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The “top two primary” system now used in Washington and to be used in California starting in 2012 is not like a traditional primary, where people vote to select a nominee for each party. It is more like a two-round general election similar to the French Presidential election system. The first round, the “primary,” all candidates from all parties compete, and the top two vote-getters go on to face each other in a runoff election. Since the top two primary system is much more like a general election than a traditional primary, the question is can the vote in these “top two primary” states serve as a good predictor for what will happen nationwide in November.
Sean Trende at Real Clear Politics came to the conclusion that Washington State could be:
[T]hese primary elections end up looking an awful lot like the November elections. I gathered the results for congressional and senate primaries in recent years where Washington used the blanket primary system (1992-2002 and 2008). This gave me a nice dataset of 65 elections. I looked at the total Democratic vote cast in the primaries, and compared it to the total Democratic vote in the general election.
On average, the Democratic candidate improved his or her share of the vote by only 1.5 points from the fall election. And there aren’t too many outliers. In 47 percent of the elections, the Democratic share of the vote in November was within two points of the Democratic share of the vote in the primary (for those who speak “geek,” the standard deviation is a reasonably narrow 4.2).
It is important to note 2008 was only the first time Washington State started using the top two system. Before that, it used a blanket primary system, and, while there are many similarities there are some important differences. A blanket primary allows a person to vote in the Republican primary for some races and the Democratic primary for other races during the same primary election. Trende’s analysis is based on mainly data from years using the blanket primary.
Greg Giroux (via SwingStateProject) put together a spreadsheet of the 2008 Congressional races using the top two system and it showed there was very little different between the total Democratic vote in the primary compared to the general. The chart is great, but the sample size of only nine races is small
This inspired me to look at all executive, Congressional, and state legislator elections in Washington from 2008 to today. This gave me a sample size of just over 100 races to compare the results of an actual top two primary to the general election in Washington. What I found was a very high correlation between the percentage of the vote a party got in the primary and the percentage of the vote they received in the general election.
Results
On average a party’s overall percentage of the vote only varied by +/- 2.08 percentage points from the primary to the General.
I found, not surprisingly, that the fewer the number of candidates there were in the primary, the closer the primary results mirror the general.
In races where there were two candidates in the primary, you see a candidate’s total increase or decrease on average by only 1.71 percentage points from the primary to the general.
In races with three candidates in the primary, you see a party’s total percentage only increase or decrease on average by 2.71 percentage points.
For races with four or more candidates in the primary, it was +/- 3.16 percentage points.
On a whole general election benefited the Democratic Party. On average Democrats total percentage in the general was 1.1 points higher than their total in the primary, while the Republican total was 1.18 percentage points lower in the general. I don’t know if this will be a lasting trend; is it that general election voters tend to lean more Democratic, or was this just a result of huge enthusiasm in 2008 among Democrats coming to the polls to vote for Obama. Trende’s analysis and primary turnout demographic statistics would indicate it is likely to be a recurring pattern.
Interestedly the presence of a third party or independent candidates (if you calculate the primary vote totals with their votes removed) didn’t increase the volatility of the general election. In fact, I found that in primaries with three or more candidates who identified as only Democratic or Republican, there was a greater variation between the primary result and the general result than in primaries with three or more candidates where at least one was a third-party candidate or independent. I suspect this finding could just be result of a small sample size or likely the result of many independent candidates taking only a very tiny percentage in the first round, making those races more like the two-candidate primaries.
While the sample size is too small, I also noticed in a few districts that if I re-assigned left- or right-leaning independents or third parties votes, like, say, the Green Party’s total to the Democrats, the primary results even more closely matched the general.
My research indicates that Washington’s 2008 top two primary was an extremely good predictor for the general election and it will likely be a very good predictor going forward. It will be interesting to see if California follows suit when it adopts the top two primary system in 2012. The results from Washington State might not translate to California. Washington, unlike California, has a tradition of very high primary turnout among all groups, including independents, dating back to its use of the blanket primary. If the pattern does hold up in Washington and California, I could picture both state’s primaries soon becoming the bellwether all pundits watch for clues about the November election. Combined, the two states contain over 14 percent of all the Congressional districts.
[Note: I excluded any race where a candidate ran unopposed or a candidate got on the general election ballot by getting sufficient write-in votes in the primary. I also excluded a few races in heavily Democratic districts where two Democrats got more votes than any of the Republicans running so the total general election vote for Democrats was 100%. In races with independent/third-party candidates, I recalculated their percentages won totally excluding their vote. All Candidates who chose a preferred party label of GOP, G.O.P., Grand Old Party, R, etc. . . were classified as Republicans]
15 Comments
Good morning!
‘Morning, twolf1!
I wonder how this would have worked in Michigan, where we had a large Republican field and a much smaller Democratic field.
In what sense does the top-two system leverage or deleverage campaign spending?
I fear that the top two will almost always be the two with the most corporate money, and we’ll have even less opportunity to vote for someone who isn’t on the dole.
I lived in France for a number of years in the late ’80s and early ’90s. It took me a couple of cycles to understand how the French system works. Basically, the first round allows everyone to make his favorite choice, so if you are a Green, you vote Green, if you are a Trotskyite, you choose the Trotsykite formation of your choice (there’s usually more than one). In the second round you choose your preference against the alternative. But there’s more. In the second round, the winning candidate on each side has to assemble a coalition from among the losers, which means making compromises and promises. Rather than try to make the party the big tent, like the Democrats tend to do, they make the election coalition the tent.
What’s nice about this is that it gives the dissident streams a chance to express themselves without buggering up the final result the way Nader did in 2000. It also provides a first test of the relative strength of the left and the right.
I don’t see how it can work in general elections here, because the courts would never allow restricting the final ballot to two choices. But the logic seems sound.
the top two system should make running more costly
I was really surprised by the turnout with the understadning all the ballots aren’t in yet. Most of Washington State is vote by mail, so you don’t have to worry about being somewhere on a specific day. My county was setting at 29% turnout when I checked Wednesday. With a very competitive sheriff race, it should have been a lot higher.
I was hearing state wide they had project this to possibly be the biggest turnout for a primary ever
The “genius” of the so-called Founding Fathers was in creating the appearance of popular sovereignty without the actual substance. Bamboozlement was the key. Remember Hamilton’s famous quote: “‘The people’ is a great beast!” The beast must be bamboozled, so it can be kept in check. The “top two” primary system is another expression of the idea that the population is a great beast that must be controlled, lest it upset the status quo.
Every newspaper in Washington State, including the “liberal” Post-Intelligencer, has been in a state of Wobbly-panic since the general strike of 1919. The basic purpose of the top two system in Washington State is to ensure that nobody will ever be able to vote for a Wobbly in the general election.
Why not simplify matters and outlaw all parties except for the Progressive/Socialist Democrats? Than we can choose between only our favored candidates?
If at all possible, it would be interesting to see what the outcome of the 2000 and 2004 elections were with this system in those two states. Just wondering.
I disagree completely with lumping Washington and California together as a prediction model for the rest of the country.
The huge youth and minority populations alone differ dramatically. Of the 37 million people in California 57% are minorities. Over 37% alone are hispanic who together with Dems and the environmentally conscious youth sure as hell will never elect a Republican Senator.
Washington, with it’s 7 million predominantaly white population, has an economy focusing on aerospace, lumber and electronics, etc. They want a Senator who’ll keep the big military and corporate contracts flowing in.
So party affiliation isn’t such a big deal there..
actually I said California might become a predictor after it adopts and gets starting using the top two primary system. The point is not that the vote will be the same, the point is that net movement across all of Washington and California for one party or the other would probably also hold true nation wide.
I do apologize – I did misunderstand your point.
I do, however, think that you might agree that California is quite unique in that it’s election results have more to do with in-state politics and less to do with national trends than most other states.
Whereas here in Arizona the local tea-party chapter may find enough sheep to drive McCain out of the Senate, probably to the detriment of the state, California’s voters would eat the outside whack groups for breakfast to make sure any Senatorial candidate kow-tows to their in-state interests, first and foremost.
I live in Washington State and this top two primary basically means that grass-roots party work is destroyed as well as third parties.
This top two was the final solution to please those in the state who don’t want to choose a party but want to be able to choose who gets the nominations of the parties that they don’t want to identify with. They wanted to be able to switch back and forth in each race.
When we had the blanket primaries they got to do this. Then the Supreme Court ruled that kind of primary violated the rights of the parties. So the state went to a primary where voters still didn’t have to choose a party to belong to, but they had to pick which party’s primary they wanted to participate in at that election.
The folk who wanted to control the parties’ nominations without ever having to commit to a party, even for one primary, raised an enormous ruckus and did initiative after initiative until they came up with this system that the Supreme Court says is ok.
They are happy. We grass-rooters have seen our ability to impact our party gone. You see the problem is that the top two could be two Democrats or two Republicans. This means the big money within the state and national party convince the rank and file folk who identify with the party but are not grass-roots activists that they HAVE to support the incumbent or the professional party’s anointed because if they don’t we might end up with two members of the other party in the general election.
We grass-rooters always have had problems in convincing the rank and file, who are not grass-rooters and who tend to blithely accept the instructions from the top down state and national professional party, to consider our grass-roots candidates and see the nomination process as deliberative democracy. Now it’s almost impossible. So basically our grass-roots party structure is now TOTALLY IRRELEVANT.
Of course this also reduces the ability of minor parties to actually have a voice.
The result? I now have only a choice between the establishmentarian Democratic incumbent Rick Larsen and a “let’s cut the rich’s taxes more” Republican in November for Congress. In the Senate race it’s Tweedle Dee (Patty Murray) or Tweedle Dum (Dino Rossi). I can’t even do a protest vote.
That was right around the time he coined the phrase, “I went to New Jersey and all I got was this lousy bullet in the gut” now seen on so many bumper stickers.