Congressional Primaries

I have written four books on congressional primary elections and edited a couple of others.

My most recent book, co-authored with Caroline Tolbert and Nate Micatka, is The Problem with Primary Voters. This book uses state voter files based on the near-universe of US adults and all primary voters, matching these voter files to commercial data and predictive models of voter partisanship and ideology. A representative democracy needs three things from its voters: participation, representation, and consistency. We show that primaries today fail in all three of these areas. Participation in primaries is extremely low. The voters who do participate in primaries are highly unrepresentative of the general population, of their states, and even of their parties. Marginal increases in turnout, such as those offered by proponents of open or nonpartisan will not solve these problems. We argue that the only reform proposal that garners substantial public support and has the potential to satisfy our three goals of participation, representation, and consistency is the establishment of a national primary day.

book: Reforming Primary Elections

I’ve done a few other things on primary reform lately. I edited, with Richard Barton, a collection of recent work on primary election reform. You can acquire a print or open access copy of that book here. And I was part of a task force on political reforms that could curb extremism; my chapter on primaries, along with the rest of that project, are available (open access) here, and there’s a video of all of the task force members talking about it here.

My other big effort to understand primaries, Reform and Retrenchment: A Century of Efforts to Fix Primary Elections, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. It is a comprehensive history of efforts to change primary election laws from the 1920s to the 1970s, and an effort to connect the history of primary election reforms to contemporary efforts to open primaries or establish alternate voting systems in primaries. You can listen to podcasts where I discuss the book here, here, and here. And here is an article summarizing the book.

Cover of Getting Primaried - The Changing Politics of Congressional Primary Challenges

My first book on primaries, Getting Primaried: The Changing Politics of Congressional Primary Challenges, was published by the University of Michigan Press in the spring of 2013. In the book I argue against the conventional wisdom that primary challenges to incumbent members of Congress are on the rise. I show that Primary challenges are not becoming more frequent, nor are they more likely to succeed than in the past. The most successful of today’s primary challengers have, however, been able to nationalize their races, drawing upon national fundraising base of ideologically motivated citizens and internet-based interest groups.

I’m also the author of Congressional Primary Elections, a historical account of congressional primaries and the literature on them, published in 2014, and designed for classroom use. And I’m the editor of the Handbook of Primary Elections, published by Routledge in 2018. The book’s 27 chapters include discussions of primary election voting and outcomes, the history of primary elections, presidential primaries, the use of primaries in other countries, and evaluations of primary election reforms.

Routledge Handbook of Primary Elections (Hardback) book cover Congressional Primary Elections book cover