What about today? With Gallup data showing dramatic rises in negative emotions globally, Trump's outsider narrative might resonate strongly. As a challenger rather than incumbent, he's likely better positioned to harness this discontent. Will it be enough for him? I don't know /9

Interesting twist: counties where negative emotions increased between 2016-2020 actually swung *against* Trump. This suggests populist incumbents can't simply rely on negative emotions - they need to address grievances and actually improve people's lives /8

Counties with higher levels of negative emotions, particularly anger, shifted strongly toward Trump in 2016. These associations remained robust even after controlling for income, unemployment, racism, religion, population density, and other factors /6

Using natural language processing, we analyzed over 2 billion Twitter posts to measure county-level anger, anxiety, and depression. This provided an detailed view of America's emotional landscape before the 2016 and 2020 elections /5

This builds on a couple of previous papers (in AJPS and JPSP) showing that people's feelings are powerful predictors of incumbent vote shares across Europe and the USA, often more influential than traditional economic indicators that are thought to determine elections /2

Since today is largely a day of nervously waiting and refreshing, it's as good a time as any to share a summary of our new paper on the role of negative affect in shaping votes for Donald Trump. A 🧵

psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...