It’s been a privilege to work with an amazing multidisciplinary team of co-authors on this project!

The paper is open access. Happy to see this one finally out in print /fin

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

But the fact the race is tight is already puzzling given the strength of the U.S. economy (which classic models suggest should strongly favor the incumbent). But the growing lit on wellbeing and voting suggests that people’s feelings may matter just as much, if not more /10

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

While much public discussion focuses on anger, we found anxiety and depression were also powerful predictors of Trump support, as well as populist support elsewhere in the world. This challenges the common narrative that populist support is primarily driven by anger /7

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

In Study 4, we focus on Trump voting. His case is complex, since he embodies elements of not just populism, but also nativism, authoritarianism, etc. Regardless, we explore how well we can predict his vote shares by measuring county-level negative emotions /4

In this paper, we focus on negative affect and populism—not only in terms of beliefs but also voting behavior and electoral outcomes at scale, using data from global surveys as well as U.S. presidential elections, European general elections, and the Brexit referendum /3

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