A win for the home team might mean a win for incumbents
Something many incumbent candidates want very much before Election Day is for their local college football team to win. And not only because of support for ol' Hometown U.
With elections on the horizon and football season about to start, football plays are in play as a factor in election outcomes, particularly in close races – or at least they're believed to be a factor, which may be much the same thing.
Why? Because incumbents want voters to be happy when they go into the voting booth. Incumbents and those working for them can become anxious if voters are upset, think the coach blew the game or are angry about that fourthquarter fumble.
Why? As political types consider the sullen, frustrated, want-to-take-it-outon-someone feelings of the electorate, they worry their supporters will be too aggravated to vote, or that undecided voters will be influenced to throw ‘em all out. In this case, as voters can't directly affect coaches or players, the “them” may be people running for office.
Why? Because politics is as much a game of emotion as what takes place on a playing field.
The 1991 election and the Vols' win
On a personal level, this first occurred to me in 1991: I'd taken a leave of absence from my job as the Knoxville mayor's press secretary to work on communications and strategy for Mayor
Victor Ashe's reelection campaign. The primary took place on Sept. 24, 1991: On Sept. 21, the Vols played No. 23-ranked Mississippi State University at Neyland Stadium.
I was at the game, and I found myself hoping for a Vols win for two reasons – and the first, to be honest, wasn't that UT would put a W in the win-loss column. Instead, it was that they'd win so Vol fans would be happy. UT won, 2826: close, but a win over a ranked team. People, myself among them, were indeed happy. Three days later, Ashe, who was vocally and actively opposed by nearly every Knox County elected official, won reelection with about 70% of the vote. Coincidence? I think not.
“In the U.S., if a local college football team wins a match in the ten days before a Senate, gubernatorial or even presidential election, the incumbent candidate tends to get a slightly higher proportion of the vote. This advantage is particularly potent if the team has a strong fan base and if they were the underdogs,” a July 8, 2010, National Geographic article titled “Sports results can affect election results” said.
The story cited Andrew Healy, Loyola-Marymount University economics professor: “Healy says that a victory by a local team puts sports fans in a generally positive frame of mind. If they approach the ballot box in this way, they're more likely to think well of the incumbent party, to interpret its past record more positively, and to be more content with the status quo.”
Interestingly, Healy's LinkedIn page shows him as having spent the last seven years with the Cleveland Browns, owned by Knoxvillians Jimmy and Dee Haslam. Indeed, a search of the Browns' front-office roster shows Healy is vice president of research and strategy.
Football, elections and false positives
There's other information that casts doubt on a correlation between sports outcomes, such as a 2016 study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences headlined, “College football, elections, and false-positive results in observational research.
The city of Knoxville's general election is scheduled for Nov. 7; the Vols' Nov. 4 opponent is not-so-mighty Connecticut, two weeks after Alabama, a week after Kentucky. It doesn't really matter much what the studies say to the people whose names are on the ballot or whose jobs, money or emotion are tired up in incumbent candidates: they'd like not just wins, but a series of wins.
The hope is happy voters translate into happy officeholders, in that it may have an effect on them holding on to their office.
George Korda is a political analyst for WATE-TV, hosts “State Your Case” from noon to 2 p.m. Sundays on WOKI-FM Newstalk 98.7 and is president of Korda Communications, a public relations and communications consulting firm.