Grief and Anger: Disentangling the Turnout Effects of COVID-19

• In Event: COVID-19 and Voting Behavior

Abstract

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) has upended normal routines across the United States, and it is not clear how the pandemic structured turnout in the 2020 presidential election. On the one hand, resource models of turnout indicate that household disruptions such as the death of a loved one can reduce turnout; political threat literature, on the other hand, indicates that perceived (potential) harm from political actors can be mobilizing. Given the widespread perception that the government mishandled the pandemic, and the racially concentrated nature of COVID-19 deaths, voters most impacted by COVID-19 might thus have received two opposing treatments. Individual-level death records (including cause of death) are available from Washington State, which I will leverage to identify registered voters who lived with individuals who died from COVID-19, measuring their 2020 turnout against voters who lived with individuals who died from other causes, and voters who did not live with anyone who died. By using each voter’s historical turnout, I will employ a triple-differences model to disentangle the effects of COVID-19 on 2020 turnout and will explore evidence of racial heterogeneity. Administrative data, however, cannot uncover underlying mechanisms. These analyses will therefore be supplemented with national survey data, which I will use to explore whether voters who have stronger feelings about the federal government’s handling of the pandemic were differentially mobilized than voters who have few opinions on the federal response.

Author

• Kevin Thomas Morris, Brennan Center for Justice