Breaking Symmetric Negative Voting: Evidence from the 2016–2020 U.S. Elections

Negative voting, casting a ballot more against a disliked candidate than for a preferred one, reveals how people translate political evaluations into expressive behavior. Existing accounts often assume that partisan hostility is symmetric, with Democrats and Republicans equally motivated by animus toward the other side. This study challenges that assumption by arguing that negative voting can be asymmetric: it emerges most strongly when psychological biases interact with political context. Specifically, negativity bias and affective polarization shape how voters interpret performance-based judgments, especially under a polarizing incumbent. Using panel data from the 2016–2020 Nationscape surveys and the 2024 American National Election Study (ANES), I show that negative voting was roughly balanced in 2016 but became sharply asymmetric in contexts like 2020, when Democrats and Independents engaged in negative voting far more than Republicans. Analyses across 2016, 2020, and 2024 indicate that these patterns are contingent on incumbency and electoral context. Overall, the findings suggest that negative voting is not a fixed feature of electoral politics but a context-dependent response—one in which affective polarization channels dissatisfaction into opposition rather than support.