Amy Lieberman, a politics and society editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Boris Heersink, a scholar of voters’ behavior after a natural disaster, to better understand if and how the recent hurricanes could shift the results of the 2024 presidential election.
How can hurricanes create complications ahead of an election?
A massive hurricane disrupts people’s lives in many important ways, including affecting people’s personal safety and where they can live. Ahead of an election, there are a lot of practical limitations about how an election can be executed – like if a person can still receive mail-in ballots at home or elsewhere, or if it is possible to still vote in person at their polling location if that building was destroyed or damaged.
Another issue is whether people who have just lived through a natural disaster and will likely be dealing with the aftermath for weeks to come are focused on politics right now. Some might sit out the election because they simply have more important things to worry about.
Beyond practical concerns, how else can a natural disaster influence an election?
The other side of the equation, which is what political scientists like myself are mostly focusing on, is whether people take the fact that a natural disaster happened into consideration when they vote.
Two scholars, Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, have argued that sometimes voters are not great at figuring out how to incorporate bad things that happened to them into a voting position. In some cases, it is entirely fair to hold an elected official responsible for bad outcomes that affect people’s lives. But at other moments, bad things can happen to us without that being the fault of an incumbent president or governor. And voters should ideally be able to balance out these different types of bad things - those it is fair to punish elected officials for, and those for which it isn’t fair to hold them responsible.
After all, a devastating hurricane is terrible, but it is not Kamala Harris’ fault that it happened. But Achen and Bartels argue that voters frequently still punish elected officials for random bad events like this.
Their most famous example is the consequences of a series of shark attacks off the New Jersey coast in the summer of 1916. As a result of those attacks, the New Jersey tourism industry saw a major decline. While these findings are still being debated, Achen and Bartels argue that Jersey shore voters subsequently voted against Woodrow Wilson in the 1916 presidential election at a higher rate than they would have had the shark attacks not happened. They argue that voters did this even though Wilson had no involvement in the shark attacks.
Amy Lieberman, a politics and society editor at The Conversation U.S., spoke with Boris Heersink, a scholar of voters’ behavior after a natural disaster, to better understand if and how the recent hurricanes could shift the results of the 2024 presidential election.
How can hurricanes create complications ahead of an election?
A massive hurricane disrupts people’s lives in many important ways, including affecting people’s personal safety and where they can live. Ahead of an election, there are a lot of practical limitations about how an election can be executed – like if a person can still receive mail-in ballots at home or elsewhere, or if it is possible to still vote in person at their polling location if that building was destroyed or damaged.
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