(iPoster) Green Industrial Pork and the 2024 Presidential Election

• In Event: Poster Session: Elections, Campaigns and Voting Behavior & International Perspectives on Networks and Political Engagement
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Elections, Campaigns and Voting Behavior

Abstract

In recent years the study of presidential particularism has received considerable scholarly attention. However, presidents may have other objectives that influence the allocation of funds for political purposes. For example, the 117th Congress authorized trillions of dollars in federal spending to rebuild American infrastructure and facilitate the research, development, and manufacture of new clean energy technologies. News outlets and critics were quick to report that spending was disproportionately targeted to the battleground states most likely to decide the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election, while senior Biden officials maintained that the objectives of the spending included the deliberate re-shoring of manufacturing jobs lost to trade liberalization. Given the large number of manufacturing communities in rust-belt battleground states, though — formerly Democratic communities that have shifted Republican in the aftermath of trade deals — this might have amounted to the same thing: bring back jobs, and votes, in de-industrialized swing state communities. Further, following a uniform Republican swing in the 2024 election, including a Republican sweep of the swing states, some observers concluded that any particularistic efforts behind infrastructure and clean energy investments were unsuccessful in increasing Democratic support.

However, a uniform national swing is not good evidence for this conclusion. Hence, given the allocation of relevant funds, we set out to determine the true effect of infrastructure spending and green energy investment on changes in Democratic support between 2020 and 2024. To do so we utilize precinct-level vote returns, transaction-level data on federal infrastructure outlays, and the location, investment amount, and number of jobs created for private manufacturing sites announced under IRA incentives or lending. By constructing groups of ``control'' precincts for every ``treated'' precinct under various assumptions we compare shifts in Democratic vote shares between 2020 and 2024 between precincts that received sizable infrastructure investments or hosted new clean energy projects against control precincts without these allocations. Importantly, our research design allows us to account for the fact that the Harris campaign also campaigned hardest in the same swing state communities that got disproportionate shares of infrastructure funds and clean energy investments. Our preliminary results suggest a more nuanced interpretation of this spending's effect on voting behavior than previously assumed, with important implications for our understandings of presidential particularism and the electoral effects of spending.

Authors

• Thomas Chamberlain

• Lawrence S. Rothenberg, University of Rochester