The Mixed Effects of Candidate Visits on Campaign Donations in the 2020 Presidential Election

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the effect of candidate visits in presidential elections has found that appearances by candidates appear to mobilize both supporters and opponents. Specifically, in the 2016 presidential election, donations to campaigns of the visiting presidential candidates increased, but—in the case of Republican nominee Donald Trump—so did donations to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. In this paper, we extend this research by assessing the effect of visits on campaign donations by presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2020 election. We find evidence that visits by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had strong mobilizing and counter-mobilizing effects, increasing donations to both campaigns. We find weak evidence that visits by Joe Biden increased contributions to his campaign, but we do not find evidence that his visits had a counter-mobilizing effect, and we find no evidence that visits by Mike Pence affected donations in either direction.

Campaigning Through Cable: Examining the Relationship Between Cable News Appearances and House Candidate Fundraising

“…We choose to follow work done by Heersink et al (2021) in their analysis of how presidential campaign stops affected fundraising. Like them, we include fixed effects for candidate and date.…”

School shootings increase NRA donations

“…Using data on donations to the National Rifle Association's (NRA) political action committee (PAC), I examine how gun rights supporters respond to school shootings, and the salient gun regulation discourse often attached to those (6,8). Donations are an important marker for political mobilization responses on the ground and tend to go hand in hand with other (less costly) forms of political participation (21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26)(27). Understanding donation behavior thus provides a unique insight into the degree to which pro-regulation movements are faced with opposition from the gun rights side.…”