Election-Denying Republican Candidates Underperformed in the 2022 Midterms

Abstract

We combine newly collected election data with records of public denials of the results of the 2020 election to estimate the degree to which election-denying Republican candidates over- or underperformed other Republicans in 2022 in statewide and federal elections. We find that the average vote share of election-denying Republicans in statewide races was approximately 3.2 percentage points lower than their co-partisans after accounting for state-level partisanship. However, we find no such underperformance on aggregate for U.S. House elections, perhaps due to the more-partisan nature of many House districts. Together, the results suggest that the types of candidates in American elections who take more-extreme positions tend to underperform, but that these performance gaps are relatively small in the present, polarized political environment.