Hostile Sexism and the 2016 Presidential Election

Abstract

We use Google Trends data to identify hostile sexism and find that sexism negatively predicts Clinton’s vote share in the 2016 general election and is associated with lower voter turnout among those more likely to vote for a Democrat. Although we find no evidence that hostile sexism was more prevalent in states in which Trump held more than 10 pre-election rallies, we find that sexism had a larger impact on votes in these areas. This shows that the marginal effect of sexism was not uniform across the country and links the differing magnitudes of the effect to Trump rallies.