By Elaine Kamarck, Alexander R. Podkul

For years, very few journalists, scholars, or voters paid any attention to congressional primary elections, and for good reasons. A large number of members of Congress have run completely unopposed. Others have drawn opponents who were underfinanced, unknown, and not taken seriously. In addition, because there is no national primary day, these elections take place over a six-month period in the year of the election, so it is easy to forget that they are happening. Recently, however, congressional primaries have begun to generate interest.

As intraparty divisions have solidified and lawmakers’ fears of getting “primaried” have intensified, many Americans have begun paying more attention to primary elections. To that end, this report on voters in congressional primaries—the second such report from The Primaries Project at Brookings—represents a sort of coming-of-age for research on congressional primaries. Thanks to the generosity of Democracy Fund, we were able to contract with Edison Research to conduct exit polls in the 2018 primaries, resulting in the best available data on this important subset of voters.

This report is divided into eight parts below; read it in full by starting with the introduction, or jump to individual sections.

      

 

 

Source: The Brookings Institute