Search results

Recent partisan claims about the illegitimacy of the 2020 election highlight a need to better understand the determinants underlying Americans' trust in the electoral process. In this study, we focus on African Americans and conservatives, two groups that stand out both historically and contemporaneously for high levels of distrust in elections. Utilizing nationally representative survey data, we analyze the degree to which election distrust is associated with respondents' attitudes towards policies addressing voter access (photo ID requirements, vote by-mail, and felon voting), perceptions of disenfranchisement, and their personal experience while voting. We find evidence that distrust is not tied to one's personal voting experience, but rather to one's policy attitudes towards electoral access. Importantly, for conservative and Black voters, the policy remedies that would lead to increased trust for one group would only further exacerbate the concerns of the other, suggesting that distrust towards American elections will be difficult to attenuate.

That voters punish the incumbent president in bad times, and reward them in good times, has become a stylized fact of elections. Despite COVID-19 representing an unprecedented catastrophe, Trump's approval ratings, unlike other world leaders, remained stable throughout 2020. To explore this puzzle, we surveyed the same Americans twice before the 2020 election—a period when COVID cases spiked. Instead of finding that the crisis's severity affected Trump's approval, we find the reverse—perception of the crisis depended on one's prior political predispositions. People who already supported Trump were more likely to underestimate COVID fatalities and case rates, and less likely to perceive the crisis as worsening over time (daily infections doubled between interviews). Those who perceived the crisis to worsen, but continued to support Trump, expressed unwillingness to blame the president. A public so polarized that it fails to acknowledge disaster, or attribute blame, cannot hold its government accountable.