"... there’s nothing new about the primaries we see today. What’s unique now is how much attention we pay to them ..."

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No, Primaries Aren’t Destroying Politics
“Getting primaried” isn't even as common as you think.
By Robert G. Boatright, February 18, 2014

This month, when House speaker John Boehner effectively scotched plans to tackle immigration reform this year, the move was chalked up in some quarters to fear. Specifically, the scary proposition that running afoul of the far right with a measure that seemed soft on “illegal aliens” would ring a sort of cattle call for primary challengers looking to oust GOP members on the ballot this year.

The dreaded primary challenge—which conventional wisdom suggests has never been more common or more effective in terms of ending the careers of lawmakers—is maligned as the cause of gridlock and hyper-partisanship. We don’t yet know how many primary challengers will run in 2014, filing deadlines vary, but many will have to announce their candidacy by the end of March. That would make this time of a year a nervous one, particularly on the right, where the spectral threat of an opponent from within the GOP is inducing paranoia. President Obama has noted that Republican members of Congress won’t even socialize with him, lest such blasphemy cost a lawmaker their job.

There’s just one problem with the idea that primaries have become more common and more important: It’s dead wrong. By my count, there’s nothing unique about the number of competitive primary challenges occurring today. In fact, there were more competitive primary races run in the House during the 1970s (an average of 49 per election) than there have been in the last decade (the average has been 45 each election). Today’s primaries only look competitive because the late 1990s had so few of them. The pattern in the Senate is similar.

Even if we consider only primaries launched for ideological reasons—for instance, to unseat a lawmaker deemed insufficiently conservative by the Tea Party, as opposed to an incumbent weakened by, say, a scandal—there’s no reason to think things are all that abnormal today. There was a slight increase in ideological challengers in 2010 and again in 2012, but the change is not dramatic (in the House there were 29 instances of this sort of “primarying” in the 1970s, and 31 between 2004 and 2012).

That’s not to say there’s nothing new about the primaries we see today. What’s unique now is how much attention we pay to them—in other words, congressional primaries end up mattering more today because we think they matter more. There are three big reasons why this is the case.

First, primary challengers can get their hands on a lot more money today—and a good deal of it now comes from outside the state where they are running. Consider the Senate, for instance. In every election between 1980 and 2000, there were between two and six competitive Senate primary challengers—a pattern that resembles this past decade. What’s been different lately is where the money to finance those challengers originates. During the 1980s and 1990s, only one candidate (Virginia Republican James Miller in 1996) raised more than $500,000 from people other than himself, and there was nobody who raised more than $200,000 from donors outside the state. In the last 10 years though, 10 candidates have tapped donors to raise $1 million for primary bids, and all 10 raised at least $500,000 from out-of-state donors. House primaries have seen a similar explosion in out-of-state financing. In 2008, for instance, two Maryland primary challengers—Democrat Donna Edwards and Republican Andy Harris—each raised nearly $400,000 from out-of-state donors. Sure, campaigns have gotten more expensive and contribution limits have increased, accounting for some of this change, but it’s clear that the primary bids we see today are propped up by donors and groups farther afield than ever before.

Second, this flood of money owes a lot to a new breed of political interest group, one that sees primary fights—and the threat of primary fights—as a powerful tool to influence lawmakers and draw attention to itself. Traditional, issue-oriented groups such as the National Rifle Association or the League of Conservative Voters have never dabbled much in primaries. Newer organizations—like the Club for Growth, MoveOn.org, FreedomWorks and various Tea Party outfits—aren’t held together by single issues around which they build sustained campaigns. To raise money, they need to demonstrate their effectiveness, and perhaps their best way to do so is to take down an incumbent who is not paying attention. To get results, these groups concentrate their attention on a small number of races. Every year there are two or three primary challengers (like Edwards or Harris) who receive substantial interest group support, but there are rarely more than that. There just isn’t enough interest-group money to lavish on candidates whose odds of winning are low.

Third, primary challenges serve as great election-year sport for a political press with a lot of airtime, newsprint and web space to fill. And of course, the political media—now working year-round and virtually 24/7—loves both colorful characters and party infighting, both of which abound in primary challenges. The spring of an election year, particularly a midterm year, can be a period of pent-up demand for political coverage at a time when little of true consequence occurs.

In 2010, Tea Party-backed Joe Miller, running to unseat Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, managed somehow to make news with campaign ads that spoofed Old Spice commercials. The candidacy of Texas Rep. Steve Stockman, a primary challenger in the Lone Star State’s Senate race, seems based entirely on provocative behavior. Earlier this month he made a show—and got media attention—for walking out of the president’s State of the Union address in a huff.

Grabbing headlines used to be much harder for a primary challenger. In 1968, for instance, the Democratic challenger trying to dislodged J. William Fulbright—the longtime chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the namesake of the celebrated international fellowship—tried to stir up controversy in Arkansas over Fulbright’s interest in foreign affairs (not always an issue that played well at home) by injecting socialist salutations into his remarks, calling the senator “Chairman Fulbright” and speaking often about “Chairman Mao.” This is just the sort of grandstanding that would be fodder for cable news today, yet the story appears to have never left Arkansas.

Fulbright did end up losing his seat to a primary challenger in 1974—a year in which more than 50 members of Congress were defeated in the primaries. Yet, despite the turnover, there were no stories about an “epidemic of primarying” or about how primary elections had become more important. Perhaps it didn’t feel like a trend because intriguing primary elections in Arkansas tended to remain of interest mostly to the residents of Arkansas.

Many recent studies of polarization in Congress have talked not only of the alleged rise of primarying, but also of the powerful effect of the mere threat of being primaried. It’s tough to measure what effect this sort of thing has on behavior, but if the numbers tell us anything, it’s that frightened members [of] Congress shouldn’t worry so much. Primary challengers have a poor record. There hasn’t been one elected to the Senate since John Sununu (R-N.H.) in 2002. (In the 2010 election, the Tea Party-backed Republican Mike Lee replaced Utah senator Robert Bennett, but Bennett was defeated at a state party convention and didn’t actually appear on the primary ballot.) In fact, actuarial tables show that statistically, the average incumbent has a greater chance of death before the next election than of losing to a primary challenger.


But that’s little comfort to lawmakers in the crosshairs—even those who seem firmly ensconced in their seats. In January, the Tea Party Leadership Fund charged that on account of his work with Democrats, House Speaker John Boehner was guilty of “stabbing conservatives in the back.” Their remedy? They announced a plan to recruit a conservative opponent to challenge Boehner in the May primary. Chances are, the challenger will lose.
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