A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races

The forthcoming article “A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races” by Kevin DeLuca, Daniel J. Moskowitz, and Benjamin Schneer  is summarized by the author(s) below.

Do Weak Top-of-the-Ticket Candidates Hurt a Party’s Down-Ballot Candidates?

Political strategists, journalists, and scholars of American politics commonly assert that a strong candidate at the top of the statewide ticket for governor or U.S. Senate boosts their party’s performance in down-ballot races. The idea is that a high-quality top-of-the-ticket candidate will energize partisan voters, boosting their turnout, as well as persuade swing voters to support the party up and down the ballot. Similar arguments persist about ideologically moderate, as opposed to extreme, candidates. As a result, after disappointing election outcomes pundits often point to weak or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidates to explain down-ballot losses.

This narrative spread widely after the 2022 midterm elections. Observers attributed several Republican losses in congressional races to low-quality or extreme governor and Senate candidates like Doug Mastriano and Mehmet Oz. As one GOP strategist in Pennsylvania stated in the New York Times, “The lack of quality candidates at the top of the ticket, both Mastriano and Oz, severely hurt down-ballot candidates.”

Despite the prevalence of claims on the importance of statewide top-of-the-ticket candidates, there has not been rigorous study of the evidence on the question: Does the conventional wisdom withstand empirical scrutiny? In our new paper, “A Drag on the Ticket? Estimating Top-of-the-Ticket Effects on Down-Ballot Races,” we test whether the quality and ideology of statewide candidates affect the performance of co-partisan down-ballot candidates. To do so, we leverage variation in quality and ideology across statewide races (for governor and senate) to estimate the effect of top-of-the-ticket candidates on down-ballot U.S. House races between 1950-2022.

What We Found

Based on a simple analysis, the data appears to support the conventional view. Without accounting for any of the characteristics of the down-ballot House candidates, we find that when a party runs a meaningfully higher-quality top-of-the-ticket candidate for governor or U.S. Senate, that party’s House candidates in the same state tend to perform 1-2 percentage points better. We observe a similar relationship for the ideology of the top-of-the-ticket candidate. These patterns seem like evidence of a coattail effect.

However, once we account for the quality and ideology of the down-ballot candidates themselves, these apparent top-of-the-ticket effects disappear. The estimates are quite precise, allowing us to rule out meaningful effect sizes with confidence, and the results hold across multiple offices, time periods, and alternative specifications.

What Does Matter? The Candidates Down-Ballot

While top-of-the-ticket candidates don’t seem to have much influence, the quality and ideology of the down-ballot candidates do matter—quite a lot. A one standard deviation increase in a House candidate’s quality equates with about a 4 percentage point increase in vote share, while a one standard deviation increase in down-ballot ideological extremity is linked with about a 2 percentage point decrease in vote share for that candidate. When we extend our data to examine local and state legislative races, we find a similar pattern.

Interestingly, the magnitude of these down-ballot quality and ideology effects has declined somewhat in recent years. This weakened relationship may reflect changes in how voters learn about, evaluate, or reward high-quality and moderate candidates.

What This Means

Our study challenges the long-standing notion that a weak or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidate drags the rest of the party down. There is not strong evidence that top-of-the-ticket candidates in statewide races meaningfully influence the outcomes of down-ballot races, positively or negatively. Voters, it turns out, are discerning. They care about who’s actually running for office down the ballot, not just who’s at the top of the ticket.

About the Author(s): Kevin DeLuca is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, Daniel J. Moskowitz is an Assistant Professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and Benjamin Schneer is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Their research “A drag on the ticket? Estimating top‐of‐the‐ticket effects on down‐ballot races” is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.