blue and red fists
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Political outcomes in the United States tend to swing back and forth between parties. A candidate from the Democratic party will win and serve one or two terms, and then a candidate from the Republican party will win, then a Democrat, then a Republican and so on. This political pendulum has been attributed to the roughly equal divide between supporters of each of the two major parties. What’s less clear is what pushes one party to edge forward and the outcomes swing back and forth.
We recently completed an analysis of data we’d collected during the last U.S. presidential election in 2020 and found some surprising hints of what might drive the swing. The patterns led us to predict that votes would be stronger for President Trump in the 2024 election.
Our first finding was not surprising. People who had strong beliefs about the candidates expected that they would have stronger emotions if their candidate won or lost. The beliefs we examined were that their candidate would save society or that the “other” candidate would destroy society. These strong beliefs were associated with expecting to feel more anger, fear, and happiness based on how the election turned out.
The second finding was that whether or not people voted was predicted by how they expected to feel if the “other” candidate won. People who expected that they would be more angry and less happy if the “other” candidate won were motivated to go and vote in the election. In other words, people’s voting was driven by their responses to the outcome they viewed as negative. This is consistent with many studies showing that bad outcomes have a bigger impact on behavior than good outcomes.
The third finding was that people on average thought they would be more impacted by the election than they actually were. This is a common finding in the psychology literature – people think future events will matter more than they actually do. Even after negative events, people usually adapt quickly and get distracted by other concerns and events.
But this was not the case for everyone. People who held stronger beliefs that the “other” candidate was a threat to society, and that candidate won the election, were actually more angry and fearful than they thought they would be. Other studies suggest this is probably because this group was more surprised by the election outcome and so they reacted more strongly. In the context of the 2020 election, Trump supporters who believed that Biden was a threat to society had unexpectedly strong emotions to the announcement that Biden won.
Putting all of this together, we were able to make an interesting prediction for the 2024 election. Trump voters in 2020 who had strong beliefs about the candidates were caught off guard by how angry they were after the election. Because of this unexpectedly strong emotion, this group should then anticipate more anger in the 2024 election. And more expected anger should predict more votes.
We’d expect the strongest supporters of a losing candidate to be the most motivated out of all voters to participate in the next election. Anger in response to an election is possibly what gives an edge to parties and pushes the political pendulum back and forth.
