Issues, Endorsements, and Vote Choice: A Panel Study of Congressional Primary and General Elections (American Journal of Political Science, accepted; first author)
with David E. Broockman, Gregory A. Huber, and Joshua L. Kalla

Why do congressional candidates’ platforms diverge from the median voter? Prevailing theories blame general election voters’ ignorance, extreme primary voters, and organized groups. We argue that primary voters face challenges electing policy-aligned candidates because primaries lack distinguishing party cues. We report an original four-wave panel survey (N= 31,254) spanning primary and general elections in 27 congressional districts in 2024, supplemented with candidate position and endorsement information. The findings support our argument. Both primary and general election voters are ∼14 percentage points more (less) likely to vote for a candidate after learning they (dis)agree with them on an issue. However, primary voters know less than general election voters about which candidate is closest to them. General election voters appear to more successfully select aligned candidates by inferring candidate positions from party reputations. Group endorsements may also affect choices. Our findings shed light on why candidates fail to converge to the median voter.

The US House of Representatives is experiencing historic levels of polarization. One possible explanation is that as parties have become ideologically sorted, primary voters have nominated more extreme candidates to general elections. This leaves the general electorate, even in competitive districts, with a choice between two extreme candidates. However, not only has existing empirical research found limited evidence that House primary voters have contributed to polarization, there is only weak evidence that ideology factor into voting decisions in House primaries at all. I argue that this could be due to a lack of survey data on House primary voters limiting the types of analyses that can be examined. To remedy this, I ran two-wave panel surveys during the 2022 and 2024 US House primary cycles, enabling the creation of a first-of-its-kind dataset of 9,152 primary voters from 40 primaries in 10 states. This paper uses that dataset to investigate ideological voting in US House primaries and finds robust evidence of its prominence.

Strategic Discrimination Against Women in US House Primaries 
with Sara Jozer and Anna Mikkelborg

A robust finding in American politics literature is that “when women run, women win.” However, this literature’s focus on the general election context overlooks a potential mechanism behind the systematic underrepresentation of women in government: strategic discrimination in primaries, defined as a bias against voting for women in primary elections due to the belief that they will face sexism from general election voters, threatening the party’s chances of victory. To date, studies of strategic discrimination have focused on the 2020 presidential primary, which has limited analysis to a single race and to voters in Democratic primaries. Leveraging data from an original survey conducted during the 2024 US House primary elections, we find evidence that strategic discrimination also disadvantages women in Democratic, but not Republican, congressional elections.