The Tuesday Advantage of Candidates Endorsed by American Newspapers
This paper documents the electoral advantage of candidates who have a newspaper endorsement republished on Election Day in comparison to other endorsed candidates. I provide evidence that this advantage is not driven by a selection effect, suggesting that it is instead explained by readers deciding how to vote based on endorsements read on Election Day. I reject some other mechanisms that could explain the influence of this endorsement, but the advice provided on the day of the election. Moreover, candidates that have a different political orientation from their endorsing newspapers benefit more from this endorsement than other candidates. These results are based on a newly-compiled dataset matching county-level data of 826 endorsed candidates election results with newspaper and county characteristics.