Primary Voters Research Articles

Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters

Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters

Breaking the Eleventh Commandment

A closer look at Representative Paul N. “Pete” McCloskey’s decision to challenge Richard Nixon for the 1972 Republican presidential nomination due to Nixon’s failure to bring the Vietnam conflict to a conclusion reveals some intriguing aspects of the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy during the U.S. experience in Vietnam. In breaking the GOP’s “Eleventh Commandment”—the exhortation to not speak ill of fellow Republicans—McCloskey acted on the courage of his convictions in opposing the war and his party’s sitting president. For McCloskey, Vietnam transcended politics; it was a moral issue on which he was willing to sacrifice his political career—unlike most other members of Congress and politicians in successive administrations during the Vietnam era. Moreover, McCloskey’s failure to gain traction with voters in the GOP primaries with his antiwar stance presaged George McGovern’s struggles against Nixon in the fall campaign in 1972.

Political Capital in the 21st Century: An Electoral Theory of Going Public and Private

This paper advances the study of presidential/executive leadership by considering the ability of presidents to cheaply use personal grassroots lobbying organizations, such as GOP Team Leader, or Organizing for America/Organizing for Action (OFA), to mobilize their core constituencies for policy purposes using the Internet and associated digital tools. Presidential grassroots lobbying organizations (PGLOs) may be used to advance the president's policy objectives by mobilizing primary voters and activists to send signals to legislators about the organizational capital which may be used to support allies (or undermine opponents) in future elections. Under the assumption that PGLO activity will be more common when such grassroots lobbying emails will be more cost-effective, we argue that grassroots lobbying will be more common under unified government, following a president's last congressional election, and with increased Internet use, but decrease as federal elections approach in the first six years of a president's term. We find support for these hypotheses in data obtained from grassroots lobbying emails sent by Organizing for America/Organizing for Action to members since early 2009. These findings illustrate the strong potential for PGLOs to help presidents exert leadership within their parties, but the limitations of digital tools when targeting opposition legislators.

The Coup de Grâce to the Sanders Campaign: Michigan, Momentum & Viability.

We illuminate the dynamics of primary campaigns by looking at how individuals changed their candidate support, favorability and viability within a crucial state in the 2020 primary. Via a multi-wave survey of likely primary voters in Michigan, we show that Joe Biden’s comeback win was due primarily to the change in perception of his viability following South Carolina and Super Tuesday, especially among the more moderate portion of the Democratic electorate. In subsequent county-level analyses we find that the difference between Bernie Sanders’s win in 2016 and loss in 2020 was more a function of changes in the Democratic primary electorate than in his appeal. Our work suggests that gains in viability do not benefit all candidates equally. Moreover, viability can be generated later in the schedule than previously thought and to decisive ends. We consider the implications of our findings for understanding Michigan’s outcome in November.

Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters. By Sarah E. Anderson, Daniel M. Butler, and Laurel Harbridge-Yong. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 172p. $99.99 cloth.

Rejecting Compromise: Legislators’ Fear of Primary Voters. By Sarah E. Anderson, Daniel M. Butler, and Laurel Harbridge-Yong. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 172p. $99.99 cloth.

Party influence in presidential primaries: Evidence from Mexico

Over recent decades, an increasing number of presidential candidates across the world have been nominated in primary elections. Yet, our understanding of presidential primaries outside of the U.S. remains very limited. This paper advances a theoretical argument linking presidential primary outcomes to the strategic behavior of subnational party elites, particularly those with the resources to mobilize primary voters in their regions. I provide support for this claim using an original dataset from the 2012 presidential primary of the Mexican Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), in which one of the candidates was very closely linked to (and informally endorsed by) the PAN leadership. The results show the levels of support for this candidate were higher in places with PAN officeholders. Additional evidence suggests this pattern is driven by PAN officeholders (1) investing resources into electoral mobilization and (2) tampering with the lists of registered voters.

What COVID-19 and the Nomination of Joe Biden Mean For Health Care in the 2020 Presidential Election.

Before mid-March, health care was the issue of the 2020 election cycle. Voters consistently ranked it at the top of the list of most important issues facing the country. Democratic primary voters ranked it as the number 1 issue in every single primary contest.

Trump Is Not a (Condorcet) Loser! Primary Voters’ Preferences and the 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination

ABSTRACTMany commentators argued that if elites and voters had coordinated on an alternative candidate, Donald Trump could have been defeated for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. This claim rests on the implicit assumption that Trump would have been defeated in a head-to-head contest against another candidate—that he was a Condorcet loser. Conventional pre-election polls, however, do not provide enough information about voters’ preferences to assess the plausibility of this claim. Relying on novel data to construct individuals’ complete preferences over the set of leading Republican candidates, we find that no other candidate strictly defeats Trump in pairwise majority-rule comparisons and—far from being a Condorcet loser—that Trump is a member of the majority-rule core. Our results question the plausibility of the coordination narrative because Trump’s support was wider than political observers believed: it came from a broad base of the Republican primary electorate rather than a small but intense minority.

Aggregated fact-checks, partisanship, and perceptions of candidate honesty

ABSTRACT Evidence of journalistic fact-checking’s capacity to correct misperceptions is mixed, and evidence of its capacity to alter candidate appraisals is even more limited. However, to date, investigators have pursued such evidence only as it relates to atomized factual corrections on the part of fact-checkers, rather than aggregated appraisals of candidate truthfulness—the latter of which have become common from non-partisan fact-checkers such as Politifact. Furthermore, little research has considered the specific characteristics that may condition voters’ willingness to be persuaded by information provided by fact checkers. In the population-based survey experiment described herein, conducted just before the 2016 California Democratic presidential primary, we assess the persuasive impact of an infographic comparing candidates’ factual accuracy, as judged by fact-checks conducted by Politifact over time. Our findings suggest that such summary information is not likely to alter inter-partisan candidate appraisals, but they may affect intra-partisan ones—at least among Democratic primary voters. These results add some clarity regarding the conditions under which fact-checking can influence voter decision-making.

Policy voting in U.S. House primaries

ABSTRACTThis paper uses exit surveys of voters in four House primaries to ask how well voters are able to use primaries for the purpose of giving policy direction to their congressional parties. The surveys found that nearly half of voters could not recall the names of any candidate and that 11% were uncertain or could not recall for whom they had just voted. The surveys also found that nearly 40% of voters could not offer a political evaluation – that is, a like or dislike having political content – about any candidate, and that fewer than a quarter could offer political evaluations of as many as two candidates. The surveys found no evidence of policy-motivated voting in three of the four primaries, but substantial evidence of it in one. Yet even in that one race, voters split their support among three candidates sharing majority voter opinion on the key election issue and thereby opened the way for nomination of a candidate not sharing majority opinion. The paper concludes from this evidence that voters in these House primaries, and probably more widely, made little use of them for the purpose of giving policy direction to their parties.

Trump-ing Foreign Affairs: Status Threat and Foreign Policy Preferences on the Right

President Trump is often at odds with the conservative establishment over a range of issues, not least of which is foreign policy. Yet it remains unclear whether supporting “Trumpism” is commensurate with coherent foreign policy views that are distinct from conventionally conservative positions. We evaluate whether the foreign policy views of Trump’s supporters, both in the voting public and among activists, differ from those of other Republicans. We use the 2016 ANES to examine Republican primary voters and the new 2016 State Convention Delegate Study to assess Republican activists. In doing so, we reveal systematic differences in foreign policy preferences between Trump supporters and more establishment conservatives. We demonstrate that the status-threat model need not be confined to domestic politics. Indeed, it may be extended to explain foreign policy preferences on the political right, that of Trump’s supporters in the present case. In doing so, we also find evidence that status threat may well be the source of fracture in the Republican Party.

Primarily about Primaries

Much of the social choice literature examines direct voting systems, in which voters submit their ranked preferences over candidates and a voting rule picks a winner. Real-world elections and decision-making processes are often more complex and involve multiple stages. For instance, one popular voting system filters candidates through primaries: first, voters affiliated with each political party vote over candidates of their own party and the voting rule picks a candidate from each party, which then compete in a general election.We present a model to analyze such multi-stage elections, and conduct the first quantitative comparison (to the best of our knowledge) of the direct and primary voting systems with two political parties in terms of the quality of the elected candidate. Our main result is that every voting rule is guaranteed to perform almost as well (i.e., within a constant factor) under the primary system as under the direct system. Surprisingly, the converse does not hold: we show settings in which there exist voting rules that perform significantly better under the primary system than under the direct system.

Gender, race, and stereotypes in the 2008 presidential primary

ABSTRACT To better understand the role of local news in voters’ opinions of candidates, we ask whether candidate coverage in local news sources readily activates race and gender stereotypes in voters’ opinions of presidential primary candidates? We conduct an original content analysis of local newspaper coverage of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential primary season. We code 1,849 news articles in 11 battleground and early primary states to evaluate how local news coverage frames issues of race and gender for each candidate. Then we utilize the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) to match primary voters with their local news content. We find considerable variation in local news coverage of candidates’ race and gender across states. While local news coverage frames Obama and Clinton in terms of race and gender issues, we find that race is covered more frequently. In addition, we find that as news coverage of gender issues increases, voters are not less likely to characterize Clinton as a strong leader. However, as local news focuses more readily on Obama’s race, voters are less likely to consider him trustworthy. These findings illustrate the power of local news media to activate stereotypes related to race and gender.

Here's Looking at You: Public‐ Versus Elite‐Driven Models of Presidential Primary Elections

ObjectiveThis study advances the presidential primary literature in two ways. First, since many studies in this literature advocate for more detailed theoretical development, we incorporate an interdisciplinary approach by utilizing social contagion theory from the field of sociology. Second, presidential primaries do not adequately explore what role the public plays during the invisible primary. We thus incorporate Google Trends data into presidential primary models to account for the relative amount of public attention for each presidential primary candidate.MethodsWe use fixed effects regression to determine the impact of public attention on a candidate's share of the contested primary vote (CPV).ResultsWe find that increased public attention leads to higher levels of support for a candidate in the Iowa caucuses, New Hampshire primary, and CPV.ConclusionThese findings illustrate the extra‐voting role the public plays in presidential primary elections and helps us further distinguish how party elites, voters, and candidates uniquely determine the selection of our executive.

Incumbency status and candidate responsiveness to voters in two-stage elections beginning with a primary

ABSTRACT Theories of representation suggest that candidates should respond ideologically to their constituency. Two-stage elections like those in the U.S. force candidates to decide which parts of their constituency they should respond to: citizens who are active enough to participate in primaries or those who only participate in general elections. We posit that non-incumbent candidates should mostly focus on the preferences of primary voters while incumbents should be largely unmoved by the preferences of either set of voters. We test these expectations using data from U.S. House and Senate contests and find support for our theory. Our results suggest that scholars should pay closer attention to the two-stage nature of U.S. elections when evaluating electoral responsiveness.

Party-crashers or wallflowers? The lack of strategic voting in experimental primaries

ABSTRACTOpen and semi-open primaries allow members of opposing political parties to participate in the selection of candidates for the general election. This feature has led to the claim that partisans will ‘cross-over’ and vote in the rival party’s primary, thereby sabotaging that party’s selection process. Using an experimental election, in which it is costly to vote, we find that most voters vote sincerely or not at all, and find little evidence of strategic voting.

The role of partisan cues on voters’ mobilization in a referendum

ABSTRACTEven though partisan cues are widely recognized as a primary force shaping voter behaviour in a referendum, their effect on a decision whether to attend or abstain from voting has not yet been carefully studied. Our analysis of the pre-referendum survey data gathered before the 2015 citizen-initiated referendum in Slovakia leads to two important conclusions: First, parties’ recommendations whether to attend or abstain from voting influence voters’ behaviour in a similar fashion as their suggestions for which side to vote for. Moreover, in certain institutional settings, the partisan cues related to mobilization have an even stronger impact on voters than endorsements for who or what to vote for. Second, the provided party recommendations must be unambiguous and clear. Lower clarity cues are reflected in voters’ behaviour to a lesser extent.

How Issue Positions Affect Candidate Performance: Experiments Comparing Campaign Donors and the Mass Public

In light of important limitations in using observed contribution behavior or surveys to assess how donors respond to candidate issue positions, we present novel experimental evidence about how habitual donors (individuals who contribute above average amounts, multiple times, and in consecutive elections) respond to candidate issue positions. Using a vignette design, we provide causal evidence about the support for two types of divergence from typical candidate issue position bundles—being too extreme or bipartisan. We show “typical” candidates outperform all others in terms of likelihood of attracting donations, primary votes, and general election votes. We also find that donors’ responsiveness to positions vis-a-vis a non-donor sample is not solely driven by partisan intensity and key demographics (i.e., high educated, high income, age, etc.). These results provide evidence that party-consistent positioning among candidates and incumbents may be reinforced by donors’ opposition to issue positions that diverge from the party-standard.

Scientists fare poorly in Super Tuesday primary vote

Scientists fare poorly in Super Tuesday primary vote

Back from the brink

History will record the 2017 Queensland state election not only for its series of firsts — Annastacia Palaszczuk is the first woman state premier to win two successive elections — but also because it defied expectations. Despite its own lack-lustre campaign, an inauspicious economic climate and the revival of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation (PHON), Palaszczuk’s Labor Government enjoyed a small after-preference swing to it (despite a small primary swing against it) to win four additional seats and, with it, its first majority in the Legislative Assembly. Conversely, the Liberal-National Party (LNP) lost three seats in a significant primary swing against it, while PHON, after a chaotic campaign, won a just single seat in a statewide primary vote that fell well below expectations. This article argues that these unexpected results can be attributed to a number of factors, ranging from Palaszczuk’s relative popularity to voters’ desire for stable government to their disdain for an opposition (and opposition leader) many conflated with both PHON and former LNP Premier Campbell Newman. The article also suggests the election of the first majority government since 2012 could mark the stabilising of a hitherto volatile Queensland electorate as Palaszczuk appears to extend Labor’s second electoral hegemony.