If it rains on the Sunday before a big election, Republican turnout on Tuesday takes a massive hit.
By analyzing precipitation during specific service hours, researchers found that rain reduces church attendance and disrupts the pulpit-led political mobilization of White Evangelicals. This physical disruption of social networks on a single Sunday is enough to measurably lower the Republican vote share in the actual election.
The Pulpit and the Polls: The Electoral Impact of Religious Participation
SocArXiv · ahky7_v1
We estimate how exposure to religious services affects U.S. voting. Novel sermon corpora show a sharp spike in political content on the Sunday before presidential elections. Exploiting quasi-random rainfall during typical service hours before elections—Precipitation at Time of Church (PTC)—and controlling for election day and weekly precipitation, a one–standard deviation increase in PTC lowers county Republican vote share by 0.6 percentage points. The effect is driven by reduced Republican turn