Riot in the party? Voter registrations in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 capitol insurrection

Abstract

Following the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, news outlets reported that registered Republicans were leaving the party in droves. Drawing on millions of individual-level voter registration records in Florida, we place post-riot party-switching in broader context. We investigate whether Republicans were more likely to experience greater out-migration after the riot, detail to which parties’ individuals switched their allegiances, use a difference-in-difference strategy to determine if the 2021 exodus was greater than 4 years earlier, and examine whether those who decamped from the GOP returned to the fold a year later. We find that registered voters who switched parties after the January 6th uprising were more likely to be white, middle-aged, high-propensity voters, and that Republicans were nearly four times more likely than Democrats to defect following the insurrection. We also find that the GOP defection rate after January 6th was nine times higher than during the same time period in 2017. However, we find that Republican registrants who switched parties post-riot did not migrate to the Democratic Party, but rather became independents, and that a year later, almost no Republicans (only 4.6%) who had defected returned to their GOP roots.