What that also shows is the reservoir of closet hard rightists in lots of districts. Any “moderate” R today knows there’s a frothing looney base in their district just waiting for a frothing looney candidate to rally 'round.
Doesn’t even have to be that deep. Cantor was primaried out by 7k votes, and it was a blowout.
Dick Lugar had not had a primary challenger in 30 years, and was insanely powerful on the national stage. He lost a senate seat.
This impinges on what I wanted to say. There are about a dozen Republicans representing districts that Biden won in 2020. We can assume they are generally centrist–or at least closely divided. If they back Jordan, they will become targets in the next election. If they don’t and draw a primary opponent they will either draw further to the right, thereby making it harder to win the general, or they will get primaried by a nutcase who will inevitably, in a centrist district, lose the general.
We are in complete agreement with each other and with the equations of psychohistory
Well, not necessarily. As noted, the primaries bring out the extremist vote, so it’s relatively easy for a wacko to win over the incumbent. But now you have a wacko running against a relatively normal opponent. What was an uncompetitive race becomes competitive.
That was the case for the Richard Lugar example above. Lugar had a 36-year history but was defeated by Tea Party nut Richard Mourdock, who then lost the general election.
Of course it’s irrelevant for the candidate in question; as you say, the primary was their vulnerability. But it doesn’t then follow that the election then goes to the candidate that won the primary. I do wonder how often this happens, though.
This will be true when the ideologies of the two parties are not far apart. But …
Once the two parties’ ideologies get far enough apart, darn near everyone who’s going to bother to vote will say and think things like “I will vote for a chimpanzee of my party before I’d vote for anyone of that evil other party.” In that toxic extreme partisan environment, the “centrists” = “swing voters” tune out, turn off, and drop out.
At which point the electorate in that district may still be close to 50/50 e.g. 48/52. But what won’t happen is the side with the more extreme candidate losing votes because of voters crossing over to the other side. The “band-gap” between the parties is too big for almost everyone to jump.
Needless to say, here in the USA in 2023 becoming 2024 the “band-gap” is wide and IMO getting wider. And will continue getting wider for some time before the pendulum starts back the other way. Assuming the Republic survives Peak Gap in its current form.
Agreed. And that pattern lowers the threshold for primarying someone. What was once a nuclear weapon–something you keep around largely for deterrence, with the hopes that you never have to actually use it–becomes just an ordinary tool in the arsenal. It used to be very costly, because there was a real risk of losing the seat, and now that’s less true (maybe).
I’d definitely like to see some stats on this, though. JKellyMap hinted that a successful primary challenge flips the seat about half the time (if I’m reading correctly), but the 538 link doesn’t point to the article so I wonder about the details.
You’re assuming that the set of people who will bother to vote is fixed, but that’s also a function of the candidates. There are some folks who have a preference one way or the other, but who don’t usually bother to vote for their preference. Face them with an extreme enough opposition candidate, however, and they might be motivated to vote after all. In this way, different elections can go different ways even if no voter ever changes their mind on whom they prefer.
True. At the same time an extreme-enough candidate also brings out the frothing partisans on the opposite side.
As always there’s a tactical debate on how much ginning up your own base’s turnout fires up the opposition turnout against you. To me that’s an imponderable. In math terms I suppose I’d say extremism ups the variance, but not in a predictable magnitude nor direction.
I’ll suggest that in terms of the decision process, most party hacks and consultants are convinced they’ll win, so think they’ll drive the variance in their favor. So extremism will seem to the decision makers to be a better gamble than it actually is. But perceptions being reality, that still means we’ll see a bias towards running extreme candidates versus being more cautious.
Also there is the matter of whether or not the “extreme” candidate that is the “choice of the masses” has other baggage on him, which is often overlooked in the feverish desire to put in whoever is the hardest hardliner.
( Not a primarying of an incumbent but an open seat, but an example was the Alabama special election to complete Jeff Sessions’ term. In the primary the whole Establishment and even Trump supported the already named placeholder, “normal” AL Republican (thus impeccably RW conservative by the standards of 2017), Luther Strange. But the Alabama masses decided to support in the primary Justice Roy “Ten Commandments” Moore as the “red meat” candidate. Then in the proper election Moore’s past, ahem, affinity for poaching among the High School demographic came up and that depressed his turnout to the point not even Trump himself could bring him over the line. The seat reverted to hard-RW as soon as the next regular election came about, though.)
At least they were talking running candidates in primaries, not to be confused with physical threats and late light death threat calls to a member’s wife, as happened with the most recent round of voting for speaker.
This doesn’t give the exact info requested (it’s before the 2022 general election, for one thing), but it gives the gist, with some interesting examples. The “slightly over half” must have been a passing comment in a later (post-general) episode.
The same applies to the Lugar/Murdock primary. “Rape is God’s Will” Murdock was only voted in as part of a Tea Party hissy fit because Lugar didn’t, like, spit at Obama in public.