Assessing Ideological Representation Using Policy Repositioning: Panel Evidence From 2012 to 2020

Assessing ideological representation can be difficult because perceived ideology and party identification correlate strongly among presidential nominees. Democratic nominees are consistently liberal, and Republican nominees are consistently conservative. However, Trump’s 2016 candidacy included ambiguous, liberal, and extremely conservative positions. While in-office, Trump repositioned to uniformly conservative policy positions. This presents an opportunity to assess changes in candidate ideology that are difficult to observe outside of experiments. With unique panel data, I used self-placed ideology in 2012 to create spatial distances to Trump and the Democratic nominees in 2016 and 2020. This design allowed for over-time variation of candidate evaluations while keeping self-placed ideology pre-Trump. I find that Trump was perceived as moderate in 2016, and this translated into a vote choice advantage relative to Clinton. However, respondents substantially reevaluated Trump as being conservative in 2020, which changed the vote choice advantage to Biden. These results show that perceived ideology influenced voting even in an era of strong partisanship, and this typically cannot be observed because of the ubiquitous connection between ideology and party among presidential candidates.