Speak Up and Dribble: How the WNBA Changed the 2020 Senate Race in Georgia

• In Event: More Than Leisure and Play: Race and Gender Politics in American Sport

Abstract

2020 was a year of activism across sports leagues, with many athletes and leagues taking stands in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Research has shown how athletes’ activism can change political attitudes and behaviors. In this article, I investigate how it can impact actual political events. I focus on one specific event during the summer: the WNBA throwing its support behind Raphael Warnock in his Georgia Senate race after Kelly Loeffler, the incumbent Republican senator and WNBA team owner, criticized the BLM movement. Warnock credited the WNBA support for being a turning point in the election, bringing attention and donations to his campaign and launching him toward a successful runoff election. In this article, I investigate the claim that the WNBA provided a decisive boost to Warnock’s campaign in the 2020 Georgia Senate race. I look at two potential key sources of this boost: extra donations and attention to the Warnock campaign. For donations, I rely on FEC, Census and A. Bonica’s CF-Score data to understand how the WNBA changed the amount, source and characteristics of the donations (group versus individual, in state versus out of state, gender and race of the donors). I also use Twitter and newspaper data to look at whether and how the WNBA’s support changed how the race was covered and followed. I use a combination of descriptive and observational methods to isolate the effect of the WNBA support from other potential explanations for Warnock’s success in the race.

Author

• Angele Delevoye