NEW YORK (AP) – As another election season heats up, researchers are engaged in a battle of their own over voter behavior: Can it really be swayed by whether the local college football team just won or lost?
Five years ago, researchers drew attention with data suggesting that a win within 10 days before Election Day gave a small ballot-box boost to the party of the incumbent senator, governor or president.
The idea was that the victory makes local people happier about the way things are in general, which nudges them to vote for incumbents.
Now a new analysis concludes that the statistical pattern found in that study was just a coincidence, not really the result of success on the gridiron.
The finding was “bad luck for researchers rather than a shortcoming of American voters,” as the authors put it in a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.