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Getting Primaried
The Changing Politics of Congressional Primary Challenges
By Robert G. Boatright The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2013 the University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-11870-0
CHAPTER 1
Congressional Primary Challenges: A Brief History and a Theoretical Explanation
Very few members of Congress get there by knocking off incumbents of their own party in primary elections. So high are the odds against beating an incumbent, in fact, that most ambitious politicians tend to wait their turn. A primary challenger will find little help from the party's established donors, who will tend to view an incumbent of their party as the most likely victor in the general election. Incumbents have at their disposal a lengthy list of individuals who have contributed in the past, the resources of their party campaign committees to draw on in raising funds, and established relationships with a variety of PACs and organized interests. An ambitious politician risks alienating party supporters and incurring the wrath of the incumbent he or she challenges. It is unlikely that an incumbent who wins the primary but loses the general election or who decides a few years down the road to step down will be a future supporter of someone who has run against him or her in the primary.
For the past four decades, the literature on congressional elections has gradually fleshed out the contours of how races are run in the "candidate-centered" system of elections that has developed since the 1960s. To the extent that this literature takes primaries into account, it has held that it takes extraordinary circumstances for an incumbent to find himself or herself in danger in the primary and that it often takes a political neophyte to instigate a primary challenge. In this chapter, I shall look at how primary elections fit into this literature, at whether the nature of primaries has changed, and at how our theoretical accounts of primaries merit updating. I shall seek to demonstrate that the candidate-centered paradigm does not adequately explain primary challenges; that at least as far as congressional primaries are concerned, we are entering an era where a select number of primaries have effectively been nationalized; and that the appropriate way to look at primary challenges is as a forum for outside groups and players within the extended party network to hash out their ideological disagreements. To do this, I begin with an illustrative story.
Consider the case of Blanche Lambert, the 1992 primary challenger to Representative Bill Alexander in Arkansas's first congressional district. Alexander had represented this overwhelmingly Democratic district since 1968. He was a member in good standing of the Democratic leadership, serving as a deputy whip and a member of the House Appropriations Committee. The first district, despite its heavily Democratic registration, was not a particularly liberal district, but Alexander was not a particularly liberal Democrat. He was liberal enough that he had at times faced primary challenges from the right, and he had survived close calls in the elections of 1986, 1988, and 1990, winning 52 percent of the vote in 1986, 66 percent in 1988, and 54 percent in 1990. Alexander's Achilles' heel was not his politics, however.
By all accounts, Alexander was not an aggressive campaigner, something that may have inspired primary opponents. Alexander had faced criticism in the 1980s for his frequent foreign travel; his 1986 opponent, state senator Bill Wood, claimed in his campaign that Alexander had taken nineteen taxpayer-financed trips. Although Wood did have prior political experience, he was heavily outspent by Alexander. Alexander's 1988 foe, who had served as Wood's campaign manager, lacked both experience and money. Alexander's 1990 opponent, Mike Gibson, had little political experience, but the growing perception that Alexander was vulnerable enabled Gibson to raise far more money than Wood had.
Alexander might have survived the 1992 election as well had it not been for the House banking scandal. A record number of incumbents faced primary opponents in 1992, a consequence of congressional redistricting, the banking scandal, and a general anti-incumbent environment. Alexander did not draw a strong primary opponent: Blanche Lambert was only thirty-one years old; she had never held elective office; and, as was frequently noted in the media, her résumé included a two-year stint as Alexander's receptionist, following her graduation from college in 1983. Lambert was clearly a more personable candidate than Alexander — a Roll Call article the week before the election quoted Lambert's campaign manager as saying that "once [voters] talk to her, they walk away liking her" (Curran and Glasser 1992). A Washington Times article appearing in the same week, which described her as "attractive and articulate, but not well known" (Aynesworth 1992), contended that she would fall short eventually, because she did not have enough money. Alexander suffered not only because his check bouncing played into the narrative that Lambert (and the media) offered about Alexander's ongoing financial and ethical problems but also perhaps because he was frequently linked to another check-bouncing Arkansas incumbent, Representative Beryl Anthony. Ultimately, Lambert defeated Alexander in the primary, winning 61 percent of the vote. Anthony lost as well. Lambert went on to win the general election, garnering 70 percent of the vote, while Anthony's primary opponent lost to a Republican.
Although Lambert might argue that it was her campaign that made the difference, much of the coverage of her 1992 victory focused more on what Alexander had done to lose the seat than on what Lambert had done to win. What Alexander had done to lose the seat had little to do with national political trends; Lambert came into office promising to be a more vigorous, sympathetic member of Congress, but she said little about whether she would vote any differently than had Alexander.
When one reads accounts of primary election defeats, stories such as Lambert's are common. In 1992, the same year that Lambert won her congressional seat, veteran Chicago Democrat Charlie Hayes was ousted from his seat by Chicago alderman Bobby Rush, nine-term California Republican Robert Lagomarsino was beaten by political novice (and multimillionaire) Michael Huffington, Democrat Chester Atkins lost his seat in Massachusetts, and nine other congressional incumbents were successfully challenged. In all of these cases, primary defeats were seen as instances where incumbents had lost touch with their districts, could not be bothered to campaign, or had made ethical or political mistakes. Defeats such as these may add vigor to Congress, but they do not necessarily change the priorities of Congress.
Blanche Lambert served only two terms in the House. In 1996, now married, going by the name of Blanche Lambert Lincoln, and pregnant, she stepped down. In 1998, however, she ran for the seat of retiring Senator Dale Bumpers, handily defeating the state's attorney general in the primary and winning the general election by a margin of 53 to 42 percent. She was reelected by a similar margin in 2004. One could argue that in her congressional career, Lincoln strived to be everything that Alexander was not. She had few ethical scrapes, and she carved out a role in the Senate as an expert on agricultural policy and other issues of particular concern to Arkansas.
In 2010, Lincoln herself narrowly survived a primary challenge. It was, however, a very different challenge from the one Lincoln had run in 1992. During the years after Democrats regained control of the Senate in 2006, Lincoln, a senator from a state that gave John McCain 59 percent of its presidential votes in 2008, found herself positioned to the right of most Democrats on many issues, including climate change, labor policy, and financial reform. In the months leading up to the 1992 election, voters in Arkansas's first district might have sensed trouble for Bill Alexander, but in all likelihood, no one outside the district would have noticed or cared. In early 2010, however, liberal activists around the country were told by MoveOn.org that Blanche Lambert Lincoln was planning to vote against the Democratic health care bill, that she opposed expanding college scholarships, that she wished to gut the Clean Air Act, and that she opposed President Obama's foreclosure plan. MoveOn declared in an e-mail that Lincoln was "one of the very worst corporate Democrats in Congress" (Sherrard 2010). In another e-mail sent out during the campaign, MoveOn declared that if Lincoln were to be defeated in her primary, "Washington will never be the same again. Democrats will know their base won't put up with them cutting deals with corporate interests and undercutting the change that Americans demanded in 2006 and again in 2008" (Ruben 2010). MoveOn's fundraising pitch was tailored to the locale of the recipient; for instance, in its efforts to support Lincoln's opponent's campaign, MoveOn told residents of Worcester, Massachusetts (a city, to state the obvious, very far away from Arkansas), "We need 4 people in Worcester to donate to hit our goal of $200,000."
Lincoln's 2010 opponent, Bill Halter, was hardly the sort of political neophyte that Lincoln was when she first ran for Congress. Halter was the Arkansas lieutenant governor, so he might have been a formidable candidate even absent the appeals from outside groups. Halter's criticisms of Lincoln were entirely political, not personal. Just as Lincoln's first campaign was more about the incumbent than about her, however, so Halter's campaign was more about Lincoln than about him. In January of 2010, the leaders of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the United Steelworkers discussed challenges to centrist Democratic senators; Lincoln was the only senator considered who was up for reelection in 2010. In an article discussing the unions' plans, Halter's name was not even mentioned (Barnes 2010a). While some Democratic leaders privately noted that Halter might not be the liberal he was often made out to be — and that whoever won the race would have a difficult time holding the seat against a strong Republican opponent — the race was framed by the national media as a referendum on whether the Democratic base in Arkansas would accept Lincoln's occasional deviations from party orthodoxy.
The manner in which this race was framed may ultimately have been Halter's undoing. On May 18, Lincoln defeated Halter in the Arkansas primary by a narrow margin of 44 to 42 percent. However, like several other Southern states, Arkansas requires a runoff if no candidate receives 50 percent. In the weeks preceding the June 8 runoff between Lincoln and Halter, Lincoln argued that the race was about who best represented the people of Arkansas and that outside groups were attempting to determine who should represent the state. Lincoln drew on the help of former president Bill Clinton in order to drive this message home. She prevailed in the runoff by a margin of 52 to 48 percent.
Lincoln's victory was not, however, the end of the jockeying over what the race meant. Her 1992 race was about Bill Alexander; had she lost, perhaps Alexander would have gotten some sort of message from his victory — given his prior primary challenges, he may have simply resigned himself to having to face primary opposition. At any rate, it seems unlikely that anyone else would have taken much from it. In contrast, in an interview appearing in Time on May 14, 2010 Lincoln noted, "There's just a lot of national groups that are using this race to make points" (Von Drehle 2010). Win or lose, observers would get these points. In a June 9 Washington Post article, former presidential candidate Howard Dean argued that more centrist incumbents would face challenges like Lincoln's unless they "act like real Democrats," a spokesperson for MoveOn agreed that Lincoln's narrow victory was a warning to other Democrats, and former AFL-CIO political director Steve Rosenthal termed Halter's race a "phenomenal victory" for the cause of holding wayward Democrats accountable (Rucker and Slevin 2010). The political director of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) speculated that the challenge would make Lincoln a better senator in the future, and AFSCME president Gerald McEntee argued that labor had "put down a marker in the sand" in the Lincoln race (Barnes 2010b).
Polling during the primary showed Lincoln losing the general election by a hefty margin, and polls taken in the month after her runoff victory placed her 20 to 30 percentage points behind her Republican opponent. Lincoln eventually closed the gap slightly, but she never really made the general election race competitive, losing to Republican John Boozman by a margin of 58 to 37 percent. The New York Times reported in October that Lincoln found little support from the national Democratic Party after the primary — not because of her politics, but because of her double-digit deficit in the polls — and that despite being "well respected by her colleagues and well liked by many of her constituents," she ran the sort of race generally run by underfunded challengers (Leibovich 2010). Some disgruntled Halter supporters speculated that Halter might have done better in the general election (Barnes 2010b).
One might draw two lessons from Blanche Lambert Lincoln's career. The first is uncontroversial — primary elections can take a variety of shapes. Both elections may have been referenda on the incumbents, but beyond this, Lincoln's 1992 campaign had little in common with Bill Halter's 2010 campaign. One might also conclude, though, that the very nature of primary elections has changed. Perhaps we have moved from predominantly local affairs, in which the occasional incumbent simply loses touch with the voters, to national affairs, in which questions such as whether an Arkansas Democrat ought to be different from a Massachusetts Democrat are largely moot. However, this could all be coincidence. It could be that some incumbents in 1992 faced challenges like the one Bill Halter ran in 2010 and that some incumbents in 2010 faced challenges like the one Blanche Lambert ran in 1992.
A Brief History of Primary Challenges, 1970–2010
Blanche Lambert Lincoln's story bears a striking resemblance to those of several other moderate members of Congress who have recently faced strong primary challenges from the left (in the case of Democratic incumbents) or the right (in the case of Republican incumbents). To find out exactly what Lambert's story tells us, it is necessary to look more closely at the evolution of primary challenges over the past four decades.
Given the claims detailed in the introduction to this book about the development of congressional primary challenges, the 1970s make for a good place to start in looking at congressional primaries and, more specifically, at the role of ideology in primaries. Prompted by the Democratic Party's McGovern-Fraser reforms, more states had begun to use primaries to select nominees, and the Supreme Court's congressional redistricting decisions of the 1960s had compelled states to draw districts according to a set of federal standards regarding population size, contiguity, and so forth. The single-member, equal population districts and the two-step election process we take for granted today only truly came to exist in the 1970s. While some variations remained in states' election procedures, we can be more confident about attributing primary challenges to national trends over the past four decades than we can in discussing elections in earlier decades.
In presenting a history of primary challenges since 1970, I shall here seek to highlight the stories behind these challenges — the issues that prompted challenges, the incumbents who were defeated or nearly defeated, and the relationship between these challenges and the larger political picture in each election cycle. To some readers, this may seem a bewildering collection of anecdotes, and that is partly the point. As I emphasize throughout this book, some of the stories that get told about primary competition are at odds with the data or at least give rise to ideas that are not borne out by careful study of trends in primary competition. The stories presented in this chapter are an effort to lay out some of the more noteworthy instances of primary competition; they are an effort to place contemporary instances of primary challenges in historical context while maintaining a respect for the idiosyncratic forces that cause primary challenges.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Getting Primaried by Robert G. Boatright. Copyright © 2013 the University of Michigan. Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press.
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