Do Sports Impact Elections?

             Most Washington Redskins fans had two reasons to be disappointed yesterday. First, the team probably played its worst game of the season during a 21-13 loss to the Carolina Panthers. Second, the Redskins’ performance seemingly all but guaranteed that Mitt Romney will win the Presidential election. You may be asking yourself how does the Redskins losing mean Romney wins and why would Redskins fans be upset about this? The Redskins performance in the game has accurately “predicted” the winner in 17 of the past 18 Presidential elections. If the Redskins win the game before the election then the incumbent party remains in the White House. If the Redskins lose that game then the incumbent party loses the election. The Redskins loss means that Romney should win the election. While which candidate will win Virginia is too close to call, both Maryland and the District of Columbia voted overwhelmingly for President Obama in 2008 and that trend should continue in tomorrow’s election. Since the team draws most of its fans from the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia, many Redskins followers would be facing another tough loss tomorrow.

            Yet, you probably will not see too many Redskins fans writing off President Obama’s chances in the same way they already are writing off the team’s chances of making the playoffs this season. One logical reason would be that many political prognosticators ranging from The New York Times FiveThirtyEight blogger Nate Silver to the Center For Politics and University of Virginia Professor Larry Sabato have predicted there is a high probability of President Obama winning the Electoral College (and thus the election) after tomorrow’s vote (they also predict Obama will win the popular vote but with much less certainty). One less than logical reason is that a National League team winning the World Series usually means that the incumbent party wins the election. This has been an accurate “predictor” of which party wins in 16 out of the past 23 elections. Since the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, President Obama has a good chance of winning the election.

Relying on sports to predict the outcome of election would probably cause Vice President Joe Biden to call “malarkey”. One of the oldest mantras in the statistics is that correlation does not equal causation. While the relationship between Redskins and/or national league performance in The World Series and Presidential elections are an interesting phenomenon, in no way do the Redskins and Giants performance influence the outcome of the Presidential election. It is just lucky that it turns out that way. In fact, no sports team performance has any direct impact on elections.

            As College Gameday Host Lee Corso would say, “Not so fast my friends.” The performance of sports teams does have actually seem to have an impact on elections. A study performed by professors at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Loyola Marymount University found that “a win in the 10 days before Election Day causes the incumbent to receive an additional 1.61 percentage points of the vote in Senate, gubernatorial, and presidential elections, with the effect being larger for teams with stronger fan support.” This may seem like a small effect, but an 1.61 increase in incumbent support is a huge difference in this Presidential election. For example, Romney is ahead by 1.5 points over Obama in Florida according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls. Yet, wins by the University of Miami, Florida University, and Florida State over the past few days could have impact in helping President Obama eke out a victory in the state (although the fourth quarter loss by the Miami Dolphins did not help Obama’s efforts).

            Should the outcome of sporting events play any impact in elections? The authors of the study seem to think no. In addition to calling sports contest “irrelevant” to elections, they found that impact of sports outcomes on decision-making processes are reduced when people become more aware they are using sports to help make political decisions (they argue that the impact sports has on politics occurs at a subconscious level).

Yet, the authors’ analysis seems to be a little irrelevant in this regard. Whether or not these results in sporting events should matter in elections is not as importan as the fact that there is any impact at all. These findings provide sports organizations with tangible evidence to show how the outcomes of games really do impact the decision making process for items that seemingly have no relationship to sports. This can and should be used as a critical piece of evidence in sponsorship negotiations by sports teams and leagues to show just how pervasive the impact of sports are in other parts of life (i.e. how the outcome of sporting events can impact how people determine which products to buy).

While it is extremely unlikely that the Redskins and Giants performances will determine the outcome of the elections (the teams are based in heavily democratic states), it is possible that a combination of other teams performances over the past few days could help determine who wins tomorrow’s elections.