Female Nomination and Party Vote Share in US Gubernatorial Elections

Abstract

What happens to a party's vote share when it nominates a woman for executive office? The evidence on female candidates is dominated by legislative races and by designs that pool parties and periods into a single average effect, which is typically null. This paper builds a new county-level panel of US gubernatorial elections - 578 races in 49 states from 1980 to 2024, reconstructed and audited from primary sources - and estimates party-specific, time-varying nomination effects with a stacked difference-in-differences design around within-state transitions from male to female nominees. The average null conceals a sharp asymmetry. Republican transitions to a female nominee since 2016 are followed by a county-level vote-share decline of 6.5 percentage points, robust across cohort, weighting and inference checks. No comparable average differential is detected for Democratic nominees. Survey-ballot diagnostics are compatible with demand-side discrimination but cannot identify that channel.