title: “Working Papers” permalink: /papers/ —

Running with the Double Bind: Exploring Ideological Moderation in Black Women Candidates.

Candidates in the United States often moderate their rhetoric after primary elections to appeal to the broader general electorate (Acree et al., 2020). Yet little work examines whether this well-documented pivot is conditioned by candidates’ intersecting identities. This project examines whether Black women candidates moderate their ideological campaign rhetoric more than their peers, in response to compounded racialized and gendered expectations of electability and progressivism. Using Twitter data from U.S. House candidates during the 2024 election, I employ a Difference-in-Differences and Regression Discontinuity Design using the primary election date as a breakpoint. The analysis applies zero-shot natural language inference to track ideological shifts in candidate rhetoric. I also examine shifts in issue framing, focusing on whether appeals tied to race, gender, and identity give way to broader policy themes after the primary. Contrary to expectations, Black women candidates do not systematically moderate their rhetoric after primaries, nor do they moderate differently from other identity groups.