A Preliminary Report on Open Seat House Nominations in 2014
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PARTIES ON THE GROUND: A PRELIMINARY REPORT ON OPEN SEAT HOUSE NOMINATIONS IN 2014 by Kathleen Bawn Knox Brown Angela Ocampo Shawn Patterson John Ray John Zaller UCLA August 2014 The purpose of this paper is to organize and take stock of what we have learned in our initial interviews, with a view to asking better questions as we proceed to the main phase of the study. Please check with us before citing. Do not post this paper on the Internet. We have promised our sources that nothing they told us will be publically reported before 2016. 1 Republican infighting in the run-up to the 2014 congressional primaries attracted unusual attention.1 The national Chamber of Commerce and the National Retail Association vowed to primary Republican members of Congress who threatened default on the national debt. Ideological groups like FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, and Club for Growth supported these same House members and have tried to nominate more like them. The Republicans’ current conflict over nominations is not unprecedented. Similar struggles occurred when evangelicals became active in Republican primaries in the 1990s (Cohen 2005) and when the Tea Party first contested nominations in 2010 (Zernike 2010, Skocpol and Williams 2012). Democrats, too, have their intra-party struggles: the movement into the party of civil rights liberals in the 1940s and 50s (Baylor 2013), of feminists, greens and anti-Vietnam War radicals in the 1970s (Kirkpatrick 1976; Carsey and Layman 2010), and most recently of LGBT advocates.2 Changes in the commitment of the party’s nominated candidates, often little noticed as they occur, moved the Democratic Party to the left between 1940 and 1970 and the Republican Party to the right in the 1990s, and they continue pushing both parties toward their extremes. One can see the roots of the contemporary polarization of the parties in the candidates that parties have nominated for federal office in recent decades. No one doubts the importance of the battle between Democrats and Republicans to control Congress in general elections. But the intra-party contests leading up to primaries are, over the long run, equally consequential. The process of nominating candidates is the process that defines what a party stands for. Yet congressional nominations are beneath the radar for most voters and even most political scientists. Hundreds of scholarly articles and scores of books have been written about general elections for the Senate and House of Representatives; much less about party nominations for Congress. Scholars have demonstrated how political ambition leads candidates to enter competition for political office (Fowler and McClure 1989; Lawless 2012.) Other work has focused on how the openness of the primary rules affects voting by the winning politicians in Congress or state legislatures (Gerber and Morton 1998, Burden 2001, Hirano et al. 2010, McGhee et al. 2013, Hill 2013.) Our study aspires to a broader understanding of the nomination process: how candidates, groups and voters interact to determine whose interests and values get represented in the party’s chosen candidate. Understanding nominations will help 1 See, for example http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-06/republican-civil-war-costs-135- million-senate-odds-up.html, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/republicans-tea-party-activists-full- scale-civil-war/story?id=21194296, and http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/colorado-elections-2014-cory-gardner-mark-udall- 105082.html 2 These studies focus on Democratic activists in presidential nominations, but we suspect the same forces were at work in congressional elections. 2 us evaluate two competing theories of how the American party system works – one based on the incentives of ambitious politicians, another in which organized groups are the power players, politicians merely their agents. We focus on nominations for open seats because they are the most common way in which new members enter Congress (Gaddie and Bullock 2000.)3 House nominations are not easy to study. They take place at scattered times and locations; irregular district boundaries and sparse voter turnout make them difficult to cover in surveys; key influences like endorsements and informal support networks may leave little or no trace in public records; and nominations are barely reported on by the news media. Given these challenges, our method is eclectic and relatively unstructured. We have made field trips to 32 districts in which nomination contests are underway, conducting open-ended interviews with leading participants and local observers. Our interview subjects range from local journalists and bloggers; party officials; activists; consultants; representatives of business, labor and advocacy groups; major donors and other people considered knowledgeable or influential. We note any activity by national groups such as Club for Growth, American Crossroads, EMILY’s List, and many others. Our goal is a broad understanding of the local political system in which each nomination takes place. The intention of this unstructured design is to detect behavior consistent with either the candidate-centered activity envisioned by most of the literature, or the more group-centric models proposed by Cohen (2005), Cohen et al. (2008), Masket (2011) and Bawn et al. (2012), and to be open to findings not predicted by either. Our project is very much a work in progress and our findings as presented here should be regarded as preliminary. This report consists of four main sections. We first review the politician- and group-centered theories of political parties, noting implications for nomination contests. We then present background data on open seat House nominations in general, and the 2014 cycle in particular. The third section chronicles two nomination contests (one Democratic, one Republican) associated with special elections that occurred in the fall of 2013. The fourth section presents a semi-systematic catalog of “candidate assets” -- characteristics that are seen as advantageous to candidates in nomination contests across the country. Some of our preliminary conclusions are clearly in line with conventional wisdom: i.e., money is extremely important, as is candidate ambition. Our clearest finding, however, supports the group-based theory: strong candidates typically have long- standing and deep relationships with groups who regard them as “champions.” PARTIES AND NOMINATIONS The nomination of candidates is often seen as a defining act of parties, but for almost all US House seats, voters make these nominations through primary 3 See Boatwright (2014) for a study of contested nominations involving incumbents. 3 elections, and have done so since the Progressive era. Rules vary across states, but the main pattern is that voters may participate in either the Democratic or Republican primary, and the candidate who gets the most votes in a party’s primary is that party’s nominee. One significant departure from this pattern is in the South, where most states have a runoff primary if no candidate gets 50 percent of the initial vote.4 A more significant departure is what is sometimes called a top-two primary, in which candidates of both (or all) parties run on a single primary ballot, with the top two finishers moving on to a runoff which serves as the general election. Louisiana has used variants of this system since the 1970s5, Washington state adopted it in 2004,6 and California in 2012. These states together contain 69 House seats, a non-negligible fraction (16%) of the total. For most scholars, the voters who participate in the primaries are not “the party.” That term is reserved for the set of elite actors who cooperate to influence and if possible determine the winner of the contest for primary votes. Who exactly these elite actors are and how they operate is a subject of contention. A dominant tradition, ably explicated in John Aldrich’s Why Parties?, focuses on politicians, activists, and formal party institutions. An alternative theory of parties, focusing on policy-demanding interest groups and activists, has been advanced by Bawn, et al (2012). Empirical studies in the dominant school assume that, for purposes of studying House nominations, the party consists of certain of its formal institutions: the congressional campaign committees of Democratic and Republican office holders in the House and Senate, and also state and county party committees in the 50 states, which consist mainly of activists. All agree that these entities have limited influence over House nominations. From this point scholars move quickly to the conclusion that House nominations are “candidate-centered.” As Gary Jacobson writes in the 8th edition of his classic textbook, The local party organization’s influence on congressional nominations varies but is typically feeble . National party leaders control more resources . but they use them sparingly in primaries and are regularly thwarted when they do. Usually, the nomination is not something to be awarded by the party but rather a prize to be fought over (when it seems worth taking) by freebooting political entrepreneurs (2013: 24). In the 6th edition of a second major textbook on congressional elections, Paul Herrnson takes much the same view: 4 http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/primary-runoffs.aspx 5 In Louisiana, the “primary” occurs on the date of the November general election, with a run-off held in December only if no candidate gets 50%. In CA and WA, the primary is held several months before, and the top two vote-getters compete on the November ballot regardless of primary vote share. 6 http://www.sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/HistoryofWashingtonStatePrimarySystems.pdf 4 Most successful candidates are self-starters because the electoral system lacks a tightly controlled party-recruitment process… Because the system is candidate-centered, the desire, skills, and resources that candidates bring to the table in the electoral arena are the most important criteria separating serious candidates from those who have little chance of getting elected” (2012, p.