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Presidential nominations are generally perceived to be under the control of primary voters and caucus‐goers, with party organizations themselves largely powerless to steer outcomes. However, parties are highly active in the background, often switching contests between primaries and caucuses or vice versa in order to influence the nomination. Despite the popular narrative of parties becoming more internally democratic and abandoning caucuses, we find numerous instances of states moving from primaries to caucuses. We examine state party switches between caucuses and primaries between 1980 and 2024, testing various theories of party change. This approach yields few systematic conclusions. Therefore, we shift to examining contemporaneous coverage of state party switches using an inductive qualitative approach, revealing a complex and dynamic nomination system and a variety of reasons why state parties choose one form of contest over another. These findings catch state parties in the act of trying to control nomination contests in surprisingly overt ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When parties make endorsements in primary elections, does the favored candidate receive a real boost in his or her vote share, or do parties simply pick the favorites who are already destined to win? To answer this question, we draw on two research designs aimed at isolating the causal effect of Democratic Party endorsements in California’s 2012 primary election. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we randomly assign a party endorsement, holding all other aspects of a candidate’s background and policy positions constant. Second, we use a unique dataset to implement a regression discontinuity analysis of electoral trends by comparing the vote shares captured by candidates who barely won or barely lost the internal party endorsement contest. We find a constellation of evidence suggesting that endorsements do indeed matter, although this effect appears to be contingent upon the type of candidate and voter: endorsements matter most for candidates in their party’s mainstream, and for voters who identify with that party and for independents. The magnitude of their impact is dramatically smaller than might be estimated from research designs less attuned to recent advances in causal inference.

A common explanation for Hillary Clinton's loss in the 2016 presidential election was that she catered to minorities at the expense of the broader electorate. How does such a loss narrative influence voters' interpretation of subsequent elections? In a conjoint experiment, white and Black Democratic respondents were randomly exposed to a vignette that ascribed Democrats' 2016 losses to their focus on identity politics. This narrative had an asymmetric effect on attitudes toward the 2020 election based on both race and gender. While it had no impact on white men's or Black women's understanding of why the Democrats lost the last presidential election or their candidate preferences for the next, it had a substantial impact on the electoral attitudes of white women and a moderate impact on those of Black men. Specifically, it shifted their support away from candidates committed to gender and racial equity and toward those emphasizing broad economic policies. The identity politics loss narrative thus may have acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy that advantaged white male candidates in the 2020 election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do legislators and potential legislative candidates respond to the signals that executive election results send out about constituent preferences? This paper takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by California's 2003 recall election -- held at the midpoint of the state's legislative session -- to test theories about the strategic entry of candidates and the ideological mobility of legislators. First, we show that a surge in support for one party in an executive election can help that party recruit more experienced legislative candidates than usual, while qualified leaders in the other party are discouraged from running in districts where the surge is particularly strong. Second, we show that legislators in the weakening party, particularly those in the most competitive districts, will moderate their behavior after the executive election results signal their electoral vulnerability.

This paper is a preliminary consideration of slate mail. We provide some basic information about the nature and use of slate mail in California and about the policy debates that have surrounded it in the last decade or two.4 We then briefly describe a program of experimental research into the effects of slate mail and report and analyze in detail the results of one such experiment.