[EL] Rick Pildes question on party split over voting by mail

[Kousser, Thad]

Hi Rick and All,
     You can find such a chart in our paper, "America's electorate is increasingly polarized along partisan lines about voting by mail during the COVID-19 crisis," linked here<https://www.pnas.org/content/117/40/24640>, in PNAS.  Figure 1 in that paper shows polarization on how eligible voters prefer to cast their ballots and their support for the policy of by-request absentee ballot voting between the nationally representative polls that we conducted in April and June.  It also shows that when respondents read scientific projections about the pandemic (the "treated" cases in our graph), Democrats were significantly more likely to prefer to vote by mail while Republicans were not influenced by these projections.
     We also conducted a similar survey in August, showing further polarization, and will go back into the field again next week to continue to chart changes in voters' preferences about how they want to cast a ballot, their comfort level with waiting in line at polling places, their trust in the integrity of different modes of voting, and their views on a range of policies.  The paragraph below, from a forthcoming Monkey Cage piece, tracks the polarization that we have observed in the desire to vote by mail:
     "We find a significant, growing gap over how citizens want to cast a ballot. In April, 40 percent of Democrats said they would like to vote by mail while only 30 percent of Republicans indicated the same. By June, that gap had grown to 20 percentage points, with 45 percent of Democrats saying they’d vote by mail to 25 percent of Republicans. By August, half of all Democrats said they want to vote by mail this election while only a quarter of Republicans said they would, for a gap of 25 percentage points."
<https://www.pnas.org/content/117/40/24640>
             Best, Thad

Thad Kousser, Professor and Department Chair
Department of Political Science, UC San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093-0521
858-534-3239
http://polisci.ucsd.edu<http://polisci.ucsd.edu/>









________________________________
From: Law-election <law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu> on behalf of Pildes, Rick <rick.pildes at nyu.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 7, 2020 8:38 AM
To: Election Law Listserv <law-election at uci.edu>
Subject: [EL] (no subject)


Hope someone can help out on this – I recall seeing a chart/graph a month or so ago that showed how much Rs and Ds started diverging on how they would vote (in-person or by absentee) once the President began criticizing mail-in voting.  If anyone knows where I can find that chart that shows how these preferences shifted once the critiques began, I’d much appreciate it, since I can’t manage to dig it up.



Thanks -



Best,

Rick



Richard H. Pildes

Sudler Family Professor of Constitutional Law

NYU School of Law

40 Washington Square So.

NYC, NY 10014

347-886-6789


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