The Voter Trap

Abstract

Why do cross-pressured voters persistently support parties that oppose their economic interests? We propose that asymmetric party brand histories constrain which cultural narratives are credible in electoral competition: the party with a deep cultural brand can activate identity-shifting frames that the economic party cannot replicate without destroying its own coherence. We formalize this mechanism through a brand-state model with three main results. First, the voter trap holds under sufficient conditions on evidence quality, cultural salience, and brand asymmetry. Second, the trap deepens dynamically: each election cycle of brand-consistent cultural campaigning lowers the signal threshold required to sustain the trap, and under long institutional memory the trap becomes absorbing. Third, platform separation is sustained endogenously by the brand mechanism, ruling out Downsian convergence. 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.