7 - Within-Election Adaptative Effect

Summary

Primaries might also contribute to party transformation by incentivizing candidates to move position within an election cycle. Candidates might face a “strategic positioning dilemma” if they must first satisfy an extreme selectorate to earn the nomination before facing a comparatively moderate general electorate. This chapter therefore tests whether all candidates in a primary adapt their positions away from the center during the nomination phase of a single election cycle, presenting general election voters with polarized choices. To scale positions both during and after a primary it uses a text-as-data approach based on candidates’ communication on Twitter during the 2020 election cycle. It finds that Democratic candidates who lost primaries became significantly more moderate immediately after their defeat, especially if they lost in ideological or factional primaries. It does not observe this pattern among Republican losers. This chapter demonstrates a further way in which primaries may contribute to polarization, incentivizing candidates to adopt positions further from the ideological center during the nomination phase of the election cycle.