The Voter Trap

Abstract

We develop a model of the voter trap: a configuration in which a cross-pressured voter rationally votes against her benchmark economic interests because party brand histories asymmetrically constrain the menu of credible cultural narratives. The party with a culturally entrenched brand can make its interpretive model credible to cross-pressured voters; the opposing economic party cannot replicate the cultural frame without destroying its own coherence. The trap exists under three primitive conditions on evidence quality, salience, and brand asymmetry, provided no effective counter-campaign is available within the economic party’s brand-feasible set, deepens dynamically until escape requires increasingly extreme public realizations, and holds for all electorates consistent with a lower bound on the cross-pressured share recoverable from electoral swing. We apply the framework to the 1898 Wilmington Coup and the Jim Crow equilibrium, using evidence from Ottinger and Posch (2025) on elite-orchestrated propaganda in Southern newspapers.