How did Voter contact affect People’s feelings towards the 2020 Presidential Candidates?

We will look at ANES data to see how people’s temperature scores changed pre and post-election when contacted by the major parties.

Foster Hillis
5 min readMay 11, 2021

To start, let me introduce my data set… I am using the 2020 Time Series Study from the American National Election Surveys (ANES). This data was collected before and after the 2020 presidential election. I have selected data from participants that completed both the pre and post-election surveys.

With this data, we can look to see what respondent’s temperature scores were for President Biden and Vice President Harris and for former President Trump and former Vice President Pence. Of the 8,280 respondents to the survey, 87% of respondents' data was measured for Biden, Harris, & Pence, and 89% of respondents' data was measured for Trump.

Because the respondents’ vote choice is not a public metric, I will be using temperature scores (as aforementioned). A temperature score is how a person feels about someone; a zero (0) score means a cold feeling and a dislike towards the candidate and a one-hundred (100) score would mean a warm feeling and a positive image of the candidate. We will be looking at the mean temperature scores from each group.

My Hypothesis: If respondents are contacted by the party a candidate is from, their…

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Foster Hillis

[He/Him/His] Student studying Political Science at the University of Oklahoma