Recent studies find that nonpartisan primaries increase competition, mitigate polarization, and improve the quality of governance.
Recent studies find that nonpartisan primaries increase competition, mitigate polarization, and improve the quality of governance. New research suggests that they also blunt the influence of very wealthy, ideological donors.
In a forthcoming Unite America Institute report, we examine special interests’ involvement in federal primary elections. By combining campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission (FEC) with other data sets and original quantitative and qualitative analysis. We systematically describe the dominant political action committees (PACs) in federal primary elections, and show how the nature of dominant PACs changed from the 1980s to the present. In short, our research demonstrates how, after the Citizens’ United Supreme Court ruling, ideological PACs (including Super PACs) displaced traditional business and labor associations as the dominant and most influential groups in primary elections. We also find that nonpartisan primaries significantly reduce the influence of ideological Super PACs.
The ideological PACs that have dominated congressional primaries since 2012 are less representative of the general public than traditional PACs. Whereas traditional business PACs — like the American Medical Association (AMA) — represent hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals across the United States, the most active ideological Super PACs act on behalf of a small handful of billionaires. For example, in 2022, the PAC that gave the most in primaries was Club for Growth Action, which was largely funded by two men (Richard Uihlein, the founder of Uline shipping company, and billionaire investor Jeff Yass) who used the PAC to advance their libertarian agenda. The PAC that gave the second most in 2022 was Protect our Future, which was almost entirely funded by the now disgraced crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.
Our analysis uncovers that ideological PACs are more likely to support primary challengers and oppose the party’s preferred candidates in primary elections. Moreover, the dominant ideological PACs are increasingly successful when they support a challenger to the party’s preferred candidate, and in recent decades, they are more influential than traditional business and labor groups in advancing their preferred candidate to the general election.
Why might nonpartisan primaries mitigate the political power of ideological groups?
The money and mobilizing power of ideological PACs is at its peak in low turnout partisan primary elections. In partisan primary elections, special interest groups only need to influence a relatively small number of voters to sway the outcome. Moreover, partisan primary voters are more easily influenced because partisanship does not determine the vote behavior, since all candidates share the same partisanship.
However, nonpartisan primary systems make primary elections more dynamic and increase turnout. Furthermore, since nonpartisan primaries feature candidates from different parties, and many voters are entrenched in their partisan loyalties, fewer voters are susceptible to changing their votes based on PAC spending or activist organizing. Moreover, since nonpartisan primaries feature a single race in which all candidates compete, that single primary is the only game in town. Consequently, conservative and liberal ideological PACs, as well as labor and business groups are all actively engaged in a single election. In these more competitive and more dynamic systems, unrepresentative ideological PACs are less likely to change election outcomes through an infusion of cash.
Testing this theory required data from a number of different sources. First, we pulled the bulk data files from the FEC website on “Contributions from committees to candidates and independent expenditures.” These files provided us with a complete list of every campaign contribution from PACs to candidates, and all independent expenditures made by PACs on behalf of candidates, from 1980 to 2022. From this list, we dropped all transactions made during the general election, so that we were left with contributions and independent expenditure made during the primary.
Next, we used data generously provided by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) to categorize PACs by their type. The CRP categories consist of parties, business, labor, ideological, and other. Using this categorization scheme, we aggregate the total amount of spending in each congressional primary from 1992 to 2022. We also incorporated election results data from Adam Bonica, a Stanford Political scientist, and Ballotpedia.
Using these data, we developed a regression model to examine the relationship between PAC contributions and candidate performance during the primary election. The outcome we measured in these models was a primary candidate’s vote share. We tested the impact of contributions from ideological PACs, as well as business and trade PACs. We also controlled for several other factors that impact a candidate’s vote share and race dynamics generally. These include if the candidate is an incumbent or challenging an incumbent, if it is an open seat race, the number of candidates, the party and chamber, and the candidate’s ideology.
Finally, we also include a variable that distinguishes partisan primary elections from nonpartisan primaries (including Top Two in California and Washington state, Top Four in Alaska, and the Louisiana Jungle Primary).
We were especially interested in how nonpartisan primaries changed the statistical relationship between ideological donors and a candidate’s vote share (for technical readers: we used an interactive random effects model, with a nonpartisan primaries dummy variable that interacted with the number of ideological donors).
We find that nonpartisan primaries significantly blunt the power of ideological donors. In partisan primary elections, receiving support from 20 ideological PACs corresponds to a 7.6 percentage-point increase in primary election vote share. However, in nonpartisan primary states, gaining support from 20 ideological PACs only predicts an increase of 2.4 percentage points. In other words, support from ideological PACs is roughly one-third as impactful in a candidate’s performance in nonpartisan primary states as it is in partisan primaries.
Within the context of other recent studies on nonpartisan primaries, these findings suggest that Top Two and similar reforms mitigate polarization, in part, by undercutting the outsized influence wealthy ideologues have in low-turnout, low-salience partisan primary elections.
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