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Does a “Divisive” Primary Harm a Candidate's Election Chances?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Andrew Hacker
Andrew Hacker
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

It is a rare election year when the nation's attention is not focussed on at least one party primary where the struggle for the nomination is highly competitive and the result a matter of doubt until the last precincts are reported. In many such cases the other party has settled on its own standard-bearer and thus sits back contentedly while the opposition wages its internecine battle before a rapt public. In recent years as varied personages as Estes Kefauver, Richard Nixon, and Charles Percy found themselves engaged in a hard-fought primary campaign to secure their nomination or renomination for state office.

Type
Research Notes
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 105 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1965

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References

1 This study starts with 1956 because that was the year for which Richard Scammon began to collate primary figures in his America Votes series (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1964)Google Scholar. Most of the primary and election statistics for 1964 were obtained from Congressional Quarterly Weekly Reports and, in a few instances, by personal correspondence with state officials.

2 Thus the total number of hard-fought primaries amounted to 153, of which 54 arose from the 27 occasions when both candidates had to struggle for their nominations, and 99 from the cases where only one of the two candidates had a strenuous fight. This figure is only 35 per cent of 440, the total number of November major-party candidacies in this period. In other words, almost two-thirds of the senatorial and gubernatorial candidates in 1956 through 1964 were either unopposed or received only token primary opposition in their quests for the nominations.

3 The best known are Ranney, Austin and Kendall, Willmoore, “The American Party Systems,” this Review, Vol. 48 (1954), pp. 477–485Google Scholar and Joseph A. Schlesinger, “A Two-Dimensional Scheme for Classifying the States According to Degree of Inter-Party Competition,” ibid., Vol. 49 (1955), pp. 1120–1128. For a recent summary and criticism of the major classification systems, see Hofferbert, Richard I., “Classification of American State Party Systems,” Journal of Politics, Vol. 26 (1964), pp. 550–567CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The “Republican” states are: Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. “Democratic” states: California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. “Evenly Balanced” states: Colorado, Maine, Montana, and Nebraska.

5 By the same token a gubernatorial aspirant who had had a divisive primary even in a friendly state had less than a 50–50 chance of success. While a state's voters may be sympathetic to one of the parties, their friendship does not always extend to supporting that party's choice for governor. Thus of the 31 candidates running for governor in friendly territory, only 14 managed to win. On the other hand, 22 of the 30 similarly situated senatorial candidates did win.

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