Does primary turnout tell us anything about the general election?

Sean Trende had a nice piece a few days ago pondering the question of whether the relatively low turnout in Republican primary contests so far (compared to 2008) portends ill for the Republicans in November. Does this mean that Republicans are unenthusiastic this year and won't turn out for their nominee?

I think Trende is right that turnout in primaries is more a function of the level of competition within the party that year rather than an omen for the general election. But unfortunately, he only uses total numbers of voters in those primaries to analyze the question. I used his table and combined it with estimates of voter party affiliation and total numbers of registered voters to generate an indicator of voter turnout in out-party primaries. This allows us to address the question of whether turnout in the primaries of the party not currently in control of the White House affects the vote share in November. Here's a scatterplot (the points are labeled by the candidate of the incumbent party):

Just to be clear about what this means, in 1996, only about 26.5% of self-identified Republicans participated in the primaries, and the Democratic incumbent (Clinton) got about 55% of the two-party vote in November. Similarly, in 2008, turnout was at a record high in Democratic primaries, and the incumbent party's candidate (McCain) did poorly in November.

The results above suggest a negative correlation, implying that lower participation in out-party primaries is associated with a higher vote share for the incumbent party's candidate. For this year, that would mean that if Republican primaries are really suffering from low turnout, that would favor Obama.

Now, some important caveats:

• The relationship shown above is not statistically significant and is further washed away when one controls for economic growth.
• The relationship shown above is based on a small number of cases (from 1972 on).
• The measurement of turnout in primaries is imperfect. I'm using an estimate of all those who identified with the party in my denominator, but different state party rules strongly affect who gets to turn out. (e.g.: Democratic leaners, whom I include, might have a harder time participating in a closed primary than in an open one.) I'm open to better data if anyone has any.

Ides of March

(Spoilers ahead.)

I took some of my students to see "The Ides of March" last night. The film was considerably better than I'd been led to believe from some of the reviews. The performances were excellent. The basic story line about ambition and betrayal was quite solid and compelling. I thought the title was a bit of a misnomer: we didn't see anything quite like the assassination of an emperor. Instead, the film reminded me somewhat of "City Hall" (1996), which showed how the routine transactions of politics can lead to tragedy. This film much more capably showed how relatively minor events -- campaign sex, beers with a rival, forgetting which cell phone is yours -- can lead to major catastrophes.

Somewhat unfortunately, the main villain in the film is ambition. Ambition is, of course, a very desirable trait in politicians, but it can admittedly be unpleasant to observe, and just because something is, on the whole, good for a political system doesn't make it good for personal human interactions. Place this film alongside "Primary Colors" as a solid study of the dark side of ambition in the context of presidential nomination politics.

So, on the whole, I'd recommend the film. But it had a number of pretty glaring (to political geeks like me, anyway) inaccuracies that I feel compelled to mention.

• Following in the tradition of "The Contender" (2000) and "The American President" (1995), "Ides" imagined a liberal, idealistic politician who was supposed to be both inspiring and electable, yet whose policy stances put him way outside the mainstream. Clooney's Morris was an atheist, promised to eliminate the internal combustion engine within a decade, and pushed for two years of mandatory national service from 18-year olds. I'm sure these seem like mainstream stances in Hollywood, but a quick glance at easily-available polling would have shown just how fringe these views are. Or they could have run the script by one or two political geeks. We work cheap.
• The film imagined a scenario in which Republican voters, led by the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh, raid Ohio's open Democratic primary to cast strategic votes for Morris' opponent, apparently because they consider Morris the more electable Democrat. This is not completely impossible, but given that the Republican nomination contest was still undecided, it's hard to believe that Republicans wouldn't want to weigh in on that race instead of trying to tinker with the Democratic one.
• Morris believed he had suppressed the intern scandal when he took on Stephen as his campaign manager. But the scandal is going to come out anyway! The police who noted Molly's drug overdose surely also noted from the prescription labels that the drugs in question came from a nearby abortion clinic; an autopsy will confirm a recent abortion. The clinic will note that the abortion was paid for in cash, and at least one nurse there might recognize the man who accompanied Molly to the clinic as the campaign manager from all the recent TV and newspapers stories. In other words, it won't take a terribly gifted reporter or investigator more than a few days to determine that right before her death, Molly had an abortion paid for by the Morris campaign. That's already fairly damaging, and probably more will come to light after that. (You think she's the first intern he'd slept with?)

These little inaccuracies and holes are hardly fatal for the film, but they could have been thought through a bit better. Still, given the relative paucity of films about primaries, go see this anyway.

Challenging a sitting president

Rhodes Cook says that Obama's in relatively good shape for reelection because he's not facing a challenge from within the Democratic Party:

For some time now there has been a political rule of thumb: Presidents with little or no opposition in their party’s presidential primaries go on to win reelection, while those who must weather a significant primary challenge are defeated in the fall election.

At this point, there are no signs of a Democratic primary challenge to Obama.

If there was, he would have reelection problems of the first magnitude. For if a president has trouble uniting his own party, how can he successfully reach out to independents and voters from the other party in the fall? The answer over the last century has been that he can’t.

I must respectfully disagree with the direction of Cook's causal arrow. Obama is not facing a challenge from within the party because he's in decent shape for reelection.

Yes, Carter faced a primary challenge in 1980 and lost in the general election, and the same thing happened to Ford in 1976. But the only reason those presidents faced primary challenges was because high quality candidates (Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, respectively) and their funders and endorsers calculated (correctly!) that their incumbent president was weak, would likely lose, and would likely drag down others in their party should they be at the top of the ticket.

Obama's path to reelection is far from certain, but it will largely depend on what happens with economic growth over the next year. Democrats with presidential ambitions realize that the economy will probably not slip into a recession in the next year and that presidents rarely lose their reelection bids unless the economy is in a recession. Just that much information is enough to keep the high quality challengers at bay until 2016.

DW-TWEETINATE

I saw some very good papers at MPSA this year, but one that struck me as simultaneously novel, fun, and useful was this one by Duke grad students Aaron King, Francis Orlando, and David Sparks. The authors are interested in figuring out just how much it helps to be ideologically extreme in a primary contest. Unfortunately, we don't have very good measures of candidate ideology, unless the candidates are incumbents (in which case we can approximate their ideology from their roll call voting records). We're mostly left with guessing at candidates' ideological positions from their speeches, donors, endorsees, etc.

King et al decided to look at candidates' Twitter accounts to see who was following them. In theory, the decision to follow or not follow someone on Twitter is in some ways analogous to the decision to vote/not vote for them or to donate/not donate to their campaign. (No, it's not exactly the same -- I follow Sarah Palin but wouldn't give her money or vote for her. But there are certainly similarities.)

The authors use social networks techniques to boil down the literally millions of connections between hundreds of candidates and other political elites to come up with something akin to ideal points for each person. You can see some lists of these ideal points for House and Senate incumbents and their primary opponents here. The authors also scaled some media figures just to see if the results would be credible. (It turns out that Brendan Nyhan is just to the right of Regis & Kelly but just to the left of Toby Keith.) It doesn't appear on the charts, but they scaled me, as well. I have an ideal point of -.077, putting me to Nyhan's left but to the right of Jesse Jackson. (This is believable.)

This is hardly a perfect measure of candidate ideology, as the decision to follow someone is often made for non-ideological reasons. But it works surprisingly well, confirming other studies' findings about ideology and primary elections. Their ideal points almost perfectly predict party for candidates, with the exception of Mickey Kaus. (Frankly, I'd have distrusted their method more if it had gotten Kaus correct.) Within party, the measures are a bit noisy. Interestingly, they have Andrew Romanoff to the right of Michael Bennet, although not by much. It would probably help if they could bootstrap some sort of standard error equivalent in there just so we could tell whether these differences matter.

One other praiseworthy item: the authors distributed a full-color handout during their presentation which contained a QR code, linking to the project's website. Very cool.

Anyway, this is a project worth watching.

California's Top-Two Primary

So California is going to try the Louisiana-style primary.  I can't say I'm thrilled that Californians voted for Prop. 14.  For one thing, it means that this blog doesn't have nearly the political impact I thought it did.  For another, I just don't think it's a particularly good law.  As I've mentioned before, the research on this subject suggests that this won't do a whole lot to reduce partisanship in California's legislature, and even if it did, weak partisanship isn't necessarily something to aspire to.  Beyond that, this new law will reduce the number of minority party candidates appearing on the general election ballot.  If you like to vote Peace & Freedom or Libertarian or Green, or if you're a San Francisco Republican or an Orange County Democrat, you're not going to find many candidates from your party on the general election ballot anymore.

It's not terribly surprising that this initiative won, of course, as it was prominently opposed by leaders of both major parties in the state at a time when they're historically unpopular.  I imagine the calculation many voters made was, The parties hate 14, I hate the parties, ergo I like 14.  Indeed, it's fitting that the initiative passed in every county save two -- Orange County and San Francisco, probably the two most openly partisan counties in the state and the hearts of the state's Republican and Democratic establishments, respectively. 

All this said, I'm actually curious what will happen, assuming the lawsuits against Prop. 14 fall flat.  We actually don't have very many cases of states trying this sort of primary system.  Maybe it will measurably reduce legislative partisanship.  And while California's own history shows weak partisanship to be dangerous, the state currently has partisanship to spare.  Of course, partisanship is far from the state's major problem right now, but at least from a research perspective, I'll be watching to see what we can learn.

The Top-Two Primary

If you have 45 minutes or so to kill in the car and you're interested in the topic of primaries, I encourage you to listen to this forum on KQED on the topic of California's Proposition 14, which comes up for a vote next month.  (Prop. 14 would create a Louisiana-style top-two primary, in which all candidates of all parties appear on the same primary ballot, and then the top two vote-getters go to a runoff, even if they're of the same party.)

The forum opens with a brief interview with the PPIC's Eric McGhee (a friend and co-author of mine) about the possible effects of switching from a closed primary to an open top-two one.  Does it make legislators more moderate and legislatures less polarized?  Well, maybe.  McGhee cites evidence suggesting that the effect would be small to nonexistent.

Then the forum turns to California's new lieutenant governor, Abel Maldonado, one of the main proponents of Prop. 14, and Richard Winger, one of the initiative's more prominent opponents.  Maldonado's performance is, in my humble opinion, a trainwreck.  He proceeds to list one complaint after another about the state government -- it's broken, it's broke, legislators are highly partisan, they spend too much time on silly issues, they can't pass a budget, politicians misrepresent themselves to voters, etc. -- but then says that the solution is a top-two primary.  He never really explains how the latter would correct the former.

Meanwhile, Winger, to his credit, employs actual evidence debunking each of Maldonado's claims one by one.  You say more open primaries would make it easier to pass a budget?  Well, it turns out the budget was plenty late during Calfornia's use of the blanket primary a decade ago.  You say it would make the legislature less partisan?  Washington state used a blanket primary for decades, and their legislature is one of the most partisan in the country.  And so on.  And all Maldonado does is keep saying, "I've lived it.  I've been there."  And then he repeats his talking points.  It's not a very impressive spectacle.

I've popped off on this topic before, but just to recap: I tend to be an advocate of strong parties.  California's own experience with weak parties under cross-filing (1914-59) was not particularly inspiring -- the legislature was corrupt and easily swayed by powerful personalities and moneyed interests, and voters had no idea whom, if anyone, to throw out of office if they were dissatisfied.  But okay, maybe you still want a less polarized legislature.  Fine.  Would a top-two primary get you there?  Not really.  The evidence we have suggests that the effect would be small or negligible.  There turns out to be very little relationship between a state legislature's partisanship and the openness of its primary elections.  Meanwhile, you'll end up with many runoff elections between members of the same party, giving voters not of that party a lot less incentive to participate.

Update: Typo fixed.

Primaries and Partisanship

John Sides has a few posts recently (here and here) in which he cites research by Eric McGhee at the Public Policy Institute of California on the effect of primary systems on the partisanship of elected officials. (Disclosure: Eric and I are working on a conference paper together on this topic.)  His findings suggest that the effect of moving from a closed to an open primary is surprisingly modest.  He further notes that during California's brief experiment with the blanket primary, politicians were no less polarized and the budget was still passed late.

Here's another way to look at this issue.  In the graph below, I've plotted Jerry Wright's data on legislative partisanship in each of the state legislatures during the 1999-2000 session along the vertical axis.  The horizontal axis is the type of primary the state was using at the time, going from most to least restrictive.

Now, notably, the states at the far right (Louisiana with its jungle or top-two primary and Nebraska with its nonpartisan elections) are among the least polarized legislatures.  However, the regression line is nonetheless flat.  We'd expect polarization to decrease as primaries become more open to independents -- they don't.  Indeed, many of the states employing the blanket primary at the time prove relatively partisan.  And Wisconsin and Ohio, which then employed open primaries, have among the most polarized legislatures in the country.  Of course, this is a pretty simple bivariate look at this problem, but one would expect to see more of an effect than this.

So what will happen if California adopts Proposition 14, the top-two primary, this spring?  Well, I suppose that depends on just how representative we think Louisiana is.  Does the Cajun State have a relatively moderate legislature because of its primary system, because of its unusual political culture, or because of other odd institutional rules in place there?  Given that it's hard to separate those out, and given that other evidence about primaries and partisanship suggests little relationship between the two, I doubt the initiative would have anything close to the impact its backers suggest.

I'm wondering if anyone has recent data on Washington's state legislature, the members of whom have been elected through a top-two primary since 2006.  Since Washington has been among the more polarized legislatures in recent years, it will be interesting to see if the chamber has been de-polarizing.