How did former president Donald Trump’s false claims of voter fraud in Georgia during the 2020 general election impact the state’s subsequent Senate runoff election? Might it actually have tipped the scale in favor of Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock?
It’s a question that political scientists have been asking in the aftermath of the runoff that handed the Democrats a thin majority of seats in the Senate. And while it’s difficult to measure the effects that such claims have on voting behavior, researchers at Northeastern were able to show in a new paper that there were at least modest links between Trump’s “big lie” and how Georgians cast their vote in the crucial contest.
The study, published Tuesday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), looked to examine, broadly speaking, whether “public endorsements of conspiracy theories are associated with real-world voting behavior.”
“In this, we test whether Georgia citizens who publicly endorsed or rejected conspiratorial content on Twitter prior to that state’s Senate runoff election turned out in that election at different rates than similarly situated Twitter users in Georgia who did not,” the authors wrote.
Researchers analyzed the social media posts from roughly 45,000 Georgia voters, which they cross-referenced with a digital voter identification database. What they found was that those voters whose Twitter posts promoted Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election turned out...
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