Swing Votes: Changes in Political Affiliations and Election Outcomes

Audience 1>> My name is Colin from SMU in Dallas. And how do you respond to the data that's been showing that white working class voters, specifically in northern states like Wisconsin and Michigan. And then I Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and across the state of Florida, are moving towards more of the Republican side when they've historically been more Democrat side?

What's your comments on that?

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's certainly still being worked out. Every election is different, every election brings slightly different coalitions to the table. My sense is that those changes have a lot to do with education. People with college degrees have been moving towards the Democratic Party for some time, and people without college degrees towards the Republican Party.

So, there's some sense that these different economic prospects and different sets of values that come with a college degree are making, for example, Hispanic voters in the Rio Grande Valley. And maybe union autoworkers in northern Michigan, feel like they have more in common with one another and with Republican elected officials than with Democrats.

I think that's probably the leading explanation right now.

>> Audience 2: Hi.

>> Elizabeth Elder: Hi.

>> Audience 2: So I have a question in regards to group politics and partisan politics. I don't know if you've read Danielle Thompson, but her explanations in terms of why ideological moderates are running less and less and how that also has a similar influence to the gender differences you talked about.

So I was wondering if you could speak on that a little bit.

>> Elizabeth Elder: Could you say a little bit more just for people who aren't familiar with that?

>> Audience 2: Yes. So just the idea that polarization and the increases in extremism with the people and candidates who feel empowered to run, people in the middle or in between those ideological positions are less incentivized as a function of feeling discouraged by the current political system and policy outcomes.

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, this is a great point. And I think is related to some of the data we saw earlier on the fact that the people most engaged in politics are more ideological, are more kind of vitriolic, or more likely to be in these echo chambers.

These are all things that were not so much features of politics 30 years ago, necessarily, and have become increasingly so. I think there are a lot of explanations for this, and no one can explain everything. Certainly social media exposes people to more negativity than was possible 20 or 30 years ago in the course of a campaign.

And it's also the case that running for office has gotten a lot more expensive. People are just spending a lot more money on campaign ads and on mobilization, and all of these things than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And to raise that money, you need to appeal to donors.

And people who give a lot of money to politics do not tend to be moderates. Other than people who give for business reasons, they tend to have a particular ideological stake. And so I think a big part of the story here is the need to raise more money incentivizes people to align more with these more extreme donor bases.

>> Audience 3: Thank you. My question is about the degree to which the winner take all design of our political system at the national level affects the engagement numbers that you talked about. So, for example, I live in the state of Oklahoma. If you're a Democrat in the state of Oklahoma, there's not much reason to go to the polls.

Just like I assume if you're a Republican, California, you feel the same way. So if your choice at the top of the ticket doesn't really have much impact, how much does that influence the participation discussion that you pointed out?

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, that's a great question. The number of things that influence voting in itself are so great that it's a little bit hard to tell exactly what's doing the work.

It's definitely the case that in proportional representation systems, where if 30% of people voted for Republicans, the Republicans get 30% of the seats from that district, that can make people feel more like their desires are reflected in the outcome of the election. But I think it's also the case that, especially in historical times, national elections were not the most salient ones for a lot of people.

State elections can be very competitive, local elections can be very competitive, even within parties in ways that encourage people to think that there are stakes in elections, even if there's not kind of a classic Democrat-Republican fight at the top of the ticket. And so when those things are top of mind, rather than the national political contest, then people, even in single party states, can get engaged in politics as well.

But I think you're definitely right that a kind of disaffected attitude based on not getting any policy wins at the level of the state can make it a little bit difficult for people to invest time and energy in voting.

>> Audience 4: Hi, thank you for your talk. I think it was really insightful.

And I had a question related to essentially galvanizing events. So, if you look at what happened in Ohio quite recently, the election was held quite randomly and there was still a large voter turnout. And then obviously, when President Trump ran in 2016, he received a lot of votes from people who previously voted for President Obama.

So my question is, are there certain events or certain things that you think influence voting behaviors and can make people break away from the traditional groups they associate themselves with?

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind. The kinds of people who answer polls are, usually, they are either Democrats or Republicans.

That's probably the way they're gonna vote. They're probably not gonna change that for very much. But as we saw, there's a really huge proportion of the public that is not always engaged. They're not gonna vote unless they feel like they have a particular reason to in any given case.

And those are the kinds of people where it's much harder to predict exactly what they're gonna do. It might really be about one issue that they feel really strongly about, or one candidate that they feel really strongly about. And so a lot of this kind of stability just doesn't apply in those cases.

So, this is why you see often a lot of turnout surges in these elections, like in Ohio or in 2016. A group of people who didn't feel like they had a clear side in the previous political contest suddenly felt like they had a place in the conversation. So that's certainly possible.

If those elections happen when you're quite young, they can be habit-forming. So if your first election is one where you feel really involved in the topic, whatever it happens to be, that can persist across the course of your lifetime. But if you're in your mid fifties, suddenly you get motivated to vote in one election, that's not generally likely to be a pattern that sticks.

So, the effects of those kinds of galvanizing events can be really different based on when they occur in your lifetime.

>> Audience 5: Hi, my name is Noid. I'm a student at the University of Chicago, and this research is just super fascinating. So thank you. One of the things I was hoping you could talk a little bit more about was kind of how an idea, I know you said sometimes they're tied to values, but even how those are all tied to one party, and how, especially thinking about the example that you gave with abortion and kind of the split in voting as a result.

So yeah, if you could just elaborate more on that.

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, so it is generally the case that the parties emphasize more different values from one another. Republicans tend to emphasize more these issues of kind of loyalty and patriotism, family, and kind of care within the family unit.

Democrats tend to emphasize more these ideas of equality or equity, or of kind of redistributive fairness. And so these are the kinds of things that can come up as different sets of ideas that are being talked about in campaigns. And then people feeling more or less tied to those kinds of broader values can shape how they align in partisan politics.

And generally, it used to be the case that first you would have a value. First, you would decide, I am gonna vote for the party that thinks that women should stay home or something like that, and then that affects your partisan choice. But that has become almost reversed in recent years in a really interesting way.

People are kinda picking up on values from their parties more than picking their parties based on values. And obviously, there's still a lot of people doing both. But that's something that's really shifted in recent times and I think will continue to shift as polarization continues to exacerbate.

>> Audience 6: Thank you so much for speaking with us today.

My name is Sarah, and I'm studying economics and public policy at U-Chicago and I took a class called Politics and Policy. And one of the articles that I really liked reading was called why do congresswoman outperform congressman. And it's actually written by a colleague, Ms. Anzia and my professor, Mr. Berry.

And it talks about how this bias that you talked about against women actually result in the most talented women succeeding in the process. And I was wondering what your thoughts on these are. Thank you.

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, that's a great paper and Sarah's a great colleague. So just to describe the findings a little bit for people who aren't familiar.

It's generally the case, as we talked about, that women have a little bit higher hurdles when it comes to their maybe professional life or resources to running for office. And so on average, women need to be a little bit more qualified than men before they feel ready to run for office.

So maybe a male candidate might feel like he needs five years of experience in law before he can run for office, a woman might feel like she needs eight. And so by the time women and men get to Congress, the women tend to be a tiny bit more qualified.

And they've waited a little longer, they've had to overcome a little bit more in terms of getting these connections from gatekeepers. And so, at least for a certain period of time, the women who served in Congress were more productive in terms of sponsoring bills and sponsoring important legislation and getting things done than were the men in Congress.

So this is a really interesting kind of effect that you could see in a lot of cases where there's discrimination is, that the people that do succeed despite discrimination are a little bit better quality in some particular measures. As it, hopefully, gets easier for women to run for office, they don't have to feel like they need three extra years before they feel qualified.

Maybe we'll see women in Congress exhibiting the same mediocrity as men in Congress. That's the dream.

>> Audience 7: Hi, thank you so much. My name is Valerie. I'm a student from Grinnell College, and I really appreciate your talk. It was extremely interesting just to hear about your findings on race and gender.

I was particularly interested in your section on group politic mobilization. Specifically, you noted that place in a zero sum game, conflict groups tend to be less willing to engage in costly behavior. I'm interested in your thoughts when it comes to nationalist independence groups. I think my first thought became independence referendums in Catalonia, and just kind of the willingness and what you think made them willing to go to the voter box.

Something that I kind of am also interested is just, are voting systems even enough to encapsulate whether or not this is the correct form of mobilization? But I was just interested in your thoughts.

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, that's a great question, and certainly not an area that I know a ton about.

So, I'm speaking as a only moderate expert here. But I think that a lot of these kind of seeking national boundaries movements tend to be less based on economic self-interest or something like that than they are on shared identity, and a desire for respect, and a desire for kind of the ability to make one's own culture the center of one's political life.

So, I think quite clear that the group membership here is really a lot of what's doing the work. And I think there's great evidence to that. For example, I just read a really interesting paper about hiring behavior among employers in Catalonia, and that they really prefer to hire people with Catalonian language skills, even if it's not relevant to the job.

And so this is a case where people really have this kind of preference for sharing a space, for sharing a political life with people who have common group ties. And I think that's also a great example of the way that voting does not really capture everything. A lot of, especially protest movements, rely on pressuring issues onto the agenda that were not there before, that you could not have voted on previously.

And so those kinds of mass efforts are really not captured at all by looking at kind of numbers in Congress or people and the rate that they turn out. So, there's a lot of really great qualitative work on social movements, but it's something that it's a little hard to study.

Cuz if you run a survey of a thousand people, maybe one or two of them is gonna be active in the kind of social movement that you're interested in. So it's a really great opportunity for researchers to move places, get their hands dirty, and understand what's motivating people on the ground.

>> Audience 8: Hello, my name is Will, and I'm a schoolteacher from Cleveland. I wanted to know how you felt about this. In my experience, many of my colleagues who have defined themselves as moderates, or especially classical liberals, have been trusted into voting for conservatives because they've been encountered with things like free speech silencing on college campuses, for example.

Is that something that you've seen in your research?

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, that's a very reasonable question. It's not something that I've studied particularly. I think it is certainly the case that people who feel silenced in a particular conversation will seek a different conversation. I have some work looking at deliberations among juries and that people who are of different racial backgrounds kind of make their voices heard to different extents.

And that if you feel like you're not being listened to, you're gonna stop talking and seek another way to express the things that you care about. So I think that's certainly a dynamic that one sees in politics, but it's not something that I can speak to based on my work in particular.

>> Audience 9: Hello. Firstly, thank you so much. I'm a student at the University of Florida, and I would love to ask how influential expectancy violations are when it comes to voting patterns. And what I mean by that is, specifically when a social group sheds light on specific identities that aren't typically in their said social group.

And they say, well, look at them, they support us. Therefore, everyone in that identity should. The most apparent example in Florida is the Cuban population down in Miami that were pro-Trump supporters.

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, that's absolutely the case. As I talked about it, racial groups, and all kinds of groups are heterogeneous.

If there are 50 million people of a racial background in America, you're gonna find several hundred or several thousand or several million of them who do not follow the kind of dominant pattern. And I think that kind of heterogeneity is underappreciated by the general public, I have some work showing that people really overestimate how divided groups are from one another on a bunch of different issues.

And so when they get these counterexamples like you're talking about, it can be really striking. So, I think if people had a better appreciation of the diversity within groups, this wouldn't be quite so impactful as it often is. But as it is, I think political campaigns have realized how useful these kind of violations are.

They've realized that people overestimate polarization between groups and that it's therefore especially striking when they can pull out counterexamples. So this is just another example of the way in which humans are social animals. Group-based violations are especially noticeable to us, and that can be really useful to political campaigns that wanna highlight that.

>> Audience 10: Hi, once again, thank you so much for the presentation. I had a brief question regarding some of the differences that males and females exhibit, I guess, when voting. Can the differences in ambition and confidence between men and women, which potentially influence political participation, as you noted, be linked to critical race theory's notion of categorizing groups into oppressed and oppressors, thereby playing a significant role in shaping the political perspectives of gender groups?

>> Elizabeth Elder: That's an interesting question. I guess I would say that I don't think that critical race theory is coming up at kind of kitchen-table discussions of politics enough to really have that kind of broad effect. It is, I think, certainly the case that conversations people have in their household in which, I don't know if you've had this experience I had.

A dinner party ends, the men go to one room and talk about politics, the women go to another room and talk about other things. That experience is the kind of thing that women might observe and to come to conclude that this kind of activity is not necessarily for them.

So I think it's more of those kind of low level, day-to-day patterns of regular interaction that send that message more than any overarching ideological effort.

>> Audience 11: Hi, I'm Gwen, I'm also from Florida as many of us are. But I was wondering a little bit more about the actual voting itself, and this may not be something that you've studied.

But we look at how our presidential elections are held, and they're held on the same day every year, which often calls on a weekday. Has looking at that, how we don't have our election day as a federal holiday or on the weekends all the time, have you found any indication that that may impact voting, especially for groups that may not be able to take time off from work cuz they lose that financial income?

Or for women who may not have other source of childcare and don't want to bring two or three kids to the polls, and how that might affect their voting habits?

>> Elizabeth Elder: Yeah, certainly. Any kind of hurdle that one has to cross to get to the ballot box can create inequalities, and having election days on a weekday is certainly one of them.

I think it's a little hard to tell exactly how that policy would shake out just because what kinds of people have federal holidays off? Me, and bankers, and not people that work at CVS. So I think that there are class dynamics to that might not shake out closing participation gaps quite as much as one would like.

But again, any hurdle that one can remove to get people fewer obstacles to the ballot box is going to improve things on at least some dimensions. So I really appreciate your thought about that.

>> Audience 12: Okay, I think we've come to the end. Thank you very much.