Campaigns and Elections
Presidential Campaign Stops Remain a Double-Edged Sword
Campaign visits by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris motivated both supporters and opponents to vote with their pocketbooks
By: Nicholas Napolio, Boris Heersink, and Jordan Carr Peterson
The 2020 presidential campaign was an odd one. The coronavirus pandemic forced candidates to campaign in new ways, and often virtually. But presidential and vice-presidential candidates on both tickets still made personal appearances as well — stopping at airports for drive-in rallies or (in the case of the Trump campaign) regular rallies with big audiences. Political scientists have long tried to measure whether such campaign visits actually matter in elections: do voters respond in any real way to these visits, or are they just political theater?
Research on this topic has produced different findings: some conclude that candidate visits can have a positive effect: after a visit, these candidates received more votes, saw their poll numbers go up, or received more campaign donations. However, other studies find that there is basically no effect for many candidate visits.
Most of these studies have looked at the effect of campaign visits as being in one direction: a candidate’s visit either benefits them or does nothing. But an alternative possibility is that visits have mixed effects: they can activate voters who like the visiting candidate, but also those who dislike them. If correct, this places campaign visits in a whole new light: by making public appearances candidates might actually be activating supporters of their opponent.
In a forthcoming article in American Politics Research, we argue that the 2020 campaign visits had counterbalancing effects. Specifically, we find that visits by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had strong mobilizing and counter-mobilizing effects, increasing individual donations to both campaigns. In contrast, visits by Joe Biden and Mike Pence had much more muted effects.
To investigate how campaign stops affected mobilization, we collected data from the Federal Election Commission on individual contributions to the Biden and Trump campaigns. We then matched those donations with a daily log of campaign stops by all four candidates (Biden, Harris, Trump, and Pence) maintained by the Chicago Tribune. Finally, we examined whether individual contributions in each zip code to each campaign increased on days when candidates visited the media markets containing those zip codes.
Here’s what we found.
On the days of visits, particularly Harris and Trump visits, donations to both campaigns increased. Specifically, Trump visits stimulated about $48,000 in donations to his own campaign in media markets on days he visited, but also about $174,000 to the Biden campaign. Harris had a stronger effect on the number of individual donors than the total amount donated, stimulating about 630 people to donate to the Biden campaign but also about 140 people to donate to the Trump campaign.
Why did Trump and Harris energize their own supporters and opponents?
We think at least two explanations are likely: negative partisanship and backlash to a woman of color on the ballot. Negative partisanship is the phenomenon that voters’ dislike of the opposing political party activates their support of their own party’s candidate and is a persistent reality in contemporary American politics. Indeed, recent studies show that Trump visits in 2016 also resulted in increased donations to the Clinton campaign, and that Trump’s endorsements in 2018 often benefited the Democratic opponents of the candidates he supported.
In addition, Trump’s campaign consistently stoked many voters’ resentment of an increasingly multicultural and gender inclusive American society, which may have made a visit by Kamala Harris — the first Black and Asian-American woman to be selected as a vice presidential candidate — threatening to a certain cross-section of the electorate, stimulating donations to the Trump campaign.
What does this mean for 2022 and 2024?
When Trump supports Republican candidates — or if he runs for president again himself — it is likely he will energize both his own base and Democratic voters in the opposite direction. In contrast, a less-controversial candidate like Biden doesn’t seem to excite voters much in either direction. But Harris has similar effects to Trump: her campaign activities excite the Democratic base, but they also seem to energize Republican voters.
