Weather has always been an uncontrollable and slightly unpredictable factor in elections.
For decades, the weather has been a part of reporters’ arsenal of Election Day coverage, with past headlines like “Bad Weather Cuts Down Suburban Voter Turnout” from 1976 and “Bright Day Swells Vote in the City” in 1926. In 1896, The New York Times published an “Election Weather Prophecy,” promising voters that the day “will be pleasant all over the country.”
Would pleasant weather encourage turnout and unpleasant weather keep voters away? Does a dour drizzle benefit one party more than the other? In recent decades, scientists have turned years of anecdotes into analyses of voting and weather data, and showed that yes, weather can indeed influence election turnout. A little.
And with an election as tight as this year’s presidential contest, bad weather in one or two swing states could affect the outcome by keeping some voters at home, said Kasper Hansen, a professor of political science at the University of Copenhagen and author of a 2023 study on weather and turnout in democratic elections.
In that study, he found that what he termed “marginal voters,” or those who only occasionally turn out to vote, are more likely to opt out if Election Day is marked by consistent, miserable rain.
Thomas Fujiwara, an associate professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University, has also found that rainfall lowers turnout, though by modest amounts (less than 1 percentage point of the voting-eligible population with relatively heavy rain). He’s an author of a 2016 paper that examined the effect of rain on one election and whether it reverberated in future elections.
Rain alone does not create substantial swings in turnout. But when you consider that the 2020 and 2016 presidential elections were decided by small margins in a handful of battleground states, even events with very small effects can matter if they happen in any of the five critical battleground states, Fujiwara said.
Die-hard voters, or voters driven to the booth out of a strong belief in civic duty, aren’t likely to be deterred by weather, Hansen said. Those people tend to vote early or will stand in a line in any weather. Instead, he said, the people more likely to avoid voting in inclement weather are those for whom voting doesn’t fit easily into a busy schedule, or those living alone, typically people ages 21 to 30, who he and his co-author consider “marginal voters.”
There has been a “common wisdom” that rainfall benefits the Republican Party, Fujiwara said. A widely cited paper from 2007 argued that if you assume younger voters lean toward Democrats, then “Republicans should pray for rain.” But Fujiwara’s paper, which looked at elections between 1952 and 2012, found no evidence supporting that theory.
“If anything,” he said, “our results suggest the effect is either zero or actually marginally benefits Democrats.”
With the 2024 election looming, as a potential “realignment” could reshape long-standing voting norms, Fujiwara hesitates to extrapolate his past research to the current electoral landscape. “Let’s say that white voters without a college education are more likely to not vote when it rains,” he said. “Then how that translates into an effect in Republican vote shares would be quite different since 2016 than before that.”
More recent findings in a paper published this year suggest that the increase in voting through other methods, like mail-in ballots and early in-person voting, partly offsets the negative effects rain may have on Election Day’s in-person voting.
Nick Turner, the author of that paper, looked at data from the 2012 to 2020 presidential contests in North Carolina and found that if it had rained in a previous election, that rain increased the amount of early and absentee voting in the following elections, to the point it was offsetting the decrease in Election Day’s in-person voting.
In 2020, President Donald Trump discouraged Republicans from participating in early voting. But this year, Republicans have spent millions to encourage their voters to participate early, an effort that evidence so far suggests is working. That makes it less likely for any one party to gain an advantage from the weather on Election Day.
It’s clear across the studies that weather can play a small role in election results, but there is not robust agreement on how early voting may affect that role.
In recent cycles, Hansen said, early voting has lessened the effect of weather on the elections, as more people are able to choose when they vote. Most of the people who vote early, he said, have tended to be older adults and highly educated people who want to get it done, while the “marginal” voter may be more likely to wait until Election Day, leaving the weather in play again.
Weather has already had an effect on the 2024 election. Hurricane Helene devastated a large part of North Carolina, a crucial swing state that Trump won by a narrow margin in 2020. With polling places under floodwaters and many roads impassible, state officials scrambled to rebuild the electoral infrastructure just weeks before the start of early voting. Last week, the state reported record turnout on the first day ballots could be cast.
It’s far too early to tell with certainty what this year’s Election Day weather will look like, though there have been some faint hints of a possible strong storm. Ultimately, it’s not just about predicting the weather but also people’s behavior in a volatile political landscape, which is much trickier.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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