Can Elite Allegations of Electoral Fraud Demobilize Voters?

• In Event: Political Attitudes, Voters, and Voting in the States

Abstract

We examine the relationship between attitudes toward Trump and the decision to turn out in the 2021 Georgia runoff. At the precinct-level, we employ five alternative measures of Trump popularity and a specification with precinct fixed effects to show that precincts where Trump is popular experienced large relative declines in turnout in the runoff. We then undertake an individual-level analysis by employing statistical learning algorithms to characterize the relationship between stated Trump attitudes and respondent demographics. We predict Trump attitudes for each of the over 7.6 million registrants in the Georgia voter file. We estimate the relationship between turnout in the Georgia runoff and Trump attitudes using a variety of research designs that control for unobserved heterogeneity in turnout propensity. We find that Trump supporters experienced large relative turnout declines, 1.67 percentage points in our base specification, in the runoff. We discuss the causes and implications of these findings.

Authors

• Bernard L. Fraga, Emory University

• Zachary F. Peskowitz, Emory University

• James Szewczyk