Primary Voters Research Articles

The Appeal of Black Republican Candidates: Does Party and Gender Matter? An Experimental Study

The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States has coincided with increased levels of black involvement within the Republican Party: The 2010 elections ushering in Black Republicans into Congress for the first time since 2003, Jennifer Carroll becoming the first black Republican woman elected Lieutenant Governor of Florida, and current black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain gaining popularity among Republican primary voters. Given these recent developments, I am interested in the following research questions: What is the appeal of black Republican candidates when compared to black Democratic candidates? Furthermore, what is the level of appeal of black female Republican candidates when compared to black male Republican candidates and black male and female Democratic candidates? Most black candidates and office holders identify with the Democratic Party and most black voters vote for Democratic candidates. Thus, it posits the puzzle of how voters perceive black Republican candidates in comparison to black Democratic candidates and whether gender plays a role in this perception. In response to this puzzle, I conducted an experiment of a fictitious black candidate running for statewide office, whose profile is varied only along party identification and gender cues. My findings illustrate that party and gender cues often intersect in the evaluation of black candidates. This study is timely and important as we consider how candidate evaluation studies treat race, gender, and political party variables.

War and Momentum: The 2008 Presidential Nominations

AbstractIn the 2008 presidential nomination campaigns, both Obama and McCain staked out clear positions on the Iraq war. Exit polls conducted in primary and caucus contests show that the war in Iraq was indeed the key issue of support for the winning contenders. However, it was not agreement with the candidates' positions that drove primary voters into the arms of Obama and McCain; rather, it was concern with the Iraq war. Primary voters treated the war as a valence issue, not as a position issue. Each candidate also won an early contest (the Iowa caucuses for Obama and the New Hampshire primary for McCain) in which concern over the Iraq war was especially strong. Those victories sparked a momentum for both candidates in subsequent contests. As a result, both Obama and McCain owed their respective nominations for president to the combination of war and momentum.

Primary Voters Versus Caucus Goers and the Peripheral Motivations of Political Participation

Depending on their state of residence, Americans can participate in Presidential nomination contests either by voting in a primary or by attending a caucus. Since caucus participation requires more time and effort than primary voting, it has long been thought that caucuses must attract a more partisan, activist, and politically extreme cohort of citizens than primaries. This paper challenges the view that more burdensome electoral institutions necessarily ought to attract more politically engaged citizens. I propose a theory of peripheral motivations that predicts caucus goers and primary voters will not differ in terms of their political attitudes or interest, but they will differ in their levels of community engagement. The key insight is that many of the reasons why citizens choose to participate or abstain from politics actually have little to do with politics. Analysis of two surveys from the 2008 Presidential election substantiates the theoretical expectations.

Le donne alle primarie: partecipazione politica e reti di attivazione

This contribution aims at analyzing voters’ characteristics and their preference motivations at the first Italian national primary elections in 2005 and the Sicilian regional primary elections in 2006. This analysis mainly focuses on gender differences and is based on a sample of face-to-face interviews. In 2005 the primary elections were called in order to select the centre-left coalition candidate for the following parliamentary elections, while the 2006 ones in order to choose the president of the Sicily region. Several differences between these two primary votes are to be detected, first of all the fact that the regional primaries were much more competitive. Both elections are analyzed by focusing on the voters’ propensity for political and civic involvement with a specific gender-oriented perspective. Political engagement’s mechanisms are reconstructed, allowing to single out different participatory profiles. Furthermore, voting motivation and priorities, cognitive dimensions as well as political communication tools employed by the candidates are considered in order to provide a more accurate explanation of voters’ behavior and attitudes.

Le primarie: democratizzazione interna ai partiti, partecipazione dei cittadini e istanze plebiscitarie

The article aims at showing the difficulties faced in introducing primary elections in the Italian representative democracy. The theoretical content of this contribution is twofold. First some questions concerning primary elections as a device for the selection of parties’ candidates will be discussed; then the impact of the primary vote on citizens’ participation resources to party-politics arena will be analyzed. These topics are dealt by following two paths. The first is devoted to briefly reconstruct the political consequences of different types of primary elections in the USA. The second path focuses on the development of the theoretical and political debate on primary elections in Italy, in a context characterized by crisis and transformation of political parties. According to the literature, when primary elections are pursued by party coalitions, then it is highly probable that they may lead to harsh conflicts among, and inside, the involved parties. The last part of this essay reports in fact two striking examples: the primary elections to select the centre-left coalition’s mayoral candidate in Palermo and Aversa in 2006. The outcomes of this analysis show that political parties do not become open and transparent organizations as an immediate result of the introduction of primary elections. As well, they prove that it is not possible to consider primary elections as the only way to improve openness, transparency, responsiveness and accountability of organizations, such as political parties and institutions in liberal-representative democracies.

Why primaries? The party’s tradeoff between policy and valence

Our theory studies why and when political parties choose to hold competitive primary elections. Party leaders can decide the nomination by granting resources and endorsements to a chosen candidate. Alternatively, they can delegate the candidate selection to the party’s rank and file by holding a primary election among multiple candidates. The benefit of a primary is to increase the expected valence of the nominee. Its cost is the ideology that primary voters might induce on the party’s policy platform. We find that primary elections are more likely to be used when the potential primary voters are not too moderate and not too extremist. We also find that opposition parties and weak parties benefit from primaries more than incumbent parties and strong parties do. Intriguingly, extremist parties are more likely to adopt primaries than centrist parties are. Contradicting previous research, we find that primaries are more attractive when candidates’ skills are less salient for voters than candidates’ policies.

Retrospective Voting in Presidential Primaries

Though retrospectiveperformance evaluations are now widely appreciated as a major influence on voting in general elections, their influence in presidentialprimaries has rarely been noticed. U sing exit polls conducted by major media organizations over the last nine election cycles, this article shows that retrospective voting is an important, indeed dominant, factor in two types of situations: when an incumbent president is running for reelection, and when an incumbent vice president is seeking to become his party's next presidential candidate. Thisfinding, inturn, helps explain two significant institutional features of the contemporary presidential nomination process: why most recent presidents have been renominated without much difficulty, and why the vice presidency has become such a good launching pad for presidential candidacies. How do voters make reasonably intelligent voting decisions, given that most of them are not terribly interested in politics, follow it only intermittently, and therefore do not have a great deal of information about the candidates and their issue positions? Political scientists have developed a number of answers to this question, but perhaps the most commonly invoked is the notion of retrospective voting. According to this theory, voters are less concerned with a candidate's or party's promises about future policy than with their past performance in office, particularly their success or failure in achieving such hard, tangible outcomes as peace and prosperity. Whereas information about campaign promises is costly to acquire and difficult to evaluate, most citizens develop relatively solid perceptions about the performance of an incumbent officeholder or administration simply by going about their normal lives and paying a minimal amount of attention to the news. The body of scholarly work bearing out the general theory of retrospective voting is, by now, quite large. The two most influential statements are V. O. Key's The Responsible

Flip-flopping from primaries to general elections

I consider a model in which candidates must win a primary election to compete in the general election. Candidates may choose different policies in the primary and the general election, but doing so results in accusations of flip-flopping. I show that candidates adopt extreme policies in the primaries but then try to move closer to the center for the general election even though primary voters are forward-looking and anticipate this policy moderation. The extent to which candidates move closer to the center is constrained by flip-flopping costs, and candidates choose divergent policies in the general election. I obtain comparative statics results on candidate policy choices in terms of voter preferences.

Strategic voting in open primaries: evidence from Rush Limbaugh’s “operation chaos”

Open primaries create the possibility of strategic crossover voting. On his March 3, 2008 program and subsequent broadcasts, radio personality Rush Limbaugh called on his listeners to extend the Democratic presidential contest by crossing over to vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton. Using voter registration data from North Carolina and election return data from Indiana, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania (states with open, semi-closed, and closed primaries, respectively), I find no evidence of a Limbaugh-motivated switch in political party registration or of a large or statistically significant Limbaugh-motivated increase in voting for Sen. Clinton.

State political culture and support for Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries

Though ideologically similar, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appealed to different types of voters in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries and demographically the candidates’ support varied considerably. Relative to the demographics of the primary electorates, however, we find that state political culture played an outsized role in determining which candidate emerged victorious in a particular state. When the size of demographic groups in the 2008 Democratic primaries are utilized in ordinary least squares regression models as independent variables with state political characteristics and Daniel Elazar's state political culture typology, political culture proves to be an important determinant of the level of support given to Obama in a state. States that are characterized by a more moralistic political culture are more likely to have given Obama a greater share of the primary vote and states that are characterized by a more traditionalistic or individualistic culture were less likely to support Obama in the 2008 Democratic primaries.

Primary Politics: Race, Gender, and Age in the 2008 Democratic Primary

Despite Barack Obama’s momentum in the early phase of the Democratic nomination, the process of selecting a nominee took longer than usual. Obama’s momentum, it seems, got stuck, and the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination was an unusually drawn out affair. Even when it appeared Barack Obama would win the nomination, many Clinton supporters said they would support John McCain in the general election. Why were some Democrats unwilling to join the Obama bandwagon once he emerged as a viable front‐runner – and ultimately the Democratic nominee? In this paper we bring a unique set of panel data from the 2008 Cooperative Campaign Analysis Project (CCAP) to bear on questions about primary vote choice, examining the evolution of preferences over the unusually long and intense 2008 Democratic presidential nomination campaign. Attitudes about race predict vote choice in partisan contests; here we show that (conditional on the presence of a black candidate) these attitudes help explain the dynamics of candidate support over the prolonged intra‐party contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

"Sour Grapes" or Rational Voting? Voter Decision Making Among Thwarted Primary Voters in 2008

During the 2008 presidential campaign, journalists and pundits debated the electoral consequences of the prolonged and hard-fought nomination contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Previous research, typically using aggregate vote returns, has concluded that divisive primaries negatively impact the electoral pro- spects of the winning candidate. It is thought that supporters of the losing candidate are less likely to vote and more likely to defect because of psychological disaffection, or sour grapes. Using a new panel da- taset that traces individual candidate preferences during the primary and general election campaigns, we are able to explicitly examine individ- ual-level decision making in the general election conditioned on voting behavior in the primary. Although sour grapes had a modest effect on eventual support for the party nominee, fundamental political considera- tions—especially attitudes on the War in Iraq—were far better predictors of the vote decision among thwarted voters. Moreover, we find that supporters of losing Democratic candidates were far more like- ly to vote for Obama if they lived in a battleground state.

California Needs to Overhaul Its Leadership, Not Its Constitution

THE CALIFORNIA Journal of Politics & Policy Commentary California Needs to Overhaul Its Leadership, Not Its Constitution Gabriella Holt* Citizens for California Reform Recently, there has been much debate on the necessity of California holding a constitutional convention as a way to end the dysfunction in Sacramento. While I agree there is much need for change in how we approach governing our state, I do not think a constitutional convention is the right path. Although the government reform areas, presented by constitutional convention advocates, require modern day review, the system will continue to fail because the reform proposals fail to address the type of people we elect as our state representatives. www.bepress.com/cjpp Volume 2, Issue 2 , 2010 The purpose of the state constitution is to guide our government and to set parameters, within which we the people can operate, protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is up to the people to govern by electing their representatives and holding them accountable. Californians need to address the type of people elected to lead our state. Failing to address this core issue is equiv- alent to moving the deck chairs on the Titanic. No matter what reforms we put in place—things will fail to change because we will continue to elect people who are more focused on their next job in politics rather than doing what is in the best interest of our state. Due to gerrymandered districts, a small percentage of highly partisan primary voters determine the make up of the highly partisan legislature. Thus, the very make up of the legislature is fundamentally flawed. For this reason, the people recently passed redistricting reform, and that is *Gabriella Holt is president and CEO of Citizens for California Reform.

Political Pluralism and the Information Search: Determinants of Group Opinionation

It is a necessary condition that people have an opinion about groups before they can use groups to help make sense of the political world. Beyond individual resources and motivation, the strength of social ties and amount of agreement within networks situated within more or less supportive social contexts affect whether individuals seek out and receive information about groups sufficient to form an opinion of them. The author tests this argument with a sample of Republican primary voters in order to address the implications for the place of interest groups in society and the study of social interaction.

Urban Politics in the State Arena

We seek to explain how states govern big cities. Political scientists' accounts of urban politics either fail to treat the state systematically or place state hostility at the center of such an account. Accounts by historians, by contrast, offer tools political scientists can use to theorize urban politics in the state arena. We use those tools, and we find that cities can manage the legislative process. This power starts with bill introduction and carries through to the vote on the floor. This ability results from a central feature of American state politics: on bills about big cities, state legislators now and in the past find their primary voting cues in the unity of local delegations. The city delegation, then, has tremendous power to manage the state's involvement in city affairs. In many respects, ours is an account of a special kind of divided government, with two institutional arenas where urban government is carried out.

Are Ballot Order Effects Heterogeneous?*

Objective. Past research on ballot order effects has typically focused on the average benefit a candidate receives if placed at the top of the ballot. This study addresses a gap in the literature by examining the possibility that a simple average may mask systematic differences in how the ballot order effect varies across candidates and voters.Methods. Using data from all Australian federal elections between 1984 and 2004, a sample that covers 1,187 separate electoral contests and 7,113 candidate × election observations, this study estimates the effect of ballot order on a candidate's share of the primary vote. To determine whether ballot order effects differ across voters as well as candidates, the study also makes use of electorate‐level demographic data from the 1996 and 2001 Australian censuses.Results. The results of these estimations indicate that being placed first on the ballot increases a candidate's vote share by about 1 percentage point. As a proportion of their total vote, this effect is much larger for independents and minor parties than for major parties. The ballot order effect appears to be similar for male and female candidates, and does not show strong trends upward or downward over the 20‐year period covered by our study. Across electorates, the ballot order effect is higher in places where voters are younger and fluency in English is lower.Conclusions. A statistically significant ballot order effect was a consistent feature of Australian federal elections between 1984 and 2004. Moreover, this study challenges the assumption that ballot order effects are homogenous, and finds that the effect of being placed atop the ballot varies across both candidates and voters.

Polls and Elections: How Did the Primary Vote Forecasts Fare in 2008?

This study compares the leading primary vote forecasts for a common set of candidates and nomination campaigns, updated through 2008. Pre‐primary and post–New Hampshire primary forecasts are estimated. Models that predicted well the primary vote from 1980 to 2000 produce substantial errors in prediction for the 2004 and 2008 presidential nominations. This suggests that the factors driving presidential nominations during the 1980s and 1990s are changing in ways that have increased the potency of campaign momentum in presidential nominations. Post–New Hampshire forecasts, which capture the effects of momentum from the early contests, continue to predict well candidates' primary vote shares.

On the Razor's Edge: The Forecast of the Primary Model

With another Bush looking weak, many Democrats are feeling good about their prospects in November, even without the dream of a job in the White House for themselves. Yet this time, a Bush won't be on the presidential ballot in November, nor will someone closely affiliated with his administration, such as the vice president. Whatever the Bush legacy may be, the 2008 presidential election shapes up as an open-seat contest. A key predictor of the model used here to forecast the outcome of that contest is the showing of the presidential nominees in primaries (hence the sobriquet Primary Model). Since American elections in November are typically preceded by primary elections earlier in the year, it is natural to inquire whether the voting in presidential primaries is a leading indicator of the vote in the general election? Remarkably so, as it turns out. How the presidential candidates do in primary elections foretells their prospects in the November election with great accuracy.

The Viability Primary

Public support before the primaries is the strongest predictor of presidential candidate attrition and of the aggregate primary vote. Yet little is known about the factors that drive candidate preferences before the primaries. This article examines pre-primary candidate support in national Gallup polls for open presidential nomination races from 1976 to 2004. The study finds that candidate background characteristics have marginal effects on mass partisan support during the earliest phase of the nomination campaign and that campaign-related factors significantly affect pre-primary candidate support once the campaign begins. Prior levels of support, network news coverage, and party elite endorsements are significant factors in explaining variation in mass partisan support for candidates throughout the nomination campaign. The decisions of well-known, party “heavyweights” to enter or not enter the race affect the choices available to partisan voters and the overall competitiveness of the nomination campaign.

Forecasting the presidential primary vote: Viability, ideology and momentum

The presidential primary vote represents a unique electoral forecasting challenge, with multiple candidates and sequential voting. This study compares the leading primary vote forecast models by re-estimating them for a common set of candidates and nomination campaigns. A new forecast model is estimated to assess the predictive power of candidate ideology, controlling for the effects of variables found to be significant in prior studies. Finally, the study compares the early forecasts, based on data from before the Iowa caucus, with “momentum” models, which are the early models, updated with variables representing the results of the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary vote, predicting the remaining contested primary vote.