Narrow Victories and Hard Games: Revisiting the Primary Divisiveness Hypothesis
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American Politics Research
38(6) 1052–1071
Narrow Victories © The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: http://www.
and Hard Games: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1532673X10369660
Revisiting the http://apr.sagepub.com
Primary Divisiveness
Hypothesis
Amber Wichowsky1
and Sarah E. Niebler1
Abstract
The 2008 presidential election offers a unique opportunity to revisit the
hypothesis that a divisive primary exacts a tolls on the party’s general election
performance—neither party had a sitting president or vice president seeking
the nomination, the Democratic nomination was contested all the way to the
end, and advertising data provide a way to gauge both the intensity and tenor
of the campaigns. In this article, we take advantage of these circumstances
to distinguish between primaries that were competitive and those that
were negative and find, contrary to the assumptions in the divisive primary
literature, that a close contest does not imply a divisive one. Moreover, we
find that Obama was helped by his tight battle with Clinton for the nomination
and that the tone of the primaries bore no relationship to his general election
performance.
Keywords
presidential primaries, general election vote share, divisive primaries,
competitive primaries, political party nominations
1
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Corresponding Author:
Amber Wichowsky, Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 110
North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706, USA
Email: wichowsky@wisc.edu
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That is why so many Democrats are praying for this divisive primary campaign
to end. They sense, correctly, that the longer it goes on, the better it is for John
McCain.
—Broder (2008, p. A21)
The 2008 presidential primary marked the first time since 1928 that neither a
sitting president nor a sitting vice president ran for his party’s nomination. In
this article, we utilize the lack of incumbency in both the Democratic and
Republican nominating contests as well as the extended duration and com-
petitiveness of the Democratic nomination to reexamine the divisive primary
hypothesis. In 1979, using soccer as the analogy, Alan Ware noted that
“narrow victories tell us nothing about the effect of hard games.” Three
decades later, utilizing a unique set of campaign circumstances combined
with data on the negativity of campaigns, we are able to test whether com-
petitiveness and divisiveness are the same thing and whether one or the other,
or both, has a detrimental effect on the nominee’s vote share in the general
election.
Data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project provide us with a way to
distinguish between the competitiveness and the divisiveness of the campaign.
Competitiveness is generally measured after the election and is based solely
on the outcome. Divisiveness, however, can be measured at various stages
along the way, as candidates air advertisements with varying degrees of
negativity.
In this article, we take advantage of the unique circumstances of the 2008
presidential nomination and data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project to
address three questions. First, to what extent do competitiveness (measured by
the closeness of the election) and divisiveness (measured by the negativity of
the campaign) actually overlap? Second, did the competitive nature of the 2008
primaries harm Barack Obama in the general election? Third, did the divisive-
ness of the 2008 primaries harm Obama in the general election? Contrary to the
implicit assumptions of the divisive primary hypothesis, we find that a com-
petitive primary does not imply a divisive one. Moreover, we find that the tone
of the campaign bore little relationship to his general election performance and
that the tight nominating contest may have even helped Obama.
Revisiting the Primary Divisiveness Hypothesis
Primaries are presumed to be inherently divisive. Rather than build coalitions,
candidates must appeal to factions and are forced to attack one another
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(Polsby, 1983). In the process, they provide ammunition to the opposition
party and expend precious resources that could best be targeted to the general
election campaign (White, 1961). The primary process may also weaken the
party’s organizational base, as supporters of the losing candidate either vote
for the opposition or abstain from voting in the general election (Johnson &
Gibson, 1974; Lengle, 1980; Southwell, 1986; Stone, 1986; but see also
Atkeson, 1998; Stone, Atkeson, & Rapoport, 1992).
Although studies of presidential elections generally conclude that divisive
primaries do more harm than good (Kenney & Rice 1987; Lengle, 1980;
Lengle, Owen, & Sonner 1995; but see also Atkeson, 1998), the empirical
evidence supporting the divisive primary hypothesis varies considerably
across the electoral office considered. The divisiveness of senatorial, con-
gressional, and gubernatorial primaries sometimes hurts the candidate’s gen-
eral election performance (Bernstein, 1977; Hacker, 1965; Kenney & Rice,
1984) or has little to no effect (Kenney, 1988; Piereson & Smith, 1975).
Hogan (2003) finds that divisive state legislative primaries help the nominee
in the general election, which he attributes to the greater publicity afforded to
candidates in these low-visibility contests. Born (1981) finds that divisive
primaries help challengers but harm incumbents. Atkeson (1998) concludes
that divisive presidential primaries have no effect on general election perfor-
mance once candidate quality and the prior vulnerability of the incumbent or
his party are taken into account.
All these studies, however, agree on one thing: that divisiveness can be
measured by the competitiveness of primary contests. As Piereson and Smith
(1975) note, the “assumption . . . is obviously the closer the primary, the more
divisive it is for the party” (p. 557). And yet it is not clear why competitive-
ness should be treated as synonymous with divisiveness.
In his criticism of the divisive primary literature, Ware (1979) argued that
we should consider primaries “divisive” if they “redistribute the victor’s
potential electoral resources to the benefit of his opponents in the general elec-
tion” (p. 382). For example, personal attacks and the airing of sensitive issues
during a tough nominating fight could work to the benefit of the general elec-
tion opponent, particularly among undecided or marginal voters. Nominating
contest winners may also have difficulty raising money from supporters of the
losing candidate if enough ill will develops between factions. And, as was
charged by the Clinton campaign in 2008, primary winners who represent a
minority ideological wing of the party may have particular difficulty garner-
ing the support of party regulars during the general election race.
On the other hand, Ware (1979) also highlighted examples where a vigor-
ously contested nomination could actually help the winner. To begin with,
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greater media attention could help candidates who were largely unknown
before the nominating stage (see, e.g., Born, 1981; Hogan, 2003). If the can-
didate had an apparent “winning” issue, a close primary could also help him
or her obtain publicity for that issue. Additionally, closely contested races
could provide a more rigorous test of a candidate’s abilities and appeal, give
an early indication of the candidate’s organizational strength, and force can-
didates to deal with potential political problems earlier rather than during the
heat of the general election campaign (Born, 1981; Ezra, 2001; Ware, 1979).
The 2008 nominating contests provide a unique opportunity to examine the
divisiveness of the nomination process and address some key limitations of
prior research. First, utilizing campaign advertising data, we are able to distin-
guish between “hard games” and “narrow victories” (Ware, 1979). Despite
early criticism regarding the lack of attention to this distinction, the litera-
ture has been remarkably silent on this point. To address this gap, we use the
tone of campaign ads to measure the divisiveness of primary contests and
examine the extent to which our measures of divisiveness overlap with stan-
dard measures of competitiveness.
Second, we do not face the problem of trying to compare the effect of
primary election campaigns on the general election outcome between states
that held their nomination before the party nominee was selected and those
states that held their contests after the selection.1 Whereas in previous years
the nomination was effectively secured by “Super Tuesday,” Clinton and
Obama contested the nomination until the very end.2 Furthermore, by using
campaign advertising data, we are able to take into account variation in the
intensity of the nominating contests. Indeed, the dominant approach to test-
ing the divisive primary hypothesis, which uses the closeness of the primary
election as a proxy for “divisiveness,” would treat voters and outcomes in
Iowa and New Hampshire as indistinguishable from voters and outcomes in
Michigan and Florida. Yet, in 2008, voters in these states had very different
nominating experiences. Voters in Iowa and New Hampshire were exposed
to months of candidate visits, substantial get-out-the-vote efforts, and weeks
of aggressive campaign advertising. On the other hand, as punishment for
breaking the Democratic National Committee rules on when states could
hold their primaries, Michigan and Florida were denied visits from Clinton
and Obama as well as television ads from both candidates.3 Advertising
data allow us examine the tone of the nomination campaigns and to take
into account variation in the intensity of the campaign. Measuring divisive-
ness by the winning candidate’s share of the primary vote misses on both
counts and, most significantly, conflates closeness with divisiveness.
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Advertising data not only help us make a conceptual clarification but also
provide a methodological advantage. Specifically, we are able to exploit the
lack of correspondence between media markets and state boundaries and
approach the primary divisiveness hypothesis as a set of natural experiments
within states (Huber & Arceneaux, 2007; Krasno & Green, 2008). As
Krasno and Green (2008) discuss in the context of the 2000 presidential
election:
[B]ecause of their proximity to Philadelphia (and the battleground state
of Pennsylvania), citizens in eight counties in New Jersey were bom-
barded with 2,247 presidential ads in the final three weeks of the
campaign in 2000. During that same period, voters in twelve northern
New Jersey counties close to New York City received just 16 spots.
This situation is not unusual: we observe twelve states where at least
one county received more than 1000 presidential ads during the final
three weeks of the campaign while at least one other received fewer
than 100 ads. This phenomenon is not limited to states that border
battlegrounds, for we also detect substantial differences in the volume
of advertising within heavily contested states. (p. 246)
We find similar within-state variation in the context of the 2008 Democratic
nomination. For example, during the 2008 primary season, voters in southern
New Jersey received nearly 8.5 times the number of primary campaign ads
than voters living in the northern part of the state. Thus, unlike previous
studies, which consider variation across states, we focus on variation within
states and are therefore able to control for potentially confounding statewide
factors and election activities.
Data and Method
To test the divisive primary hypothesis, we utilize campaign advertising data
collected by the Wisconsin Advertising Project (WiscAds).4 In 2008, CMAG
tracked and WiscAds coded campaign advertisements in all 210 media mar-
kets in the United States. While WiscAds data have been used extensively to
test hypotheses about whether and how campaigns matter, to date few studies
have examined campaign ads from primary elections. Indeed, most studies of
presidential campaigns essentially ignore what happened during the nominat-
ing stage. Yet it is exactly these messages that lie at the heart of the divisive
primary hypothesis. Lengle et al. (1995) argue:
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By their very nature, primaries invite internal party dissension if not
civil war . . . Negative and deceptive advertising blankets the airwaves
and reinforces voter loyalty and antipathy toward candidates. In a pri-
mary, the price of victory for the winner is a tarnished image and a split
party, and there is no consolation prize for losers. (p. 372)
Data on primary ads were aggregated to the media-zone level.5 Media
zones are defined as the intersection between states and media markets
(Krasno & Green, 2008). For example, the Philadelphia media market is
segmented into two media zones, one covering Pennsylvania and the other
New Jersey; the Chicago media market spans Illinois and Indiana. In total,
we have 343 media zones.
Our analysis includes several measures of campaign advertising. First, we
include the number of ads aired in each media zone. This measure is logged to
account for the diminishing returns of exposure to campaign advertising
(Freedman, Franz, & Goldstein, 2004; Stevens, 2008). Second, we utilize data
on advertising tone to measure the divisiveness of the nomination. Coders at
the Wisconsin Advertising Project were asked to assess the tone and focus
of each ad. Specifically, an ad was coded as promote (mentioning only the
favored candidate), attack (mentioning only the opposing candidate), or con-
trast (mentioning both candidates). We treat ads as negative if they were
coded as either attack or contrast. Our measure of negativity is the percentage
of total ads aired in each media zone that were negative.6 Not all negative ads,
however, are the same. We also distinguish between ads that were negative
and policy focused and those that were negative and focused on the personal
traits of the candidates.7 We expect that personal attacks have the greatest
potential to harm candidates in the general election (Ezra, 2001).
Replicating previous studies, we test whether the closeness of the primary
election has any effect on the general election performance of the nomination
winner. Primary and caucus results for both the Democratic and Republican
contests were collected at the county level and aggregated by media zone. Our
measure of competitiveness takes into account the relative competitiveness of
the Democratic Party’s nomination to that of the Republican Party (Kenney &
Rice, 1987). That is, we take the difference between the closeness of the Dem-
ocratic and Republican contests such that higher values on this measure mean
that the Democratic contest was more competitive than the Republican
contest.
Closeness for each party was defined as the absolute value of the eventual
winner’s share of the primary vote compared with the runner-up’s share of
the vote. Thus, for the Democratic Party we compare the primary and caucus
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results between Obama and Clinton and for the Republican Party between
McCain and Huckabee. The margin of victory during the nomination phase for
the Democrats ranged between 80 percentage points to less than 1 percentage
point. On the Republican side, the margin of victory ranged from 100 (reflect-
ing the fact that McCain secured the nomination early on) to a 3 percentage
point margin between McCain and Huckabee. Our measure of relative com-
petitiveness ranges from -60 to 100, with -60 reflecting a media zone where
the Democratic and Republican contests were decided with a margin of victory
of 62 and 2 percentage points, respectively, and 100 reflecting a media zone
where McCain had already secured the Republican nomination and where
Clinton and Obama were essentially tied.
Our dependent variable is Obama’s share of the general election vote,
again aggregated by media zone. To account for potential state-specific effects
we estimate a multilevel model (Gelman & Hill, 2007) and allow the intercept
to vary randomly by state. The model can be written as follows:
yi = aj + bXi + ei,
where yi is the share of the general election vote won by Obama for media
market, i; Xi is a vector of our explanatory variables for media market, i,
including Kerry’s vote share in 2004, the relative competitiveness of the
2008 nominating contest, total ads aired during the nominating phase
(logged), and the divisiveness of the nominating contest as captured by
the tone and focus of advertising; and ai is an intercept that randomly
varies by state, j. The second level of the model can be written as follows:
aj = ma + hj, with hj: N (0, s2a )
We test the expectation that divisiveness at the nominating stage harms the
party’s general election performance with two different model specifications.
First, we include the proportion of advertising coded as negative. Second, we
break negative ads into those that were personal attacks and those that were
focused on drawing out the policy distinctions between Obama and Clinton.
It is possible that the relationship between the divisiveness of the nominat-
ing contest and the general election outcome is confounded by expectations
about general election prospects or incumbent vulnerability. Weak incum-
bents are more likely to draw a primary challenge (Atkeson, 1998; Lazarus,
2005) and it may be that a party’s nominating contests are more vigorously
contested because that party expects to win in November (Born, 1981).
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We are able to overcome some of these concerns by looking at what was
essentially an open race on both sides, with neither a sitting president nor sit-
ting vice president running for the nomination. But utilizing campaign adver-
tising data to assess campaign tone provides a further advantage in this regard:
The lack of correspondence between state boundaries and media markets
allows us to treat this question with a set of “state-level natural experiments”
(Krasno & Green, 2008, p. 246; see also Huber & Arceneaux, 2007). For
example, some areas of New York received substantially higher proportions
of negative advertising than adjacent areas of the state simply because they
share a media market with Pennsylvania. Indeed, there were 25 states where
at least some part of the state received more than 1,000 primary campaign ads,
while another part of the state received none. We focus on this within-state
variation by including state-level random effects.8 Thus, we not only provide
a more direct test of the divisive primary hypothesis by measuring the tone of
the campaign and controlling for prior Democratic performance, advertising
volume, and the closeness of the Democratic nomination by measuring the
tone of the campaign, but we are also able to account for any unmeasured
state-specific effects.
We estimate a Bayesian multilevel model (Sturtz, Ligges, & Gelman,
2005). We use diffuse normal priors with mean zero and standard deviation
100 for each xi and aj. Estimates and inferences are based on 10,000 iterations
with a burn-in period of 5,000, producing 5,000 approximately independent
draws from the posterior density. To assess model convergence we ran three
chains, specifying different initial values from a random distribution and
checking whether the distributions of the different simulated chains mix
(Gelman & Hill, 2007).9
Results
We begin with a descriptive overview of the 2008 Democratic nomination.
The number of ads aired (logged) for the Democratic contests ranges from 0
to 9.5. On average, Democratic candidates for the nomination aired slightly
more than 1,275 ads per media zone. The median number of ads aired per
media zone was close to 600 spots. While our analysis is restricted to the ques-
tion of whether primary divisiveness harmed the general election performance
of the Democratic Party, similar measures range from 0 to 9.3 for the Repub-
lican contests, with Republican candidates airing an average of 398 ads per
media zone during the nominating stage. The median number of spots,
however, was considerably lower (0), reflecting the fact that McCain secured
the nomination early and thus did not air ads in a number of states. To put
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Figure 1. Campaign advertising and closeness of Democratic contests
these numbers in perspective, an average of 830 presidential ads were aired in
a media zone during the last 2 weeks of the 2008 general election. Thus, many
voters were exposed to a substantial amount of campaign advertising well
before the general election campaign. Indeed, Obama was on the air with pri-
mary ads for almost an entire calendar year—from July 2007 to June 2008
(Ridout, 2009). The volume of campaign advertising was only modestly cor-
related with the competitiveness of the nominating contest for both parties
(rdem = .13 and rgop = .12).
Turning to the tone of the Democratic nomination campaign, negative ads
accounted for an average of 6.8% of all primary ads aired. The Democratic
contests were more negative than their Republican counterparts, with only
3.5% of Republican ads deemed negative. While the Clinton and Obama
operations ran fairly positive air campaigns, voters in some media markets
received substantially more negative messages. Our measure of negativity
ranges from a low of 0% to a high of 66.7% of ads aired. Figure 1 plots both
advertising volume and the percentage of ads that were negative against the
Democratic winner’s margin of victory. As shown in the left panel in Figure 1,
the more ads Obama and Clinton ran the more closely contested the nomina-
tion. However, as shown in the right panel, they were not more likely to “go
negative” when the race was tight.10 The correlation between the winning
candidate’s margin of victory and the percentage of ads that were nega-
tive is a modest, but positive 0.17. That is, negativity was higher in safer
contests.
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Figure 2. Competition in the 2008 Democratic nominating contests
To give a sense of how advertising exposure and tone varied across media
zones, Figures 2 and 3 show how our measures of competitiveness and divi-
siveness varied geographically. The timing of when the ads aired during the
campaign does not adequately explain geographic variation in negativity.
Negative ads aired early (South Carolina) as well as later during the cam-
paign (Pennsylvania). Rather, the inverse relationship between competition
and our measure of negativity appears to be driven by the campaign strategy
of the Clinton camp. Overall, Clinton’s ads were more negative (13% of all
airings) than those aired by the Obama campaign (6% of all airings). More-
over, the Clinton campaign was more likely to “go negative” in areas where
Obama won fairly easily, such as Green Bay, Wisconsin, and Columbia,
South Carolina, as well as in places where she won handily, such as Nashville,
Tennessee, and Lexington, Kentucky. On the other hand, both candidates
avoided running negative ads where the race was close, such as Austin,
Texas, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
While we hypothesize that negativity has a deleterious effect on the party’s
performance in the fall, we anticipate that the most damage comes from per-
sonal attacks rather than from messages that serve to draw policy distinctions
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Figure 3. Negativity in the 2008 Democratic nominating contests
between the candidates. On average, approximately 2.2% of the total ads aired
by Democratic nominees were classified as personal attacks. There was, how-
ever, significant variation in the tone of Democratic ads. For example, per-
sonal attacks accounted for more than 15% of ads aired in four Pennsylvania
media markets: the Buffalo media market, which covers two north-central
Pennsylvania counties, plus the Wilkes Barre, Erie, and Johnstown media
markets. Figure 4 shows how our measure of personal attacks varies across
media markets.
Once again, the correlation between our measure of personal attacks and
the Democratic winner’s margin of victory is a modest but positive .18.11 That
is, the safer the primary contest for either Clinton or Obama, the more likely
it was for voters to be exposed to potentially divisive campaign messages.
The lack of overlap between our measures of competitiveness and divi-
siveness does not, however, directly challenge the central assumptions of the
primary divisiveness hypothesis. It could still be the case that one contender
won the primary with a safe margin of victory, but in the process ended up
harming the party’s showing in the general election. This may have been a
distinct possibility among voters who supported Clinton in the primary but
were lukewarm when it came to supporting Obama in the fall. To address
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Figure 4. Personal attacks in the 2008 Democratic nominating contests
these possibilities, we begin with some bivariate comparisons between our
measures of competitiveness and tone, and Obama’s general election perfor-
mance relative to Kerry’s performance in 2004 for our 343 media zones.
We first divided media zones into terciles, reflecting areas where Obama
did better relative to Kerry, those where Obama performed about equally
well, and those where he underperformed relative to 2004. Table 1 presents
the mean advertising volume, margin of victory, and percent negative for
each category. We see that advertising volume was slightly higher in places
where Democratic performance improved in 2008 and that Democratic per-
formance also was better in areas where the nomination was more hotly con-
tested. Thus, it does not appear that the competitiveness of the nomination
harmed the Democratic Party’s general election performance. On the other
hand, we see that the percentage of primary ads coded as “personal attacks”
was actually higher in places where the Democratic Party underperformed
relative to 2004. Conversely, we see that our other category of negative
ads—those drawing policy distinctions between the candidates—was lower
in these underperforming areas.
Table 2 presents our multivariate results. We begin with a model that only
considers the effect of competition during the nominating phase on Obama’s
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Table 1. Obama’s Performance in 2008 Relative to Kerry in 2004
Primary Percentage Percentage Percentage of
Margin of Advertising of Negative of Policy Personal
Victory Volume Ads Attack Ads Attack Ads
Worse (N = 62) 35.6 4.5 7.4 4.5 2.9
Same (N = 150) 20.8 4.8 7.0 4.2 2.8
Better (N = 131) 22.2 5.3 6.8 5.6 1.2
Table 2. Bayesian Multilevel Model: The Democratic Nomination Fight and the
2008 General Election
Dependent Variable: Obama’s Share of General Election Vote
Independent
Variables Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4
Dem Share 1.04 (1.01, 1.05) 1.03 (1.01, 1.05) 1.04 (1.01, 1.05) 1.03a (1.01, 1.06)
a a a
2004
Competitiveness 0.03a (0.01, 0.04) 0.03a (0.01, 0.04) 0.03a (0.01, 0.05) 0.03a (0.01, 0.05)
(relative)
Ads (logged) 0.12a (0.01, 0.16) 0.13a (0.03, 0.25) 0.13a (0.01, 0.24)
Percentage of -0.01 (-0.04, 0.03)
negative ads
Percentage of -0.05 (-0.14, 0.04)
personal
negative
Percentage of 0.01 (-0.04, 0.07)
policy negative
N 343 343 343 343
Deviance 1,761 1,758 1,759 1,760
Note. Entries are coefficients; 95% highest posterior density (HPD) intervals in parentheses.
a. HPD interval does not include 0. State-level random effects not shown for space considerations.
general election performance, controlling for Kerry’s share of the 2004 presi-
dential vote and including state-level random effects. Although the literature
is mixed on whether competitive primaries harm or hurt the candidate in the
general election, the general conclusion is that presidential nominees are
harmed by tight nominating battles. For example, using a similar measure of
competitiveness and examining presidential primaries between 1912 and
1984, Kenney and Rice (1987) find that a percentage point increase in pri-
mary vote relative to the opponent’s primary vote share yields an additional
0.07% of the general election vote in that state. Our measure of relative
competitiveness is scaled such that higher values indicate the Democratic
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nomination was more closely contested in a media zone than the Republican
contest. After controlling for Democratic performance in the previous presi-
dential election, a one percentage point increase in the relative competitive-
ness of the Democratic contest over the Republican contest leads to three
tenths of a percentage point increase in Democratic vote share, a relatively
small effect, but opposite that suggested by earlier research.
Model 2 adds in advertising volume. Moving from the minimum to the
maximum in advertising volume (0 to 9.5 on our logged scale) increases
Democratic general election performance by slightly more than 1 percent-
age point (compared to Kerry’s performance in 2004).12 Thus, we find that
the more closely contested the Democratic nomination is (both relative to
the Republican contest and considered separately), the better the Democratic
Party’s performance in November.
Our expectation, however, is that it is not how closely contested the nomi-
nation is but how divisive the campaigns are that affects the party’s general
election performance. Model 3 tests this hypothesis by including the percent-
age of ads that were classified as negative. The effect of negative ads is in the
expected direction but not statistically significant. Given the opposite rela-
tionships found for negative ads classified as personal attacks and those
focused on contrasting the positions of the candidates in the bivariate results,
we test whether overall negativity obscures any effect by including both neg-
ative policy and negative personal ads.
Model 4 replaces the percentage of ads coded as negative with separate
measures of personal attack ads and those classified as policy focused. The
point estimates for both measures are in the expected direction with personal
attacks decreasing and policy-focused attacks increasing Obama’s general
election performance, controlling for past Democratic performance, relative
competitiveness of the Democratic nomination, advertising volume, and state-
level random effects. Neither coefficient, however, reaches conventional lev-
els of statistical significance. Overall, we find little evidence that the tone of
the Obama and Clinton campaigns harmed the Democratic Party in the gen-
eral election. Indeed, it appears that the more vigorously contested the nomi-
nation contest, the better Obama performed in November.
Conclusion
In 2008, the Democratic Party had a long, expensive, and contentious battle
for the presidential nomination. All three aspects of the nomination struggle,
from its length to its cost to the potential harm a divisive fight would have
on the party’s performance in the fall, received substantial media coverage.
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Throughout the spring and early summer of 2008, the media were quick to
note the potential risk that a drawn-out battle between Obama and Clinton
posed for the Democratic Party’s chance of winning the White House in
November.
Early public opinion surveys buttressed the claim that the divisive primary
was splitting the Democratic Party in two: Clinton carried women and the
White working class; Obama drew support from younger voters, African
Americans, and the professional class. Surveys taken during the spring months
indicated that about a quarter of Clinton backers would vote for McCain over
Obama, while one out of five Obama supporters said they would vote for
McCain if Clinton was the nominee (Gallup Organization, n.d.). As one female
supporter of Clinton noted, “I’m not going to be voting for him [Obama], and
it irritates me. Nobody’s concerned about the women. I don’t think I can vote
for McCain. I guess I’ll have to sit it out” (Williams, 2008, p. A1). Although in
the end these fears were overblown, whether the nominating struggle bore any
relationship to Obama’s general election performance remains an outstanding
question.
The 2008 Democratic nominating contest provided a key opportunity to
test the primary divisiveness hypothesis, because the two top contenders
(Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) fought for the nomination until the very
last contest in June. Furthermore, the availability of campaign advertising data
for all media markets allowed us to assess the tone of those campaigns and to
make distinctions between campaigns that resulted in “narrow victories” and
those that reflected “hard games” (Ware, 1979).
Contrary to the expectations and assumptions in the divisive primary litera-
ture, we did not find that more competitive nominating contests were more
divisive than those won by a safe margin. In 2008, Clinton and Obama were
actually less likely to “go negative” in tight races, and we find no support for
the assumption that “the closer the primary, the more divisive it is for the
party” (Piereson & Smith, 1975, p. 557).
Rather, Obama was marginally helped by close nominating contests. After
controlling for previous Democratic performance and including state-level
random effects, a one percentage point increase in relative competitiveness
was associated with approximately three tenths of a percentage point increase
in Obama’s general election vote share. This finding was the same whether we
used our measure of relative competitiveness or one based on the Democratic
winner’s margin of victory.
While we found no support for the assumption that close primaries are
divisive, we would argue that the positive effect found for competition speaks
to other research demonstrating that close primaries can help challengers
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(Born, 1981; Romero, 2003). In fact, Obama’s candidacy fits well with the
types of conditions Ware laid out when discussing how close primaries could
help candidates in the general election. For one, Obama was an unknown
candidate with an issue position on Iraq that was popular among Democrats
and many Independents. Second, he was able to flex his substantial organiza-
tional and financial muscle throughout the primary season. Indeed, the pro-
tracted nomination may have helped Obama increase his donor and volunteer
base (Vargas, 2008). Moreover, absent geographic, demographic, and ideo-
logical factions, such as those characterizing the contests of 1968, 1976, and
1980, a more unified Democratic party may have been in a better position to
reap the benefits of a vigorously contested nomination.13 On the other hand,
while it appears that Obama underperformed relative to Kerry in areas where
the primary was more divisive, this relationship is not sustained in our multi-
variate analysis. Thus, while Obama was helped by a close nomination con-
test, the tone of the Democratic nominating campaign had little effect on his
general election performance.
Although our initial goal was to revisit the divisive primary hypothesis,
our analysis also reveals that many voters were exposed to substantial
amounts of campaign information during the nominating stage. Indeed, some
voters were exposed to more campaign ads during the primary than they were
during the general election campaign. Studies examining the effects of presi-
dential advertising, therefore, may provide an incomplete picture by only
considering campaign messages during the general election. Our analysis
focused on Obama’s general election performance relative to 2004. We leave
it to future research to examine whether the primaries bore any relationship
to voter turnout or individual attitudes, such as knowledge of issue positions
or interest in the election.
Others have noted that the relationships between primary divisiveness and
general election outcomes may be spurious (Atkeson, 1998; Born, 1981;
Lazarus, 2005). We have sought to overcome these concerns in two ways.
First, we examined what was essentially an open race for both parties.
Second, we took advantage of campaign advertising data and the lack of cor-
respondence between state boundaries and media markets to assess within-
state variation in campaign negativity. We acknowledge that our analysis
was limited to 2008 and that the positive effects found for primary competi-
tiveness may be conditional on the unique circumstances of the historic nom-
inating fight between Clinton and Obama. Nevertheless, our results challenge
the assumption that competitiveness implies divisiveness. And contrary to
the dominant media narrative, we find no evidence that in 2008 the Demo-
cratic Party was harmed by its lengthy, competitive, and at times divisive
nominating battle.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Ken Goldstein and the Wisconsin Advertising Project for use
of the 2008 data and Byron E. Shafer for his feedback on an earlier version. We are
also grateful for the comments provided by three anonymous reviewers and the editor.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this
article.
Notes
1. Moreover, as others have noted (Atkeson, 1998; Lazarus, 2005), the relationships
between primary divisiveness and general election outcomes are often endog-
enous because weak incumbents are more likely to draw a primary challenge.
This is less of a problem in 2008 as neither the sitting president nor sitting vice
president sought the nomination for either party.
2. Barack Obama secured a majority of delegates on June 3, 2008. Clinton conceded
the nomination 4 days later, on June 7, 2008.
3. Michigan scheduled its primary for 15 January and Florida held its primary
on 29 January, thus violating the Democratic National Committee’s rule that
no state (with the exceptions of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and
Nevada) hold its nominating contest prior to February 5, 2008.
4. The Wisconsin Advertising Project obtains these data from the TNS/Cam-
paign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), a commercial firm that tracks television
advertising.
5. “Primary ads” include campaign advertising in both primary and caucus states.
6. We acknowledge that our measure of divisiveness presents an incomplete picture
of the nomination battle between Obama and Clinton. No doubt the candidates
left some of the “mudslinging” to their surrogates and, in some sense, also to the
media. Nevertheless, we believe our measure of advertising tone correlates with
the overall tenor of the Clinton and Obama campaigns across states and over
time.
7. Coders distinguished between policy, personal trait, and those that were both
policy focused and mentioned personal traits. We split ads coded as both policy
and personal equally between our two categories.
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8. Alternatively, we could have included state-level fixed effects (see, e.g., Krasno &
Green, 2008). A multilevel model (random effects) is appropriate when group-level
coefficients are not of interest (Gelman & Hill, 2007).
9. The models converged quickly with the parallel chains mixing well (potential
scale reduction factors less than 1.1 for all parameters; see Gelman & Hill 2007).
10. The graph plotting advertising volume includes media zones where no ads aired;
the graph plotting the share of negative ads only includes media zones where at
least one ad aired.
11. If we include media markets where no ads ran, the bivariate correlation falls to .11.
12. Similar results are obtained if we include competitiveness of the Democratic con-
tests rather than our measure of relative competitiveness, although the effect of
advertising volume is less robust (p < .10), given the stronger correlation between
advertising volume and competitiveness of the Democratic contest.
13. We thank one of our anonymous reviewers for raising this point.
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Bios
Amber Wichowsky is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison.
Sarah E. Niebler is a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of
Wisconsin, Madison.
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