Polls and Elections: Resistance Is Not Futile: Anti‐Trump Protest and Senators’ Opposition to President Trump in the 115th Congress

Abstract

Though 2017 saw historic levels of political activism in the form of anti-Trump protests, it remains to be seen whether these demonstrations actually led lawmakers to harden their resistance to President Donald Trump's agenda. Coupling state-level protest data, Senate voting records, and a collection of senators' tweets from 2017, I find that anti-Trump protests led to heightened opposition to the president in the U.S. Senate, though largely along party lines. Senate Democrats representing states that saw more intense Women's March demonstrations were more likely to oppose the president's legislative agenda, particularly on nominations votes. Moreover, the frequency of anti-Trump demonstrations back home increased the likelihood that Democratic senators issued tweets critical of President Trump. Senate Republicans, however, were unresponsive to anti-Trump protests, both in the chamber and on Twitter.

Measuring Congressional Partisanship and Its Consequences

“…Beyond her research, an extensive and growing literature uses tweets to explore how congressional candidates campaign online (e.g., Evans and Clark 2016; Evans, Cordova, and Sipole 2014; Meeks 2016). Others have used Twitter to measure legislators’ ideology (Barbera 2015), presidential support (Miras 2019), issue attention and agenda setting (Barbera et al 2019; Hemphill, Russell, and Schopke‐Gonzalez 2020), substantive representation (e.g., Dancey and Masand 2017; Gervais and Wilson 2017), and incivility (Gervais and Morris 2018). We add to this growing research area by using this low‐cost, frequent, and unrestricted communication mode to measure members' partisan intensity and connect it to their legislative behaviors.…”