Electoral Consequences of Political Rumors: Motivated Reasoning, Candidate Rumors, and Vote Choice during the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

Using national telephone survey data collected immediately after the 2008 U.S. presidential election (N1⁄4 600), this study examines real-world consequences of inaccurate political rumors. First, individuals more willingly believe negative rumors about a candidate from the opposing party than from their party. However, rumor rebuttals are uniformly effective and do not produce backfire effects. Second, the probability of voting for a candidate decreases when rumors about that candidate are believed, and believing rumors about an opposed candidate reinforces a vote for the preferred candidate. This belief-vote link is not a result of the spurious influence of party affiliation, as rumor belief uniquely contributes to vote choice. The evidence suggests political rumoring is not innocuous chatter but rather can have important electoral consequences. When citizens base political decisions on inaccurate beliefs, democracy suffers. Effective deliberation is premised on a factually informed citizenry (Delli Carpini & Keeter, 1996; Luskin, Fishkin, & Jowell, 2002), and misinformed citizens often exhibit different political preferences than those holding more accurate information (Gilens, 2001; Kuklinski, Quirk, Jerit, Schwieder, & Rich, 2000). Political rumors, characterized as unsubstantiated claims about candidates and issues that are often false, are a potentially important source of misperception that may threaten democratic outcomes. Although political rumors are not new, their prevalence during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign raises concerns about their influence on citizens’ beliefs, and, more importantly, their potential impact on voting behavior. In 2008, news All correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Brian E. Weeks, School of Communication, The Ohio State University, 3016 Derby Hall, 154 North Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA. E-mail: beweeks@gmail.com organizations devoted considerable coverage to political rumors, especially those about Barack Obama (Weeks & Southwell, 2010), and rumors circulated widely online (Garrett, 2011). An overwhelming majority of the public was exposed to these claims (Hargrove & Stempel, 2008), but despite widespread awareness it remains an open question whether false rumors about the candidates relate to citizens’ voting behavior during the 2008 election. Perhaps this rumoring, though extensive, was just idle chatter—inaccurate but essentially harmless. This article advances our understanding of political rumors and their association to citizens’ votes by making two complementary contributions. First, it examines whether partisan motivated information processing strategies that have been demonstrated in laboratory settings, including both motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990; Taber & Lodge, 2006) and the backfire effect (Nyhan & Reifler, 2010), are also evident in citizens’ responses to political rumors in the real world. Second, it extends survey research establishing a link between misperceptions and public opinion to a uniquely important form of political behavior: Vote choice. We argue, and our data affirm, that rumoring is not harmless talk but instead is a form of political expression that is associated with real negative consequences on citizens’ voting behavior.