Sanctioning Partisan Traitors: The Limits of Anti-Trump Opinion Leadership

• In Event: Evaluations of Politicians and Voting Behavior

Abstract

As Donald Trump spread false claims about the integrity of the 2020 election, Republican elites from election officials and judges to sitting senators spoke up against these claims. This form of countervailing elite opinion leadership is precisely what scholars of anti-democratic behavior demand from co-partisans of populists who undermine democratic norms. Nonetheless, Republican voters continue to overwhelmingly support Trump's voter fraud claims, while existing interventions to reduce misinformation have shown limited efficacy in correcting Republicans’ voter fraud beliefs. To explain extant findings, we posit that Republican elites can meaningfully persuade their voters, but taking counter-partisan stances and being denounced by Trump undermine these persuasive effects. In a pilot conjoint experiment among self-identified Republican voters, we test a range of attributes that may bear on elites’ perceived credibility, finding that Trump’s denunciations and elites’ stated positions on election policy strongly predict respondents’ self-reported trust in those officials. In our main experiment, currently in the field, we investigate whether framing the same messenger as an ardent Republican (Trump ally and tough on voter fraud) or partisan traitor (labeled a “RINO” by Trump) moderates the persuasive effect of a message correcting misinformation about 2020 election integrity. Exploiting ambiguity surrounding his relationship to Trump, we present real statements by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and examine whether exposure to the statements diminishes Kemp’s approval ratings and perceived credibility. We explore outcome variables relating to concrete fraud beliefs, democratic norms, and support for Trump in the 2024 primaries among self-identified Republicans. We conclude with a persistence analysis, re-surveying subjects from our first study to determine whether either persuasion on voter fraud or perceptions of the elite messenger endure.

Authors

• Daniel Markovits, Columbia University

• Patrick Liu, Columbia University