Collision with Collusion: Partisan Reaction to the Trump-Russia Scandal Joshua P. Darr, Nathan P. Kalmoe, Kathleen Searles, Mingxiao Sui, Raymond J. Pingree, Brian K. Watson, Kirill Bryanov, and Martina Santia President Donald Trump faced substantial scandal coverage early in his presidency. Can these stories about presidential controversies change the opinions of Trump’s fellow Republicans, or are the efforts of the news media to inform partisans about prominent issues futile? Past research on partisan reactions to major political scandals were confounded by problems with self- reported media use and single-shot experimental treatments. We address these concerns using a unique, repeated-exposure experimental design that either randomly supplied participants with news about the Trump-Russia scandal, or removed most of those stories from view, over the course of one week in June 2017. This design mimics sustained media attention to a political scandal and disentangles the effects of media coverage from selection in the context of a high-choice media environment. We find that Republicans randomly assigned to see more Trump-Russia headlines reacted more negatively than Democrats or Independents, rating Trump’s performance lower and expressing more negative emotions about him. Republicans’ perceptions of media bias were not affected by Trump-Russia stories, and effects were not contingent upon clicking the articles. Intense media focus on a story can alter partisans’ evaluations of politicians by shifting the balance of headlines. O utsized media attention is a key feature in all political scandals, which require a “communica- tive event” in their early stages by definition (Shaw 1999). Media attention leads to more media attention: stories in the headlines continue to dominate coverage, resulting in news “feeding frenzies” (Sabato 1994). The news media tend to feature negative and personalized stories that are expected to increase atten- tion from consumers (Rosenstiel et al. 2007), resulting in high levels of sustained media attention for political scandals (Galvis, Snyder, and Song 2016; Patterson 1993). Despite the media’s central role in political scandals, the prevailing scholarly wisdom predicts that scandal coverage will have minimal effects on public evaluations of the leaders involved (Bennett and Iyengar 2008). Partisans loyally support their party’s leaders and often seem impervious to news that portrays those leaders in a negative light (Bartels 2002). The proliferation of media channels may also weaken the impact of scandals: given many A list of permanent links to Supplemental Materials provided by the authors precedes the References section. *Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XSGYWA Joshua P. Darr (jdarr@lsu.edu), Nathan P. Kalmoe (nkalmoe@lsu.edu), and Kathleen Searles (ksearles@lsu.edu) are Assistant Professors of Political Communication in the Manship School of Mass Communication and Department of Political Science at Louisiana State University. Mingxiao Sui (msui@ferrum.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Media and Communication at Ferrum College. Raymond J. Pingree (rpingree@lsu.edu) is an Associate Professor in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. Brian K. Watson (bwats17@lsu.edu), Kirill Bryanov (kbrya21@lsu. edu), and Martina Santia (msanti4@lsu.edu) are Doctoral Candidates in the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. The authors would like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Perspectives on Politics, Martin Johnson, and audiences at SPSA 2018 and LSU’s Manship School of Mass Communication for their thoughtful comments. Funding was provided by the George D. Nelson Professorship, an internal research fund of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Any remaining errors are our own. 772 Perspectives on Politics doi:10.1017/S1537592719001075 © American Political Science Association 2019 Special Issue Article https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592719001075 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 181.214.60.246, on 22 Aug 2019 at 16:37:02, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at