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ID: 134794

Election fundamentals and polls favor the republicans / Highton, Benjamin; McGhee, Eric; Sides, John

Sides, John	Article
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Summary/Abstract

Our congressional forecasting model provides predictions of individual House and Senate races as well as aggregate party seat shares in each chamber. It does so by marrying an underlying structural or “fundamentals”-based model with available polling data—an approach similar to Linzer (2013). The structural portion of the model is based on contested House and Senate elections from 1980 to 2012, excluding those when an independent or third-party candidate won a significant share of the vote. 1 The dependent variable is the Democratic candidate’s share of the major-party vote. The independent variables are drawn from the extensive literature that has identified significant national and state or district correlates of congressional election outcomes (e.g., Jacobson 2012). These include:

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ID: 156839

Has the top two primary elected more moderates? / McGhee, Eric ; Shor, Boris

McGhee, Eric	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Party polarization is perhaps the most significant political trend of the past several decades of American politics. Many observers have pinned hopes on institutional reforms to reinvigorate the political center. The Top Two primary is one of the most interesting and closely-watched of these reforms: a radically open primary system that removes much of the formal role for parties in the primary election and even allows for two candidates of the same party to face each other in the fall. Here we leverage the adoption of the Top Two in California and Washington to explore the reform’s effects on legislator behavior. We find an inconsistent effect since the reform was adopted in these two states. The evidence for post-reform moderation is stronger in California than in Washington, but some of this stronger effect appears to stem from a contemporaneous policy change—district lines drawn by an independent redistricting commission—while still more might have emerged from a change in term limits that was also adopted at the same time. The results validate some claims made by reformers, but question others, and their magnitude casts some doubt on the potential for institutions to reverse the polarization trend.

Key Words

Party Polarization ; Primary Elected ; More Moderates ; Political Trend

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