the Progressive Movement was seeking to break the hold on the political
process of what were often seen as corrupt party machines. The growth of the
initiativeandrecallalso dates from this period, but the primary election has
become the most common form of determining who should be a candidate.
Because many US states are extremely ‘safe’ for either theDemocratic Party
or theRepublican Partythe primary can often effectively be the election. In
Maryland, for example, it is highly unlikely that a Republican could be elected
to a major state or congressional office, so the winner of the primary is,de facto,
the overall winner. Primaries vary in form but a distinction is usually drawn
between the so-called open primary, where any qualified elector can vote in
any party primary, and the closed primary where there has to be some formal
evidence of party affiliation before an elector can participate in a party’s
selection of its candidate. In more recent years the parties have taken steps,
which the courts have generally upheld, to abolish the open primary, and the
number of states using the primary to express their preference in relation to the
presidential nomination has grown so that the primaries now virtually deter-
mine the outcome of the candidate selection process well in advance of the
party conventions. This development has been criticized as costly, because the
candidates have to campaign across the states, and inflexible, because it may
mean that a party will find itself bound to a candidate who has become
inappropriate or unpopular after the primaries but before the presidential
election. The primaries for the presidential candidature nominations are held
in most states during the first six months of the year in which the election is to
be held. The earliest primaries, starting with New Hampshire, are of particular
importance, as a strong performance by one of the candidates can often
establish an invincible lead. Due to the very high costs of primary campaigns,
conducted mainly by television advertising and direct mail, a poor perfor-
mance can quickly lead to a candidate having to withdraw from the race. Thus
the arithmetically larger primaries in the states of California and New York
can, in fact, be relatively unimportant, as unassailable leads may already have
been established. Even a ‘winning’ performance, such as that of George Bush
as incumbent president, in 1992, when he was receiving only about 70% of the
primary votes cast against 30% for an extreme right-winger, Patrick Buchanan,
can damage positions within a party.
The idea of introducing a primary system into the United Kingdom has
often been mooted, but it would be resisted as a transfer of power from the
activists to the ordinary electors who in theory are less knowledgeable than the
party workers about the merits of individual candidates. In favour of such a
move is the fact that in some constituencies selection as a Labour or Con-
servative candidate is tantamount to election, and that it is undemocratic to
allow a very small group of perhaps unrepresentative partisans to make such an
important choice.
Primaries