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Despite the longstanding underrepresentation of blacks in Congress, political science research has not settled on the cause. While there is increasing evidence that racial attitudes affect vote choice in today's congressional elections, how this effect interacts with the race of the candidates is unknown. This study addresses this debate by analyzing novel survey, census, and candidate data from the Obama era of congressional elections (2010–2016) to test whether racially prejudiced attitudes held by whites decrease their likelihood of supporting black Democratic candidates and Democratic candidates as a whole. In line with theoretical predictions, this paper finds that Democratic House candidates are less likely to receive votes among white voters with strong racial resentment toward blacks, and black Democratic candidates fare even worse. These findings help to explain the persistence of black legislative underrepresentation and contribute to theories of partisan racial realignment.

Strategic voting occurs when voters make vote choices using their ex ante expectations about the results of an election in addition to their sincere candidate preferences. While there is ample theoretical reason to believe strategic voting should occur under certain electoral conditions and institutional arrangements, the evidence for it in the literature has been mixed. I theorise that the polarisation of the two main British political parties and the highly publicised predictions of defeat for Britain’s primary national third party, the Liberal Democrats, make the 2015 UK election an ideal case for studying strategic voting. I adapt established methods of identifying strategic voting to this election and find evidence that Liberal Democrat voters in the UK voted strategically for Labour and Conservative candidates to maximise their odds of affecting the electoral outcome in their constituency.

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Recent work on American presidential elections suggests that voters engage in anticipatory balancing, which occurs when voters split their ticket in order to moderate collective policy outcomes by forcing agreement among institutions controlled by opposing parties. We use the 2021 Georgia U.S. Senate runoffs, which determined whether Democrats would have unified control of the federal government given preceding November victories by President-elect Biden and House Democrats, to evaluate support for anticipatory balancing. Leveraging an original survey of Georgia voters, we find no evidence of balancing within the general electorate and among partisans across differing model specifications. We use qualitative content analysis of voter electoral runoff intentions to support our findings and contextualize the lack of evidence for balancing withan original analysis showing the unprecedented partisan nature of contemporary Senate elections since direct-election began in 1914.

From the onset of the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in January 2020 to Election Day in November, the United States experienced over 9,400,000 cases and 232,000 deaths. This crisis largely defined the campaign between former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump, centering on the Trump administration′s efforts in mitigating the number of cases and deaths. While conventional wisdom suggested that Trump and his party would lose support due to the severity of COVID-19 across the country, such an effect is hotly debated empirically and theoretically. In this research, we evaluate the extent to which the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced support for President Trump in the 2020 election. Across differing modeling strategies and a variety of data sources, we find evidence that President Trump gained support in counties with higher COVID-19 deaths. We provide an explanation for this finding by showing that voters concerned about the economic impacts of pandemic-related restrictions on activity were more likely to support Trump and that local COVID-19 severity was predictive of these economic concerns. While COVID-19 likely contributed to Trump’s loss in 2020, our analysis demonstrates that he gained support among voters in localities worst affected by the pandemic. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-022-09826-x.

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