The Coattail Effect: 5 Powerful Case Studies You Need To See

Causal identification of coattail effects is challenging because popularity shocks typically affect parties in both concurrent elections. Recent studies of the relationship between congressional and presidential elections have recognized the effect of incumbency on presidential coattails by either controlling for its impact or by limiting the analysis to open seat districts. In this article i estimate the magnitude of such coattail effects from governors onto other concurrently elected statewide executive officers using a unique dataset of county election returns for all statewide executive office elections in the united states from 1987 to 2010. Although the presidential coattail effect has been an object of frequent study, the question of whether popular congressional candidates boost vote shares in return for their parties presidential candidates remains unexplored. The coattail effect, a phenomenon where an incumbent president's performance influences the electoral success of their vice president, is a critical yet underexplored dynamic in political science.