Republican Candidates Research Articles

COVID-19 Infections and Mortality in Florida Counties: Roles of Race, Ethnicity, Segregation, and 2020 Election Results.

PurposeThis study investigates the association of racial and ethnic composition, segregation, and 2020 presidential election voting results with COVID-19 infections and deaths in Florida counties.MethodsFlorida county COVID-19 infection and death counts reported through March 2021 were supplemented with socioeconomic characteristics and 2020 presidential results to form the dataset employed in this ecological study. Poisson regression analysis measured the association of infection and mortality rates with county demographic and economic characteristics, then assessed the moderating role of county political preferences.ResultsCounties with higher proportions of Black residents experience disproportionately higher COVID-19 infection and mortality rates. Disparities are further inflated in counties with larger Republican vote shares. That voting effect extends to Hispanic population proportions and segregation, both of which are associated with higher COVID-19 infection and mortality rates in more Republican-leaning counties.ConclusionsCommunities challenged by pre-existing health disparities, segregation, and economic hardship before the pandemic bear disproportionate risk of COVID-19 infection and mortality. Factors associated with voter preference for the 2020 Republican presidential candidate compound those problems, worsening consequences for all county residents, suggesting deeper structural health challenges.

The Mixed Effects of Candidate Visits on Campaign Donations in the 2020 Presidential Election

Recent scholarship on the effect of candidate visits in presidential elections has found that appearances by candidates appear to mobilize both supporters and opponents. Specifically, in the 2016 presidential election, donations to campaigns of the visiting presidential candidates increased, but—in the case of Republican nominee Donald Trump—so did donations to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. In this paper, we extend this research by assessing the effect of visits on campaign donations by presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2020 election. We find evidence that visits by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had strong mobilizing and counter-mobilizing effects, increasing donations to both campaigns. We find weak evidence that visits by Joe Biden increased contributions to his campaign, but we do not find evidence that his visits had a counter-mobilizing effect, and we find no evidence that visits by Mike Pence affected donations in either direction.

They’re Not Just Words: The Verbal Style of U.S. Presidential Debate Rhetoric

ABSTRACT Televised U.S. presidential debates are the most-watched, if not the most-researched, political events in history. While prior studies have largely focused on general election contests, this longitudinal content analysis used DICTION software to parse the effects of election level, partisanship, and time on the candidates’ word choices or verbal styles in 35 general and 121 primary election debates. The results indicate that general election debate rhetoric contained significantly more optimism and certainty than primary debate rhetoric. Additionally, the rhetorical cleavage between the parties was located in the primary debates where the Democratic candidates used significantly more rhetorical realism, activity, and commonality than Republican candidates who used more rhetorical certainty. Further, we also found significantly less rhetorical certainty in the 2010s and the 2020 general election debate rhetoric than in the 1960s and 1970s. Finally, we found interaction effects on optimism and realism that also supported our propositions that U.S. presidential candidates’ rhetoric is meaningful at the semantic level, and that their verbal styles may reveal informative perspectives on the speakers and their speech acts.

How the ‘Law and Order’ Trope Individualizes Racism and Inverts Racial Vulnerability

During the 1968 US presidential campaign, Richard Nixon infamously ran as the “law and order” candidate, invoking in his Republican nomination acceptance speech the domestic protests against racial injustice and the Vietnam war. In the 2020 presidential campaign, Donald Trump revived Richard Nixon’s “law and order” slogan as part of his response to the Black Lives Matter protests after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on May 25th. In this paper, we examine how Trump and his supporters use the “law and order” trope to move public discourse about racism away from critical understandings that view racism as embedded in institutionalized practices and policies, and toward the racial ideology encapsulated in what Jane Hill (2008) calls the “folk theory of race and racism.” Whereas the racial justice movement attempts to center public discourse on systemic racism in policing, the “law and order” trope works to decenter that discourse by individualizing racism and thereby minimizing concerns about the system-wide pattern of racism. As it reinforces the dominant understanding of racism that underpins much US public discourse, the “law and order” trope inverts the racial vulnerability so that Black bodies and racial justice protesters are seen as threats rather than victims of state-sanctioned violence. We illustrate these ideas by drawing from examples of public discourse in response to the summer 2020 racial justice protests, including excerpts from Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham’s shows on Fox News in the days immediately following Floyd’s killing through Ingraham’s interview of Trump at the end of the summer. Our analysis explains how the discourse spawned by the “law and order” trope reinscribes key assumptions about racism, dismisses calls for racial justice, and perpetuates the racial status quo — thereby posing a substantial barrier to changing the policies and practices that lead to racial inequities in policing.

The intersection of race and party: voter perceptions and candidate selection in U.S. Senate elections

ABSTRACT Previous literature suggests that Democratic candidates of color receive less support than white Democrats on Election Day. It has been suggested that this reduced support is due to voters’ ideological perceptions of people of color being more liberal than whites, which translates into perceptions of candidates. However, these studies are frequently limited to white voters’ perceptions of Democratic candidates of color, and the full relationship linking race/ethnicity, to ideological placement, to vote choice has rarely been tested. In the current study, we examine how both the race/ethnicity and party affiliation of Senate candidates shape perceptions of their ideology and vote choice among people of all race and ethnicities. Using the 2006–2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Study, we find support for our hypothesis that Black Democrats are generally perceived as more liberal than white Democrats. These perceptions have real consequences, resulting in fewer votes. Conversely, Black Republican candidates are perceived to be just as conservative—and Hispanic Republicans even more conservative—than white Republican candidates. Findings suggest that the link between race/ethnicity, perceptions of ideology, and electoral success vary according to the race/ethnicity and party of candidates.

Does the Alt‐Right still matter? An examination of Alt‐Right influence between 2016 and 2018

AbstractIn this paper, we use panel data from the 2016 and 2017 waves of the Voter Study and the 2018 American National Election Studies (ANES) Pilot, to better understand the relative influence of the Alt‐Right on mainstream US politics in the Trump era. Given the degree of formal alignment between Trump and a number of key voices within the movement, we first examine the strength of the association between affect for the Alt‐Right and support for Republican Party between 2016 and 2018. We also examine relative levels of affect for the Alt‐Right among Whites between this period, tracking a number of important changes. We find that, while affect for the Alt‐Right was strongly associated with support for Republican candidates such as Trump in the 2016 election cycle, we find a somewhat weaker relationship between affect for the Alt‐Right and White support for Trump and down ballot Republican candidates in 2018. We also find that, after rising between 2016 and 2017, levels of affect for Alt‐Right appear to have declined by 2018. The results are therefore reflective of exponential rise of the Alt‐Right during the 2016 election and the movement's subsequent implosion after the 2017 ‘United the Right’, rally in Charlottesville, VA.

A Boom in Fortunes: How the Presence of Oil Affects Republican Support in North Dakota

In this paper, we aim to assess how the presence of oil rigs and the associated economic spillovers affect political support for the business- friendly party assumed to be the Republicans for our purposes. We analyse the state of North Dakota from 2000-2016 due to its oil boom beginning in 2006, taking the support of the Republican presidential candidate by county, and the presence of oil to be the basic empirical strategy. The specific strategy we used was conducting a difference-in-difference (diff-in-diff) analysis comparing the western half of the state where the oil rigs are located to the eastern half of the state where there are no oil rigs. We find that oil rigs and their presence do have a significant result on the support for Republican presidential candidates in elections post-2008. We conducted a minor extension where we conducted analysis on whether or not the presence of oil spills counteracts the effect experienced by the spill. We find that this result is not as significant and large in magnitude.

(In)congruities between Political Messages and Popular Music: An Analysis of Campaign Songs in U.S. Presidential Elections

ABSTRACT This study presents a rhetorical analysis of the popular songs selected by the major party candidates for their campaigns during the U.S. presidential elections from 1972–2016. Our analysis reveals that music is a form of political expression that, depending on the way it is incorporated, can either bolster or hinder a candidate’s platform. Both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have largely made use of congruity in their campaign songs, with that congruity only increasing over time. In particular, findings indicated that musically incongruent songs that are politically reinforcing could be a significant boost for candidates striving to expand their base. The research also indicated that Republican candidates tend to select songs that are positive and patriotic in nature, while their Democratic counterparts incorporate songs that offer a critique of the nation.

Ronald Reagan’s “To Restore America”: Political Lifeline in the 1976 Primary

ABSTRACT This paper examines Reagan’s 1976 speech, “To Restore America,” identifying the importance of his role as citizen, and his use of narrative, locus of the irreparable, and polarization in his bid to persuade voters to choose him as the Republican nominee for president. The speech helped save Reagan’s campaign, and perhaps, his political career, and it changed the terms of the primary campaign by putting Gerald Ford on the defensive and made Reagan into a kind of true representative of the Republican party.

Ideological Representations in the Nomination Acceptance Speeches of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton: A Contrastive Study

The study examines the correlation between language and ideology through critical discourse analysis and semiotics of two nomination acceptance speeches of the 2016 American election. It is an interdisciplinary study that combines different fields: ideology, ideological structures, and semiotics. Through a comparative analysis between the speeches of two nominees who run for the American presidency: the Republican candidate, Trump, and the Democratic candidate, Clinton, the study explores the ideological polarization of the self and Other presentations that each candidate applies concerning three themes: internal problems, foreign affairs, and immigration. Besides, the internal problems theme is sub-classified into five sub-issues: crime, violence, economy, American rights, and health care. In this regard, the study focuses mainly on uncovering the hidden ideologies that each speaker utilizes either verbally and nonverbally to reveal how far each speaker can successfully manipulate the language and utilize signs to serve his/her political intentions. Therefore, the ideological square model of Dijk (2006a) is utilized for the verbal analysis to provide an analysis of polarization techniques of the self and Other. The ideological structures and strategies model of Dijk (2006b) is also applied to do a linguistic analysis along with Kress (2010) multimodal social semiotic approach for the nonverbal analysis. The study revealed that Trump and Clinton are varied in presenting self and Other presentations. For the nonverbal analysis, Trump concentrated more on denigrating the negative Other-presentation than boasting the positive self-presentation. On the other hand, Clinton focused on lauding the positive self-presentation than disparaging the negative Other-presentation. However, they both agreed on neglecting the mention of the good properties of the out-group and the bad properties of the in-group. Concerning to the nonverbal analysis, Trump and Clinton also utilize more semiotic modes to boast the self-presentation and perform fewer semiotic modes that denigrate the Other-presentation. On the contrary, Clinton focuses on emphasizing the positive self-presentation than disparaging the negative Other-presentation. Besides, the study introduced a modified model that helps to analyze nomination acceptance speeches verbally and nonverbally.

Technology Threats to Employment, Issues, and Candidate and Party Preferences in the United States

Research indicates that susceptibility to having one’s job replaced by technology is associated with candidate and party preferences in affluent democracies, but there is little understanding of why. We investigate whether workers exposed to technology are more supportive of candidates and parties that prioritize the economy, unemployment, and welfare state programs, currently or with historical reputations for doing so. In the United States which we examine here, however, technology threatening jobs has not been politically salient and partisan attachments are strong, which could limit issue-based conversions in candidate preferences. To examine these possibilities, we use survey experiments randomizing exposure to information about the individual-level threat of losing one’s job to technology and hypothetical candidate issue priorities in experiments with and without party labels. We find that there are some differences in “issue premiums” among high-exposure individuals in the party labels experiment, but whether individuals are made aware of their exposure does not explain any issue-based variation in candidate preferences. We also find that when made aware of their exposure to technology, high- and low-exposure Republicans and low-exposure independents become slightly more supportive of Republican candidates.

More than “Fake News”?

Abstract While the debate around the prevalence and potential effects of fake news has received considerable scholarly attention, less research has focused on how political elites and pundits weaponized fake news to delegitimize the media. In this study, we examine the rhetoric in 2020 U.S. presidential primary candidates Facebook advertisements. Our analysis suggests that Republican and Democratic candidates alike attack and demean the news media on several themes, including castigating them for malicious gatekeeping, for being out of touch with the views of the public, and for being a bully. Only Trump routinely attacks the news media for trafficking in falsehoods and for colluding with other interests to attack his candidacy. Our findings highlight the ways that candidates instrumentalize the news media for their own rhetorical purposes; further constructing the news media as harmful to democracy.

Trust and tribulation: Racial identity centrality, institutional trust, and support for candidates in the 2020 US presidential election

AbstractWe examined how racial‐ethnic identity centrality, or the importance of race/ethnicity in people's self‐perceptions, affected peoples’ support for the Democratic and Republican candidates in the 2020 US election. We explored this association by examining the mediating role of trust in important social institutions. In Study 1, we examined these effects by comparing the pattern of relationships among people of color (POC) and white people, using a sample of 177 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants. In Study 2, we expanded our focus on different racial‐ethnic groups, by comparing effects for Black, Latinx, Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI), and white participants, using a sample of 530 MTurk workers. Although there were a few findings that ran contrary to our expectations, the two studies generally found that trust in institutions that challenge the status quo, such as the media, explained the relationship between identity centrality and support for candidates among POC, especially Black and Latinx participants. We also found that trust in institutions that uphold the status quo, such as police and courts, explained the relationship between racial‐ethnic identity centrality and support for candidates among white people.

Public Sphere and Misinformation in the U.S. Election: Trump’s Audience and Populism Indicators in the COVID-19 Context

(1) In a context of an unprecedented global pandemic, an analysis of the effects of political disinformation on audiences is needed. The U.S. election process culminating in the official proclamation of Joe Biden as president has led to an increase in the public’s distrust of politics and its leaders, as public opinion polls show. In this context, the change in the electorate’s attitude towards Donald Trump, throughout the legislature and especially after the elections, stands out. So, the objective of this research was to determine, through the measurement of surveys, the views of the electorate on the behavior of the Republican candidate and the possible causes that determine the loss of confidence in his speeches and comments. (2) The methodology, a comparative quantitative-qualitative approach, analyzed the responses collected by Pew Research waves 78 and 80 (2020 and 2021). Specifically, the surveys analyzed were 11,818 U.S. adults in the case of the American Trends Panel 2020 and 5360 in the case of the same panel for 2021. (3) Results showed the change of position of the electorate, especially Republicans, in the face of the policy of delegitimization of the process and Trump’s populist messages on Twitter. (4) Conclusions pointed in two directions: society has decided not to trust Trump, while at the same time showing distrust about the correct management of the electoral ballot.

Skin tone bias and the US presidency: The portrayal of a Black incumbent and a Black candidate in newspaper photographs

AbstractAcross cultures, darker skin tone is associated with lower social status. We propose that Black politicians are subject to skin tone biases in US newspapers, with hostile biases resulting in them being portrayed as more dark‐skinned. We hypothesized that such biases occur as a function of negative racial attitudes. We contrast this with an ingroup bias hypothesis, according to which partisans denigrate Black politicians of the other side, but not their own side. The present research evaluated skin tone biases toward President Barack Obama, a Democrat, and Dr. Ben Carson, a Republican, in US newspapers. We collected published photographs of President Obama during his first term in office (n = 3781 from 34 newspapers) as well as for Dr. Carson during his 2015–2016 presidential run (n = 1049 from 53 newspapers) from high‐circulation newspapers, which had endorsed Democratic or Republican presidential candidates. Blind coders rated the darkness of Obama's and Carson's skin tone. Multilevel modeling revealed that Democratic‐leaning newspapers portrayed both Obama and Carson as lighter than Republican‐leaning newspapers. Findings did not support a partisan ingroup bias. We conclude that Black politicians of either party are subject to a skin tone bias, where Republican‐leaning newspapers portray them with darker skin tones, regardless of whether they are a Democrat or a Republican.

Lessons from the Use of Ranked Choice Voting in American Presidential Primaries

Grounded in experience in 2020, both major political parties have reasons to expand use of ranked choice voting (RCV) in their 2024 presidential primaries. RCV may offer a ‘win-win’ solution benefiting both the parties and their voters. RCV would build on both the pre-1968 American tradition of parties determining a coalitional presidential nominee through multiple ballots at party conventions and the modern practice of allowing voters to effectively choose their nominees in primaries. Increasingly used by parties around the world in picking their leaders, RCV may allow voters to crowd-source a coalitional nominee. Most published research about RCV focuses on state and local elections. In contrast, this article analyzes the impact on voters, candidates, and parties from five state Democratic parties using RCV in party-run presidential nomination contests in 2020. First, it uses polls and results to examine how more widespread use of RCV might have affected the trajectory of contests for the 2016 Republican nomination. Second, it contrasts how more than three million voters in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries backed withdrawn candidates with the low rate of such wasted votes for withdrawn candidates in the states with RCV ballots. Finally, it concludes with an examination of how RCV might best interact with the parties’ current rules and potential changes to those rules.

Putting US First: How Outgroup Hostilities and Defense of the Status Quo Motivate White Evangelical Affect Toward Candidates in U.S. Elections 2004 to 2016

How do voters construct feelings toward inparty elites? More specifically, how do they do so when they lack a shared policy agenda or shared salient social identity with candidates beyond partisan identification? In this paper, I investigate this puzzle by developing a theory of Putting America First to explain white evangelical affect toward Republican presidential candidates from 2004 to 2016. Using ANES surveys from 2004 to 2016, I test the effectiveness of this model of candidate affect. I find that shared outgroup hostility, what I call Putting Us First, motivates positive affect for presidential candidates among white evangelicals, regardless of shared policy objectives and descriptive representation. Overtime, white evangelicals’ affect is driven by outgroup hostilities rather than Culture Wars values. Overall, this informs our understanding of voter affect toward candidates and the increasingly important role of social outgroup hostility in defense of the status quo.

On Modeling the Social-Psychological Foundations of Support for Donald Trump

Scholars have identified many social-psychological factors correlated with support for Donald Trump; however, attempts at modeling these factors tend to suffer from omitted variable bias on the one hand, or multicollinearity on the other. Both issues obscure inferences. Using two nationally representative surveys, we demonstrate the perils of including or failing to include many of these factors in models of Trump support. We then reconceptualize the social-psychological sources of Trump support as components of a broader “profile” of factors that explains Trump support in 2018 and vote choice in 2016, as well as attitudes about issues connected to Trump. Moreover, this profile—an amalgamation of attitudes about, for example, racial groups, immigrants, and political correctness—rivals partisanship and ideology as predictors of Trump support and is negatively related to support for mainstream Republican candidates. Our analyses suggest that Trump benefited from activating dimensions of public opinion that transcend traditional party cleavages.

Life expectancy and voting patterns in the 2020 U.S. presidential election

IntroductionIn the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, voters in communities with recent stagnation or decline in life expectancy were more likely to vote for the Republican candidate than in prior Presidential elections. We aimed to assess the association between change in life expectancy and voting patterns in the 2020 Presidential election. MethodsWith data on county-level life expectancy from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and voting data from a GitHub repository of results scraped from news outlets, we used weighted multivariable linear regression to estimate the association between the change in life expectancy from 1980 to 2014 and the proportion of votes for the Republican candidate and change in the proportion of votes cast for the Republican candidate in the 2020 Presidential election. ResultsAmong 3110 U.S counties and Washington, D.C., change in life expectancy at the county level was negatively associated with Republican share of the vote in the 2020 Presidential election (parameter estimate −7.2, 95% confidence interval, −7.8 to −6.6). With the inclusion of state, sociodemographic, and economic variables in the model, the association was attenuated (parameter estimate −0.8; 95% CI, −1.5 to −0.2). County-level change in life expectancy was positively associated with change in Republican vote share 0.29 percentage points (95% CI, 0.23 to 0.36). The association was attenuated when state, sociodemographic, and economic variables were added (parameter estimate 0.24; 95% CI, 0.15 to 0.33). ConclusionCounties with a less positive trajectory in life expectancy were more likely to vote for the Republican candidate in the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, but the Republican candidate's share improved in some counties that experienced marked gains in life expectancy. Associations were moderated by demographic, social and economic factors.

Study on the US Presidential Election Based on Neural Network

The world's most watched U.S. election is in a state of anxiety, with Republican candidate Donald John Trump and Democratic candidate Joe Biden will compete for the presidency this month. The two candidates will show different political positions and administrative options in different areas of development and domestic and foreign policy. The election of different candidates will have a great impact on the United States economy and the global economy, and will have a great impact on the trend of international relations. In response to question one, we need to analyze the possible impact of election of different candidates on the United States economy. We first quantitatively analyze the policy data of the two candidates obtained in the network in different fields. By merging the quantitative models of different fields, the AHP is used to calculate the weights of different fields, and the comparison between two candidates in each field and the impact on the American economy. According to the large data set collected, we do cluster analysis, and analyze and predict the impact of different fields by BP neural network model. For the second question, in order to analyze the impact of different candidate is elected to the Chinese economy, according to the problem a model for analysis, in order to improve the accuracy of the model, this part adds more considerations variables, at the same time, higher precision, based on genetic algorithm neural network model, after finishing the data concentration, 80% of the data used in the model, variables to determine index weight and threshold, the remaining 20% of the data by residual error calculation is used to model accuracy test. In view of question three, through the analysis of question one and question two and the actual situation, we can get the final winning candidate. And through the analysis of its economic and policy means to give China's economic countermeasures and policies in related fields. By referring to a large amount of data, this paper finally obtains the influence of different candidates on the united states, china and the global economy and politics through data visualization analysis of different candidates' policy claims in different fields. In order to further improve the model accuracy and computational efficiency, this paper also proposes to use Levenberg-Marquardt-based algorithm to solve the problem.