Primary Opponent Research Articles

Preventative Polarization: Republican Senators’ Positional Adaptation in the Tea Party Era

Republicans in Congress have, by almost any measure, become significantly more conservative over the last 25 years. We propose that the changing pressures they face when seeking reelection helps explain this trend. Rather than moderating towards the general election median voter as they had previously done, Republican senators became more conservative when seeking reelection to avoid the emergence of, or mitigate the threat from, a primary opponent after the Tea Party emerged. We also show that at the height of the Tea Party era—the 111th to 113th congresses—retiring senators moderated their voting behavior, suggesting that their personal preferences were more moderate than their expressed preferences. During the Trump era, we report mixed results, suggesting that the threat posed by primary challengers was not solely ideological, though the new dynamics and behaviors that emerged in the Tea Party era have continued to shape the Republican Party in the Senate.

Two Against One: Deterrence in the Triad

Abstract This essay explores a deterrence relationship between one defender and two challengers that are interconnected game-theoretically but are otherwise acting independently. In the double deterrence game model, the primary challenger makes the first move, defender, the second, and the secondary challenger makes its move only after the defender and the primary challenger have made their choices. In other words, the threat of the secondary challenger is both latent and contingent. There are four types of defenders, and three types of the two challengers. These preference assumptions define 36 distinct strategic environments, or games. These games are analyzed under both complete and incomplete information. The results are highly sensitive to the specific combination of player types. Deterrence is most likely to succeed when a defender’s threat is highly credible, and to fail when it is low. The secondary challenger is most likely to have an impact on play only at intermediate levels of the defender’s and the primary challenger’s credibility. Assuming a rising challenger, or a declining defender, or both, a danger zone will exist just prior to, or immediately after, the primary challenger has achieved parity with the defender, that is, when a balance of capabilities exists. The principal aim of a defender of the status quo facing two challengers acting independently should be on preventing a challenge by its primary opponent. This conclusion is robust no matter what configuration of player types one assumes.

Application of Natural Law Doctrine in Constitutional Court Decision No. 20/2564

In late 2021, the Constitutional Court of Thailand issued a decision concerning the constitutionality of Section 1448 of the Thai Civil and Commercial Code. Due to the decision, same-sex marriage remains unregulated. The Court implemented natural-law doctrines as their reasons. Natural-law theories are the primary opponents of same-sex marriage within the jurisprudential debate. This paper explores the natural-law doctrines used and presents an analysis of this constitutional decision by way of legal philosophy. Hume’s Law is helpful in discerning natural-law theories. The citation of Cicero’s “true law" proves to help analyse other doctrines and comment on some of the contradictions from the natural-law applications. One contradiction is the citation of Cicero’s text itself, another, from the simultaneous reference of nature and tradition. Another apparent reference of natural-law doctrines the Court used is the preservation argument. Upon the subjects of marriage, natural law, and procreation, it is worthy of exploring some of John Finnis’s natural-law theory and its similarity with this decision’s rationales. This constitutional decision is significant from the philosophical perspective and an excellent opportunity to explore the role of the legal philosophy of the ancient Greek to the contemporary period in Thai jurisprudence.

Alfredo Helsby Hazell's antivaccine view. Controversies and debates at the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century in Chile

This article reconstructs the main arguments against vaccination that circulated in Chile during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For this purpose, we will study the figure of Alfredo Helsby Hazell, who was the primary opponent of vaccination in Chile and published several writings in which he developed and disseminated his ideas. We observe that Helsby argued his rejection of vaccination from the defence of hygienism and distrust of the scientific explanations that began to spread from the germ theory. This was articulated with the defence of health as a private sphere of action, criticizing the intervention of the State in such matters.

Hydro Power Plants as Disputed Infrastructures in Latin America

Non-violent methods can strongly support achieving the 2030 Agenda of sustainable development goals, increasing energy efficiency and access in the poorest countries. However, hydroelectric power stations are disputed strategic elements in any region of the world. This paper analyzes, firstly, the role of hydroelectric power stations as elements that have been generating conflicts in Latin America in the period 1982–2018 and, secondly, the conflicts themselves. The results show that indigenous peoples face the most significant risks from constructing dams and, consequently, they are the primary opponents of hydroelectric projects.

Age Limitations for Presidential Candidates? Exploring Student Perspectives Using Classroom Debates

Ahead of the 2020 Presidential Election, Donald Trump (age 73) and his primary opponent, Joseph Biden (age 76) received extensive criticism regarding the aptness of their candidacies based upon their current ages. While the United States Constitution requires candidates to have “attained the age of thirty-five years”, no age cap for presidential candidates exists. In response to timely public discussion, undergraduate interprofessional gerontology students worked in assigned groups to prepare to debate either in favor of, or in opposition to a constitutional amendment capping the age of presidential candidates. Following classroom debates, course faculty moderated in-depth conversation examining cogent arguments made throughout the debates. After attending this session, participants will understand the logistics of planning in-class debates, moderating post-debate student discussions, and evaluation methods of student debate performance and on a corresponding reflective writing assignment. Student and faculty takeaways and prospective classroom debate ideas will be provided.

When Two Become One? Examining Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's Campaign Themes from Primary to General Election

AbstractMoving from primary opponents to presidential ticket partners requires negotiation and strategy. Yet no work has systematically tracked the evolution of how two separate campaigns rhetorically become one. Rooted in partisan appeals, descriptive and policy representation, and ticket balancing research, this study employs two computer‐assisted content analytic methods to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden's tweets during the 2020 U.S. presidential primary and general election. Shifting between campaign phases, Harris did not rhetorically engage in ticket balancing or emphasize her qualifications, favoring other techniques instead to support Biden. Biden's messaging remained largely consistent yet showed some accommodations to emerging contexts.

Joint Initiatives Instead of Multilateralism: A New Reality for the WTO?

The article examines the complexities of the negotiation function of the WTO, in which consensus in decision-making plays an important role. The author systematizes the possibilities and limitations for incorporating the results of plurilateral negotiations (i.e., with a limited number of participants) held within the framework of the so-called joint statement initiatives into the organization's law. The article also analyzes the prospects for integrating specific joint initiatives (internal regulation in services, simplification of investments in development, e-commerce) into the WTO system. The article emphasizes that despite standard features, all initiatives are unique in their content, format, and history and are at different stages of readiness, for Russia, which takes an active part in these joint initiatives, bringing the negotiations to a conclusion. The article criticizes joint initiatives from their primary opponents (India and South Africa), who insist that plurilateral initiatives' participation ignores existing multilateral mandates reached by consensus. Thus, they destroy the multilateral system.The purpose of the article is to review conceptual and practical approaches to forming new trade rules in the WTO system in the context of the multilateral crisis. The author concludes that plurilateral agreements can become a way out of the crisis in the negotiation function of the WTO, as well as the basis for future trade agreements in the system of organization. However, for plurilateralism to be effective and sustainable, it must be linked to multilateral norms and principles. Any plurilateral approach must allow flexibility in forming the basis for negotiating trade rules at multilateral level. It seems that if in the near future the WTO does not take decisive actions to adjust the rules and procedures for the new agreements, the prospects for advancing negotiations and maintaining the relevance of the leading institution of the international trading system will become even bleaker.

MPI detach — Towards automatic asynchronous local completion

When aiming for large-scale parallel computing, waiting time due to network latency, synchronization, and load imbalance are the primary opponents of high parallel efficiency. A common approach to hide latency with computation is the use of non-blocking communication. In the presence of a consistent load imbalance, synchronization cost is just the visible symptom of the load imbalance. Tasking approaches as in OpenMP, TBB, OmpSs, or C++20 coroutines promise to expose a higher degree of concurrency, which can be distributed on available execution units and significantly increase load balance. Available MPI non-blocking functionality does not integrate seamlessly into such tasking parallelization. In this work, we present a slim extension of the MPI interface to allow seamless integration of non-blocking communication with available concepts of asynchronous execution in OpenMP and C++. Using our concept allows to span task dependency graphs for asynchronous execution over the full distributed memory application. We furthermore investigate compile-time analysis necessary to transform an application using blocking MPI communication into an application integrating OpenMP tasks with our proposed MPI interface extension.

Medicare for All, Some, or None? Testing the Effects of Ambiguity in the Context of the 2020 Presidential Election

ABSTRACTPolitical scientists have long contemplated whether candidates are better off taking more ambiguous policy positions. Taking advantage of a lack of clarity in Senator Kamala Harris’s healthcare position, I use an original survey experiment to apply these theories to the case of the 2020 presidential election. I find that ambiguity offers Harris little to no advantage over two of her leading Democratic primary opponents and, among certain subjects, harms her relative to Senator Elizabeth Warren. I also find negative effects on Harris’s favorability relative to President Donald Trump. These results have interesting implications for both the 2020 election and the broader study of candidate rhetoric because they illustrate potential downsides to avoiding clear issue statements.

Guam

Guam Elizabeth (Isa) Ua Ceallaigh Bowman (bio), Michael Lujan Bevacqua (bio), and Tiara Na'Puti (bio) The year 2018–2019 in Guam began on a high note with a series of landmark elections and ended more forebodingly with a federal court case threatening the rights of the island's Indigenous people. November 2018 saw the victory of Democrat Lourdes "Lou" Leon Guerrero as the island's first female governor. For centuries, chief executives on island have been referred to as "maga'låhi," a colonial appropriation of the CHamoru term for a male leader. With Leon Guerrero's election, she assumed for the first time in modern history the title of "maga'håga," or female leader (pdn, 7 Nov 2018). Leon Guerrero led a local "blue wave" of Democrats who seized a super majority (ten out of fifteen) seats in I Liheslaturan Guåhan (Guam Legislature). Among those elected was former journalist Clynt Ridgell, the first Guam-elected leader of Chuukese descent (pdn, 7 Jan 2019). Leon Guerrero's lieutenant governor, Joshua Tenorio, became the first openly gay man in US history to hold that position. In I Liheslaturan Guåhan, ten of the officials elected were women, including seven Democrats and three [End Page 195] Republicans. With 67 percent of its legislature made up of women, Guam held one of the highest percentages of female elected leadership in world history. This milestone reflected the wave of women winning public office in the continental United States, but it could also be tied to a resurgence of CHamoru values long suppressed by patriarchal colonialism (pdn, 8 Nov, 2018). As a way of combining these two narratives, a company called Maga'håga Rising began to sell "The Future is Famalao'an" t-shirts shortly after Leon Guerrero's inauguration. "Famalao'an" is the CHamoru term for women, playing on the popular American hashtag #thefutureisfemale (pdn, 13 Jan 2019). At the same time, the maga'håga appointed Tony Babauta as her chief of staff and Jack Hattig as director of the Chamorro Land Trust Commission. This was despite past scandals involving sexual misconduct toward women—Babauta at the federal level and Hattig at a high school (pdn, 10 Dec 2019; gdp, 19 Jan 2019). Leon Guerrero survived a divisive four-way primary to become the Democratic Party's nominee. Leon Guerrero and Tenorio beat their closest primary opponents, former Senator Frank Aguon and former Attorney General of Guam Alicia Limtiaco, by under 300 votes (8,218 to 7,958). Aguon and Limtiaco, despite signing a party unity pledge during the campaign, mounted a write-in campaign during the general election. Their effort was boosted through significant self-inflicted wounds by the Republican nominee for governor Ray Tenorio, then lieutenant governor. In the midst of the campaign, Tenorio was charged and tried for official misconduct for taking a police officer's gun. While Tenorio was found not guilty after the election, the scandal tarnished his campaign (pdn, 22 March 2019). With Leon Guerrero the heavy favorite, much attention was focused on whether or not her camp would be able to garner enough votes to avoid a runoff election. According to Guam law, a candidate must receive a majority of the votes in order to be elected, or else a runoff is held. Aguon and Limtiaco's write-in campaign won an unprecedented 22.9 percent of the general election votes, just 1,258 fewer than Ray Tenorio and his running mate, former Senator Tony Ada (26.4 percent). Leon Guerrero narrowly avoided a runoff by winning 50.7 percent of the votes. Maga'håga Leon Guerrero, a former nurse, was a pro-choice community activist in Guam in the early 1990s. Guam remains a heavily Catholic island, although recent child sexual abuse scandals have weakened the influence of the church. Though not damaging her campaign, her support for reproductive rights as maga'håga created a minicontroversy. After the election, Leon Guerrero's Bureau of Women's Affairs began actively seeking an abortion provider for Guam, as there had been no official provider for nearly a year. The bureau director stated that a recent case in which a twelve-year...

Electoral Competition with Primaries and Quality Asymmetries

We introduce primaries—both closed and open—into a Downsian model of two-party electoral competition allowing the two candidates in each party’s primary to differ in valence as well as in policy platform. The good news is that the introduction of either type of primary acts as a stabilizing force since equilibriums exist quite generally, serves as an arena for policy debates since all candidates propose differentiated platforms, and guarantees that each party’s nominee is of higher quality than its primary opponent. Moreover, primaries tend to benefit the party whose median voter is closer to the overall median. The bad news is that the winner of the general election need not be the candidate with the highest overall quality since primaries that are too competitive can prove harmful. Given the differences between open and closed primaries, we show that the choice of primary type is particularly important and may determine the winner of the general election.

Segmenting Clinton and Obama Voters

The purpose of this case is to introduce data visualization, advanced regression techniques, and supervised learning. Students are asked to visualize data geographically and in scatterplots. They will use stepwise regression and regression trees to select a predictive model for forecasting data in a holdout sample. In a forecasting competition, they will submit their models to be tested for accuracy. Supervised learning techniques—such as training, validation, and testing—are introduced. Regression trees serve as both predictive and graphical tools for communicating insights from data analysis to a decision maker. Excerpt UVA-QA-0807 Rev. Sept. 21, 2017 SEGMENTING CLINTON AND OBAMA VOTERS It was February 19, 2008. One week earlier, Barack Obama had taken the lead in the delegate count during the Democratic Party's presidential primaries, the winner of which would face the Republican Party's nominee in the general election to become the next president of the United States (POTUS). On that day in February, Hillary Clinton, Obama's primary opponent, began running ads in Ohio aimed at middle-class, blue-collar voters. One ad, “Night Shift,” closed showing Clinton at her desk: “She understands. She's worked the night shift, too.” But had Clinton ever worked the night shift? Her spokesperson said it was a “rhetorical reference” to working late nights as a lawyer, First Lady, and senator. Clinton was not alone in her awkward appeals to voters in key demographics. Months earlier at a campaign stop in Iowa, Obama noted that while produce prices had risen in grocery stores, farmers had not benefited from increases in crop prices: “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula? I mean, they're charging a lot of money for this stuff.” At the time, there wasn't a single Whole Foods in the state of Iowa. . . .

The Druze Community and the Lebanese State, between Confrontation and Reconciliation

The Druze Community and the Lebanese State, between Confrontation and Reconciliation

Two-stage elections, strategic candidates, and campaign agendas

Candidates employ strategies that depend on the electorate involved and the opponent(s) they face. In two-stage elections — elections that include both a primary and a general election — candidates must balance the need to satisfy their party's electorate and defeat their primary opponent(s) with the need to appeal to the electorate as a whole in order to defeat their general election opponent. That balance will depend on whether the primary stage is contested or not. We evaluate how candidates in 56 U.S. Senate and gubernatorial campaigns respond to these considerations by analyzing the bundles of issues candidates emphasize in their campaign advertising. As expected, electoral competition leads candidates to emphasize similar issues over the course of their campaigns. As a result, candidates involved in contested primaries adopt a mixed strategy, responding both to their primary election opponents and their eventual general election opponent during the primary-election phase of the contest.

“Ya Basta?!” Ronald Reagan's 1966 Success with Mexican American Voters

President Ronald Reagan often is remembered for his ability to attract disaffected Democrats—the “Reagan Democrats”—to vote Republican. Yet, long before his first Presidential victory in 1980, Reagan garnered their votes in the 1966 California gubernatorial election. In beating Republican primary opponent, former San Francisco Mayor George Christopher, as well as his general election opponent, incumbent Democrat Governor Pat Brown, he drew heavily from the ranks of disaffected Democrats. Perhaps more surprising, Reagan polled well among Mexican Americans, who were traditionally Democrats. Indeed Reagan would win by almost a million–vote margin, and this was accomplished in no small way by the help of Mexican American voters.

Intensions and Indeterminacy: Reply to Soames, Turner, and Wilson

I am grateful to Scott Soames, Jason Turner, and Mark Wilson for their comments on Constructing the World. Soames andWilson are two of the primary opponents I had in mind in writing the book, and it is useful to see just where our disagreements lie. Both of them raise central issues about the semantic applications of the epistemological framework in the book, especially the use of the scrutability to ground intensions and other aspects of meaning. Turner raises important issues about indeterminacy that were passed over quickly in CTW. His discussion helps to bring out ways in which the treatment of indeterminacy in the book is suboptimal, and it points the way to a better treatment.1

The Influence of Tone, Target, and Issue Ownership on Political Advertising Effects in Primary Versus General Elections

The conventional wisdom in the literature about political advertising effects—e.g., going negative risks backlash, stick to issues your party owns—has been derived from studies of general elections. Much less attention has been paid to primary elections, in which a partisan audience may be receptive to attacks on the opposing party and may judge most issues to be handled better by their own party. This experiment (N = 223) sets out to investigate the roles of tone (positive versus comparative), target (none, primary opponent, or general election opponent), and issue ownership (party-owned issue or unowned issue) in responses to political advertising during primary versus general elections. As predicted, partisans in primary election conditions had lower ad and sponsoring candidate evaluations for comparative ads attacking a primary opponent than for positive ads or comparative ads attacking the eventual general election opponent, but there were no differences between the latter two. Independents in the general election conditions responded more positively to positive ads than comparative ads. Issue ownership had no main effects.

Constructing Policy Networks: Social Assistance Reform in the Czech Republic

Czech social insurance and family transfers experienced fundamental reform in 1995 but Czech social assistance benefits still lack comprehensive change. This article explains the delay in Czech social assistance reform by appling policy network studies in a postcommunist context. Although few organizations perticipate in the Czech social assistance policy network, they are divided: they lack the common interests and exchangable resources necessary to create dialogue and compromise. The organizations of disabled citizens are the only interest group active in the policy network, with the operators of state social care institutions their primary opponents. In the late 1990s, this already fragmented issue network suffered further division when the EU entered as a powerful network actor with another set of policy goals. Until the policy network structure facilitates more dialogue and consensus‐building, hopes for comprehensive social assistance reform will linger unfulfilled.

Apoptotic cell death: its implications for imaging in the next millennium.

Apoptosis, also known as programmed cell death, is an indispensable component of normal human growth and development, immunoregulation and homeostasis. Apoptosis is nature's primary opponent of cell proliferation and growth. Strict coordination of these two phenomena is essential not only in normal physiology and regulation but in the prevention of disease. Programmed cell death causes susceptible cells to undergo a series of stereotypical enzymatic and morphologic changes governed by ubiquitous endogenous biologic machinery encoded by the human genome. Many of these changes can be readily exploited to create macroscopic images using existing technologies such as lipid proton magnetic resonance (MR) spectroscopy, diffusion-weighted MR imaging and radionuclide receptor imaging with radiolabeled annexin V. In this review the cellular phenomenon of apoptotic cell death and the imaging methods which can detect the process in vitro and in vivo are first discussed. Thereafter an outline is provided of the role of apoptosis in the pathophysiology of clinical disorders including stroke, neurodegenerative diseases, pulmonary inflammatory diseases, myocardial ischemia and inflammation, myelodysplastic disorders, organ transplantation, and oncology, in which imaging may play a critical role in diagnosis and patient management. Objective imaging markers of apoptosis may soon become measures of therapeutic success or failure in both current and future treatment paradigms. Since apoptosis is a major factor in many diseases, quantification and monitoring the process could become important in clinical decision making.