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. Instead, voters exhibit a strong capacity to discern differences in quality and ideology across offices and incorporate this information into their vote choice. However, in line with growing concerns about information inaccessibility with the decline of local news sources, this capacity has weakened considerably in recent years. Our findings revise canonical beliefs on top-of-the-ticket effects and raise questions about the impact of the contemporary information environment on voter capacity.