All in the Family

Sitting Legislators Seeking Nomination Win the Primary More than 96% of the Time
In primary elections from 1998-2006, 96% of sitting senators -- better than 19 of 20 (96.3%) incumbents seeking their party’s nomination to another term -- won renomination. A somewhat higher percentage in the House - slightly more than 29 of every 30 sitting representatives (96.7%) -- were renominated for another term. Fully 84% of senators, and 81% of House members, ran unopposed when seeking nomination to another term.

Primary elections are held to determine whom a party will nominate for the General Election. Voter turn out tends to be lower, but all voters in a primary share a party affiliation. Legislators rarely face challengers for their party’s nomination. Even when they are challenged by another candidate on the ballot, they win 77% of the time in the Senate, and 85% of the time in the House.

Incumbents who sought nomination for another term usually got it:

The number of primaries is not fixed by the number of seats on the ballot. Rather, the number of primaries is determined by the number of candidates from different parties seeking nomination to the same seat. Some seats have one primary, some two and some even have three. For this reason, this Issue Briefing will focus only on primaries that include a sitting legislator seeking nomination to another term.

The defeat of an incumbent legislator in a primary is extremely rare. Incumbents were more likely to retire or seek nomination to a higher office than to lose a primary. In the Senate, nearly four times as many sitting members chose not to seek nomination to another term as lost a primary. The bulk of these came in 2002 with the new district boundaries, but in 1998, 2000, and 2004, more senators chose to retire or to seek higher office as were turned out by the voters. In the House, roughly three times as many members chose to retire or seek higher office as lost in the primary.

Incumbents who were not nominated for another term:

Of legislators who did seek nomination to another term but lost the primary, a large share faced another incumbent in the primary, thus ensuring that at least one of them would lose. Of the six senators who lost primaries, two lost to other senators after redistricting put them in the same district. That same year, one House member lost the primary to another House member. Over the five elections examined, nearly a third of the House members who lost primaries were defeated in the year after reapportionment, running in newly-designed districts with some new voters and, sometimes, other incumbents.

Legislators who had been appointed to a vacancy, and had not previously faced voters in an election for that seat, did even better than legislators who were seeking re-nomination. Of ten appointed senators between 1998 and 2006, not one lost the primary. In the House, there were 21 appointed members who sought nomination to a full term; all 21 won their primaries. Indeed, most of the time these candidates were not contested in the primary, despite the fact that they had not won nomination at the last election: seven of the ten senators and 11 of the 21 House members were not contested.

In an earlier report, we noted that voters in general elections for legislative seats rarely see contested elections, and where they do see contests, the districts are drawn so that one party has an overwhelming advantage. While statewide candidates are typically within 10 percentage points of each other, districted candidates, for state House and state Senate, most often face no serious opposition.

Voters have very few choices in primary elections. Even in those rare instances when an incumbent is challenged, voters are extremely unlikely to rebuke a sitting legislator by denying them nomination for the next General Election. The primary is truly the incumbents’ to lose.