Do natural disasters help or hurt politicians’ electoral fortunes? Research on this question has produced conflicting results. Achen and Bartels (2002, 2016) find that voters punish incumbent politicians indiscriminately after such disasters. Other studies find that voters incorporate the quality of relief efforts by elected officials. We argue that results in this literature may be driven, in part, by a focus on contemporary cases of disaster and relief. In contrast, we study a case of catastrophic flooding in the American South in 1927, in which disaster aid was broadly and fairly distributed and Herbert Hoover (the 1928 Republican presidential candidate) was personally responsible for overseeing the relief efforts. Despite the distribution of unprecedented levels of disaster aid, we find that voters punished Hoover at the polls: in affected counties, Hoover’s vote share decreased by more than 10 percentage points. Our results are robust to the use of synthetic control methods and suggest that—even if voters distinguish between low- and high-quality responses—the aggregate effect of this disaster remains broadly negative. Our findings provide some support for Achen and Bartels’ idea of blind retrospection, but also generate questions about the precise mechanisms by which damage and relief affect vote choice.

Measuring the effect strategic choices have on electoral outcomes is problematic, because this requires an assessment of the outcome under a counterfactual that is not observed. To overcome this problem, we extend the synthetic control approach for causal inference to circumstances with multiple treated cases and use it to estimate the effect of vice-presidential candidates on their home states' vote. Existing research has concluded that vice-presidential candidates have little effect on the outcome of elections in their home states. However, our results from elections spanning 1884-2012 suggest that vice-presidential candidates increase their tickets' performance in their home states by 2.67 percentage points on average-considerably higher than previous studies have found. In addition, our results suggest that the vice-presidential home state advantage (HSA) could have swung four presidential elections since 1960, if presidential candidates had chosen running mates from strategically optimal states.

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