Five Facts on Primary Elections
The 2024 primary season kicks off next month when voters gather in Iowa for their first-in-the-nation caucuses. But these early rounds of voting, run by the two parties with the intent of choosing their final candidate to run in the general election, have often failed to produce candidates that are able or willing to broadly appeal to the public.
Here are Five Facts on primaries.
- Primary voters comprise a small subset of the electorate.
Primaries often have low voter turnout relative to the overall size of the electorate, and primary voters tend to self-identify as more ideological than the average voter in their district. This dynamic can lead to the selection of more partisan candidates, who may not represent the broader electorate. For instance, in 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her primary in New York with just 11 percent of voters turning out. Two years earlier, Matt Gaetz won his first primary with roughly 9 percent of voters turning out. The Bipartisan Policy Center found that four in five voters do note vote in midterm primary elections.
- In 2022, only 42 House seats were decided by margins of five percentage points or less.
Extensive gerrymandering, as well as voters self-sorting into more likeminded enclaves, has left most congressional districts with strongly partisan leanings and firmly in the hands of one party or the other and made left few congressional races truly competitive. This has meant that the winner of the dominant party’s primary is almost always the winner in the general election. In all, five out of every six US House races were decided by ten points or more in the 2022 midterms.
- In fifteen states at least one party operates under a closed presidential primary system that keeps independents from participating.
Independent voters, who now comprise as much of half of the electorate, are nonetheless unable to participate in the primary process in many states, including New York and Florida. Another 14 states have semi-closed primary systems where at least one party bars independents from voting in their state-level and congressional primaries.
- The presidential primary system grants disproportionate influence to early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
These states, which hold their primaries or caucuses first, are not representative of the nation's demographic diversity. This can skew the selection process towards candidates who appeal to the specific demographics and issues of these states, rather than those of the entire country. The attention and resources candidates pour into these states can also distort their policy priorities and campaign strategies. This unbalanced focus can lead to a misalignment between the candidates selected and the broader national electorate's preferences and concerns.
- Some states have started to adopt reforms to improve the primary process.
Alaska, for instance, has introduced the nonpartisan top-four primary system. Under this system, all candidates, regardless of party affiliation, compete in a single primary election. The top four candidates from this primary then advance to the general election, where ranked-choice voting is used. This reform aims to reduce extreme partisanship by allowing a broader range of candidates to reach the general election and by encouraging voters to consider candidates based on policies rather than party lines. Since Alaska has only held one election under this system, it’s too early to say whether top-four primaries result in the election of more broadly representative or moderate candidates.
