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Home > Weatherhead > JOE > Spring 2024 > Iss. 1 (2024)

 

Abstract

After George Floyd was murdered in May of 2020, a massive wave of anti-racism and antipolice brutality protests erupted across the United States. In addition to matters such as racial prejudice and awareness of racial discrimination, some studies have measured the effect of those protests on the 2020 presidential election. Previous research has shown that higher protest attendance in specific geographic areas causes increased vote shares in those areas for candidates aligned with the protests. We expand on this research, employing an instrumental variable (IV) model with rainfall as an exogenous source of variation in protest attendance to assess the effect of anti-racism protests in the summer of 2020 on vote shares in the 2020 presidential election in Midwest metropolitan areas. We use town and city level election results and protests within each city’s metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Furthermore, we group towns and cities by the proportion of white residents to compare the effect of protest attendance on vote share across different racial demographic groups. Contrary to previous literature, we find that greater protest attendance decreased the Democratic vote share in suburbs surrounding six midsize Midwestern cities at a statistically significant level. However, the effect is not significantly different across the demographic groups.

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