Primary colors: What a new study tells us about the Democratic and Republican parties
One stubborn analysis of partisanship in America that goes like this: Republicans have their share of candidates on the far right and Democrats have theirs on the far left, and in primary elections, each divisively drags their respective party’s center of gravity away from where most general election voters stand.
A new report shows the truth about America’s two dominant political parties is far different from what this lazy shorthand suggests. Namely, GOP primary voters are quite accepting of those who want to radically recast the Party of Lincoln and Reagan, while Democratic voters more consistently reject those seeking to pull their own party much further left.
So explains Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution, whose Primaries Project looked at 2,362 candidates for the House and Senate nationwide.
On the Republican side, candidates who were endorsed by Donald Trump, who were also the most virulent election deniers, were 12% of all candidates and won nearly 97% of their primaries; candidates who mentioned Trump and his movement favorably were another large chunk of candidates and also fared relatively well. Of the Republicans who strayed away from Trump and his Make America Great Again message, which made up 59% of all candidates, just 30% won their primaries.
The Democratic picture was much different. Just 5% of candidates were endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, “The Squad” or a closely allied political group. A whopping 72% of candidates weren’t so endorsed and shied away from talk of defunding the police, abolishing ICE, bashing “corporate Democrats” and so on. While the 55% of candidates who characterized themselves as “mainstream Democrats” and the 33% who called themselves progressives won 52% and 42% of their races respectively, the measly 1.45% who called themselves Democratic Socialists won less than half the time.
Short summary: The national Republican Party, in response to the voting base that shows up on primary day, in many respects remains captive to Donald Trump. There’s no sane contrary claim that the Democratic bus is being driven by people far outside the American mainstream.
