article examines changes in general elections in Pennsylvania from 1984 to 1996. The county level vote of New Democrat Bill Clinton is compared with that of traditional Democrats, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis. Clinton won Pennsylvania by gaining votes in the traditionally Republican suburban counties around Philadelphia. Compared to that of previous Democratic presidential candidates, Clinton's percentage of the vote actually declined in the Democratic counties of western Pennsylvania.

The Politics of Welfare Retrenchment: Evidence from Mass Medicaid Disenrollment in Two States

AbstractIn 2005, Missouri and Tennessee tightened eligibility for their public health insurance programs, resulting in widespread coverage losses. Leveraging county-level variation in subsequent disenrollment, I show that voters in Tennessee punished the incumbent governor for the Medicaid cuts. In Missouri, by contrast, disenrollment had no impact on the subsequent gubernatorial election but did increase support for Democrats in 2006 state legislative elections, possibly due to the strategic entry and exit of candidates. In both states, the loss of Medicaid coverage was associated with lower support for Democratic presidential candidates, although these declines appear part of a longer-term trend that preceded the coverage loss. The results speak to the potential political costs of welfare spending cuts and the electoral consequences of reducing income-targeted social programs.

Facing the Competition: Gender Differences in Facial Emotion and Prominence in Visual News Coverage of Democratic Presidential Primary Candidates

This study considered the impact of gender on visual coverage of the top 12 candidates in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary. Using Microsoft Azure’s Face API, we analyzed 9,529 still images from 43 mainstream news sources for facial emotion (happiness, anger, neutrality) and prominence (close-up, medium, long shots). We found visual evidence for an age-old narrative that undermines confidence in women’s leadership fitness: They were presented as emotionally less composed than men. Although we found no gender differences for facial prominence per se, its interaction with facial emotion gave nuance to gender differences in visual coverage of leadership performances.

Do house prices affect campaign contributions?

AbstractIndividual campaign contributions are the largest source of financing for U.S. presidential and congressional candidates, though the body of research examining why people give remains small. To help understand these decisions, we estimate the causal impact of house prices on donations across campaigns and parties using an instrumental variables strategy. Our results indicate that an increase in house prices increases ZIP code‐level donations to Democratic presidential and congressional candidates, with minuscule or no effect for Republican candidates. The effects in areas with a greater proportion of renters are larger than areas with more homeowners. Since this population is likely to experience higher rents as a result of house price increases, this suggests that pleas for policy may inspire giving. Further, areas with the highest fraction of college educated residents also see the largest effects, when compared to less‐educated areas, suggesting a wealth effect exists as well.

Public Opinion and the Candidate Spouses in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary

Abstract The 2020 Democratic Presidential Nomination contest featured an unusually diverse array of candidates. It also featured a historically diverse set of presidential candidate spouses including multiple men and the first openly LGBTQ+ candidate spouse. Spouses have long been among the most important surrogate for presidential candidates because the public views them as an authentic window into the candidate’s suitability for the presidency. Prior surveys of public opinion towards presidential candidate spouses have been conducted only during the general election phase, capturing the public’s views only of the spouses of Democratic and Republican candidates securing the nomination. In this study we draw on a unique nationally representative survey of 400 likely Democratic voters, asking them what they thought of the spouses of the top four presidential candidates in national polling as of the start of the calendar year 2020: Jill Biden, Chasten Buttigieg, Bruce Mann, and Jane Sanders. We use this data to explore the public’s assessment of this diverse group of candidate spouses and the implications for the traditionally gendered role of First Lady.

Blue bird in a coal mine: How 2020 Democratic presidential candidates framed climate change on Twitter

ABSTRACT Climate change is a consensus issue among US Democrats, yet even within this agreement there can be divergence. Rooted in scholarship on rational choice theory and framing, this study content analyzes how the top four 2020 Democratic presidential candidates differentially framed climate change on Twitter. Results revealed that (a) progressive versus moderate Democrats constructed climate change narratives befitting their intraparty ideologies, (b) candidates created cohesive framing strategies across Entman’s framing functions and a newly proposed function of framing called ”affected publics,” and (c) climate change frames were integrated with the campaign’s overarching themes and issue foci.

The Dynamics of Democratic Breakdown: A Case Study of the American Civil War

Abstract The 2020 election raised fundamental questions about the future of American democracy. Although the Democratic presidential nominee Joseph Biden won a decisive victory in the Electoral College and the popular vote, President Donald Trump refused to accept defeat. For weeks after the election, Trump falsely claimed that Democrats had stolen the election. In an unprecedented step for a defeated incumbent president, he pressured Republican election officials and legislators to help him overturn the election results. Trump’s attacks on American democracy culminated on January 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob invaded the United States Capitol Building to disrupt the Electoral Vote Count. In the aftermath of the 2020 election controversy, national polls found that over 90% of Americans believe that American democracy is in danger. Since the election, experts on both ends of the political spectrum have warned of the possibility of a full-fledged democratic breakdown in the United States. This article places America’s political crisis in historical context by examining the only democratic breakdown in the nation’s history: the Civil War. Following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 election, eleven southern states seceded from the Union. The conflict that ensued cost over half a million lives and left one-half of the United States in physical and economic ruin. This article makes three main points. First, a dispute over election rules did not cause the Civil War. Instead, the war resulted when the dominant political class in the South—slaveholders—rejected the principle of majority rule. American history thus demonstrates that even in the case of an election of unquestionable integrity, a disgruntled extremist minority might still break the country apart. Second, the slaveholders feared that if they put the issue of secession to a popular referendum, the non-slaveholding majorities in southern states might vote against it. To achieve their goal of destroying the Union, therefore, slaveholders dictated special rules for the secession votes in their states. After Lincoln’s election, southern state legislatures delegated the issue of secession to state conventions. Across the South, slaveholders manipulated the convention election rules to ensure the result they wanted: break-up of the federal union. Third, and finally, northerners viewed the war as a battle for the survival of democracy itself. They recognized that no democratically held election would ever be binding if losers could simply break free and form their own government. Northerners thus rallied around the Lincoln administration and supported the Union war effort through four bloody years of battle. The Union’s victory vindicated democracy as a form of government. The Confederacy’s crushing defeat in 1865 demonstrated that democracies could successfully navigate even the most extreme forms of civil disorder. Most important of all, the Civil War era gave rise to a dramatic expansion in the inclusiveness of American democracy. Ironically, therefore, the United States government emerged stronger in 1865 than it had been when the war began in 1861.