Sore-Loser Effect: High Election Expectations Tied To Lasting Partisan Hostility

9 in 10 Voters Expect Their Candidate to Win. That Spells Trouble After Election Day

Every presidential election leaves tens of millions of Americans disappointed. A new study finds that how bitter those voters stay afterward may depend less on the loss itself and more on how certain they were that it would never happen.

Political scientist Seth Warner of the University of Connecticut combed through decades of national survey data and found that voters on the losing side usually come out of an election a little less hostile toward the other party than the winners do. Losers who had expected victory broke that pattern. Their dislike of the opposing party held steady after the defeat, and in some cases may have grown.

Confident voters are hardly a fringe group anymore. Roughly 90% of voters now expect their preferred presidential candidate to win, according to the study, published in the journal Political Behavior. Warner calls that a sharp increase from just two decades ago. In his words, the share of Americans expecting their party to win is now “much closer to unanimity than a thin majority.” Only one side can be right.

Election expectations reach record highs

To track voter confidence over time, Warner used the American National Election Studies (ANES), a long-running academic survey that interviews Americans around each presidential election. Since 1952, it has asked respondents a simple question: “Who do you think will be elected President in November?” Warner compared each answer with the person’s intended vote or party, drawing on surveys from the 1950s through 2024.

For decades, confidence stayed fairly steady. Around 2000, it began climbing, reaching the high 70s during that decade and settling in the high 80s from Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign onward.

A skeptic might argue that recent races were simply closer, leaving more room for hope. Warner tested that idea by matching each interview date to the polls at that moment, using RealClearPolitics averages for 2004 through 2024 and Gallup polls for earlier years. Voters did pay some attention to the numbers: each extra percentage point of polling lead for their side was tied to about 7% higher odds of expecting a win. Even after accounting for polls and tight races, voter confidence shot well past what the numbers supported starting around 2012.

Disliking the other side tracks with high hopes

Next, Warner looked for the traits that went along with high hopes. He examined how warmly people felt about their party’s candidate, how strongly they identified with their party, whether their policy views matched their party’s, how closely they followed campaigns, and whether they lived in a clearly red or blue area.

Since 1980, the share of voters expecting their own party to win has risen by about 18 percentage points. In a statistical breakdown, two changes accounted for the biggest pieces of that rise. One was party loyalty at the ballot box: more voters now back their own party’s nominee, a shift that explained about 25% of the increase. Close behind was partisan animosity, the political science term for dislike of the other party.

Between 1980 and 2020, the share of partisans who rated the opposing party below 25 on a 0-to-100 “feeling thermometer” jumped by 47 percentage points. That surge accounted for about 22% of the rise in voter confidence. Following campaigns closely, living in a strongly partisan state and district, and holding party-aligned policy views each explained very little.

Warner then followed the same people across ANES surveys in 2016, 2020 and 2024 to see whether shifts inside one person’s head lined up over time. They did. When someone’s dislike of the other party rose by a typical amount, their chance of expecting their party to win rose by about 9 percentage points. After accounting for other political attitudes, that link shrank to about 4 points but did not disappear. Warm feelings toward one’s own candidate turned out to be the strongest predictor of all.

One partisan wrinkle surfaced as well. In recent elections, Democrats appeared considerably less optimistic about their chances than Republicans, a gap that did not always exist.

Sore losers and dashed election expectations

Warner’s most provocative finding concerns what happens after Election Day. ANES interviews many people both before and after each presidential race, which let him measure how each voter’s feelings toward the other party shifted once the results came in. He analyzed 22,313 such responses from presidential election years between 1996 and 2024, leaving out 2000 because the survey lacked the needed questions that year.

Usually, losers cool off. In line with earlier research, people whose party lost generally emerged less polarized than people whose party won. Losers who had expected to win were a different story.

“Among voters whose party saw defeat, those who entered the election with high hopes sustained and potentially even grew in their level of partisan animosity,” Warner writes. Losing voters with more modest expectations came out with lower animosity than the winners.

By Warner’s own estimate, the effect is modest, about 3 points on a 100-point scale. Its timing gives it weight, since it arrives during what he calls “the important and sensitive time of a democratic transition.”

Across individual elections, the pattern pointed the same way every cycle. Effects were largest in races Donald Trump ran in, and those races produced three of the four results strong enough to pass the usual statistical test for ruling out chance. Earlier years were not far behind, though: estimates for 1996 and 2004 were only slightly weaker, and 2004’s passed that test.

Warner also checked how long the hangover lasted. Republicans who expected to win in 2020 were still showing extra hostility toward Democrats in 2024, nearly as much as right after that election. Democrats who expected to win in 2016 showed no lingering effect by 2020. Warner treats 2020 as an extreme case because of Trump’s claims of mass voter fraud, and he says the 2016 results argue for caution about how long such effects last.

Why confident voters struggle with defeat

Two psychological ideas may explain the pattern, according to the paper. One, expectancy violation theory, holds that when high-status groups see their standing threatened, they often respond with resentment. Another, called relative deprivation theory, ties unmet expectations to hostility toward groups that seem better off.

Warner’s findings may also help reconcile conflicting research. Some large recent surveys found Americans’ partisan hostility “locked in,” barely budging after elections, while studies covering a broader range of years and settings found that losers tend to soften. Warner suggests both can be true: losers may normally cool off, but that softening disappears when nearly everyone on the losing side expected to win.

Several caveats apply. All of the data are observational, so the study cannot prove that high expectations cause lasting hostility or that hostility causes high expectations. Warner’s analysis found evidence of a reverse link, with expecting victory also predicting later animosity, though that connection was weaker. He also cannot fully separate wishful thinking from the influence of partisan news sources, since the ANES does not consistently ask people about their media habits.

Democracy depends on losers accepting the result. Warner sums up the trouble in one line: “not only do Americans dislike the opposing party, but they increasingly enter each election believing their own side will prevail.” With roughly 9 in 10 voters counting on a win that only one side can collect, millions of Americans now walk into every presidential election unprepared to lose. Warner suggests that political leaders and media outlets could help by tempering expectations before the votes are counted. Lowering supporters’ expectations may sound like bad campaign strategy, but these findings hint that it could make the morning after a lot less ugly.