Defending Sober Voters against Sensationalist Scholars: A Reply to Rogers

I thank Steven Rogers for taking my work seriously and writing an earnest reply. In this brief reply to the reply, I’d like to clarify my views and respond to some of the new evidence presented by Rogers. Just like the previous literature, the evidence offered by Rogers fails to distinguish between identity voting and policy voting. Instead, Rogers’s (2020) essay repeatedly makes the same kinds of inferential mistakes that I attempted to highlight and correct in my paper (Fowler, 2020).

A predominant view among scholars of political behavior is that party identity drives voters’ decisions and therefore...