•  
  •  
 

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

donor retention, 2012 election, campaign donors, Republican primary donor, primary elections

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Political Science

Abstract

In recent presidential elections, we have seen many long, drawn out nomination battles in party primary elections. The divisive primary hypothesis states that divisive presidential primaries hurt the party’s performance in the general election (Kenney and Rice 1987). Research on this claim has generally focused on the party’s performance in terms of vote shares (for example, see Henderson, Hillygus, and Tompson 2010), but there are problems with this approach. Aggregate vote data only allows analysis of two points in time (the primary and the general election), and does not permit an analysis of individual behavior. Panel survey data can give an individual-level picture of support for the party nominee as the campaign progresses, but panel data is very difficult to collect and suffers from the limitations of survey research. Do donors to losing primary candidates tend to rally around the nominee even after a divisive primary? Analyzing campaign in this way provides a different perspective that the other methods cannot give.

Download

Share

COinS