If it rains on the Sunday before a big election, Republican turnout on Tuesday takes a massive hit.
SocArXiv · March 18, 2026 · ahky7_v1
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The Takeaway
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.
From the abstract
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