A Drag on the Ticket? Estimating Top-of-the-Ticket Effects on Down-Ballot Races

Campaign staff, journalists, and political scientists commonly attribute the poor performances of a party’s down-ballot candidates to low-quality or extreme top-of-the-ticket candidates, but empirical evidence on this conventional wisdom is scant. We estimate the effect of candidate quality and ideology in gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections on co-partisan vote shares in down-ballot U.S. House races. While naive estimates imply that top-of-the-ticket candidates influence down-ballot outcomes, after accounting for correlations in candidate quality/ideology across offices, we estimate near-zero statewide top-of-the-ticket effects on U.S. House elections. We similarly observe near-zero top-of-the-ticket effects in the further-down-ballot settings of state-legislative and county-legislative elections. Overall, voters exhibit a strong capacity to discern differences in quality and ideology across offices and incorporate this information into their vote choice throughout the time period under investigation. However, in line with other research, this link between candidate quality/ideology and election outcomes has weakened considerably in recent years.