Evolution by national election? Partisanship, voting behavior, and sentiments toward culture war groups

Scholars have long highlighted group identities and group sentiments as factors that shape citizens’ partisanship. Yet recent research has begun to “flip the causal arrow,” exploring how partisanship – a powerful force in American politics – influences these factors. Given that marginalized groups (e.g., Black, LGT and Muslim Americans) feature prominently in contemporary “culture war” debates (e.g., in discussions of “woke” politics), the present study investigates one mechanism by which partisan considerations might affect sentiments toward members of these groups: how these groups vote in national elections. Using a well-powered, pre-registered experiment, we test whether manipulating information about these groups’ voting behavior in presidential elections can affect partisans’ sentiments toward them. Across multiple outcome measures, we consistently find small, non-significant effects for each target group, irrespective of respondents’ party. A series of robustness tests further corroborate these findings. Our results imply that, if shifts in marginalized groups’ voting behavior are capable of affecting public sentiments toward these groups, the shifts would need to be far larger in size than is typically observed in US presidential elections. More broadly, these null findings indicate that Americans’ sentiments toward marginalized groups resist “evolving” even when these groups shift toward improving their own party’s electoral prospects.