Candidate Gender, Feminist Identities, and Emotional Engagement During Political Campaigns

We test how the presence of women candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary increased levels of emotional engagement among feminists. We use an original three-wave panel data collection. We find that respondents expressed high levels of positive emotions when they learned about a man running in the presidential primary rather than a woman regardless of their feminist identities. We find that after the Democratic primary process concluded, respondents reported lower levels of negative emotions when they read about a former woman candidate relative to a man who had run in the Democratic primary. We also find that strong feminists had higher levels of positive emotions when the candidate had explicitly identified as a feminist for both women and men candidates. These results suggest that women candidates pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination in future elections may not increase the emotional engagement of feminists and this can have implications for turnout.