Changing Demographics, Changing Votes? Local Demographic Changes and Vote Choice

• In Event: How Spatial Context and Institutions Affect Behavior and Distributive Outcomes

Abstract

In recent years, the immigration issue and broader questions of demographic change have become highly salient in American politics, and some scholarship connects these issues with Donald Trump's unexpected 2016 victory. One strand of prior research indicates that local influxes of immigrants or unfamiliar ethnic groups can generate threatened political responses in the affected communities. In this paper, we examine whether local demographic changes helped drive Trump's 2016 general election victory. To do so, we compile a novel precinct-level data set for six key states, including precinct-level turnout measures generated through the voter file. We also use the voter file data to accurately weight Census data, providing us with a rich set of precinct-level demographic measures. In total, this procedure provides us with a data set of more than 27,000 precincts from Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Overall, our analyses uncover little evidence that communities which experienced influxes of Latino/a residents were more likely to shift to the GOP in 2016.

Authors

• Daniel J. Hopkins, University of Pennsylvania

• Seth J. Hill, University of California, San Diego

• Gregory Huber, Yale University