Over the past few weeks, Alex Morse, the mayor of Holyoke, Mass., and a progressive challenger for the state’s 1st Congressional District, has been accused of sexual impropriety — allegations whose credibility and origins are seriously contested. Morse, the youngest and first openly gay mayor ever elected in Holyoke, argues that these attacks reinforce anti-gay tropes and thus hurt him more than similar allegations lobbed at non-LGBTQ politicians.
Is he right? Do voters punish gay candidates, and other candidates from nontraditional backgrounds, more than they do straight candidates? What we find isn’t simple. While voters punish all candidates similarly, nontraditional candidates start with lower baseline support because of some Republican voters’ biases.
In other words, while gay candidates like Morse aren’t sanctioned more for misbehavior, they’ve started their candidacies with less room for error overall.
How we did our research
To study whether nontraditional candidates — specifically, candidates who were Black, female or gay — are held to higher standards, we ran a survey experiment using Lucid. A nationally representative sample of 4,000 adults in the United States read a short description of a fictional candidate in a primary election in the party to which respondents said they belonged. (Independents who said they didn’t lean toward one party or the other read about a candidate in a nonpartisan or “open” primary.) We then asked respondents to evaluate how likely they were to vote for that candidate.
Respondents were randomly assigned to read about a candidate who was either Black or White, male or female and gay or straight. In other words, race, gender and sexuality were all randomly assigned, which allowed us to account for any potential compounding intersectional effects — for example, the effect of being both Black and gay.
For a random one-third of our respondents, that’s all they read. Another third read that the candidate had admitted to an extramarital affair, and the final third read that the candidate had admitted to embezzling government funds.
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Do nontraditional candidates face steeper penalties?
Most social science research finds that women and non-White candidates face steeper electoral penalties for the same behavior as their White counterparts. That’s not what we found. Across the board, we find no evidence of disproportionate penalties for women, gay and/or Black candidates. In fact, we even found some evidence that gay candidates were less penalized than straight candidates.
When candidates admitted to embezzlement, our respondents were about 30 percentage points less likely to vote for candidates — regardless of whether the candidate was Black or White, or male or female. If they had admitted to extramarital affairs, these candidates all lost over 10 percentage points in vote share.
Unexpectedly, gay candidates were penalized only about 25 percentage points for embezzlement — five percentage points less than straight candidates. Further, we found no evidence of added or compounded penalties for candidates with several marginalized identities.
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However, it’s still harder for gay candidates to survive scandal
We found that gay candidates started with a lower vote share, whether or not they had admitted to misconduct. That suggests bias. Among Republican voters, a scandal-free gay candidate was evaluated more harshly than a heterosexual candidate who admitted to an affair. The average electoral penalty for being gay — even without any allegations of corruption or an affair — was five percentage points in vote share.
Candidates win elections by persuading and mobilizing a universe of voters who are considering voting for a candidate. A number of factors, notably partisanship and ideology, constrain that universe. But if some voters are less likely to consider voting for gay candidates from the outset, these candidates must attract a greater proportion of their potential voters to win. As a result, gay candidates cannot afford to lose the same amount of voter support as their straight counterparts.
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What this means for Alex Morse
At first, our results might seem to spell trouble for Morse. But recent polling paints a slightly different picture. An internal poll run by MassLive saw Morse, the challenger, trailing the incumbent Rep. Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) by only five percentage points (41 percent to 46 percent). Of the voters polled, 85 percent of voters said they had heard about the scandal and were asked whether it had changed their opinion. Out of those voters, 55 percent said the news did not change their opinion, 21 percent said they were more likely to support Morse and 18 percent said they were less likely to support Morse.
Though polling may produce unreliable estimates of how candidates will actually fare in the election, MassLive’s results suggest the allegations have not entirely derailed Morse’s campaign.
Of course, in our experiment, the candidate admitted to an affair, while the allegations against Morse may well be spurious. And an actual candidate may be evaluated differently than an abstract fictional one. But our results offer yet another possibility: Among Democratic voters, gay candidates fared no worse than their heterosexual counterparts, with or without a scandal. Only Republicans were less likely to vote for a gay candidate. And just now, Morse is running in a Democratic primary — in a district where winning the Democratic primary usually means winning the seat.
The upshot for Morse is twofold. First, our data suggest he is correct that gay candidates are disproportionately hurt by allegations of impropriety, though perhaps not in the way he means. But second, that penalty comes mainly in a Republican primary or a general election.
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Akhil Rajan (@AkhilVik) is a master’s candidate in political science at Yale University.
Christina Pao holds a master’s in political science from Yale University and is an M.Phil. candidate in sociology and demography at the University of Oxford.
This study was funded by FLAGS — the Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and by the Bruce L. Cohen Fund at Yale University.