The 1968 analogy

Kevin Drum suggests that Democrats should calm down about the possibility of a long nomination fight hurting their chances in the fall:

The hot topic of conversation right now is the proposition that a long, drawn-out Democratic primary runs the risk of destroying the party and putting John McCain in the White House. So for the good of the country, Hillary should withdraw.

Now, this might be true. But I'd like to offer a historical counterexample: 1968. Consider. The Democratic incumbent president was forced to withdraw after a primary debacle in New Hampshire. The Vietnam War had split liberals into warring factions and urban riots had shattered the LBJ's Great Society legacy. A frenzied primary season reached all the way to California in June, culminating in the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a nationally televised battle zone. Hubert Humphrey, the party's eventual nominee, had never won a primary and was loathed by a significant chunk of the liberal community. New Left radicals hated mainstream Democrats more than they hated Republicans.

In other words, this was the mother of all ugly, party-destroying campaigns. No other primary campaign in recent memory from either party has come within a million light years of being as fratricidal and ruinous. But what happened? In the end, Humphrey lost the popular vote to Nixon by less than 1%. A swing of about a hundred thousand votes in California would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives.

If long, bitter, primary campaigns really destroy parties, then Humphrey should have lost the 1968 election by about 50 points. "Bitter" isn't even within an order of magnitude of describing what happened that year. And yet, even against that blood-soaked background, Humphrey barely lost.

This is all true, but it's important to remember that Humphrey drastically underperformed in 1968 relative to what we would expect given the state of the economy at the time (a result that is often attributed to Vietnam War deaths). We can't quantify what damage was done by the polarizing primary campaign, but it's hard to see how it would help.

Democrats risk a similar scenario -- a destructive primary campaign could turn a possible rout in November into a 50/50 coin flip a la 1968. And even if they do win, any significant reduction in the popular/electoral vote margin could have significant legislative and political consequences going forward.

On the other hand, as John Sides points out at The Monkey Cage, the most prominent political science article studying this question did not find a significant negative effect (gated JSTOR link):

Divisive Primaries and General Election Outcomes: Another Look at Presidental Campaigns
Lonna Rae Atkeson
American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Jan., 1998), pp. 256-271.

Theory: The divisive primary hypothesis asserts that the more divisive the presidential primary contest compared to that of the other party the fewer votes received in the general election. Thus the party candidate with the most divisive primary will have a more difficult general election fight. However, studies at the presidential level have failed to consider candidate quality, prior vulnerability of the incumbent president or his party, the national nature of the presidential race, and the unique context of each presidential election campaign. Once these factors are taken into account presidential primaries should have a more marginal or even nonexistent effect in understanding general election outcomes.

Hypothesis: Including appropriate controls for election year context in a state-by-state model and creating a national model that controls for election year context, candidate quality, and the nature of the times should diminish the effect of nomination divisiveness on general election outcomes.

Methods: Regression analysis is used to examine the effect of presidential divisive nomination campaigns on general election outcomes.

Results: Once election year context in the state-by-state model is controlled for, divisiveness has a much more modest effect. This modest effect does not appear to change general election outcomes. In addition, the election year model, which posits that presidential elections are national elections and not state-by-state elections, indicated that divisiveness was not significantly different from zero.

Comments

[joe5348]

Brendan,

I'm no political genius, but didn't the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Nixon's southern strategy and Wallace's running have something to do with the numbers?

Joe

[Jason]

See also Jeff Lazarus's article from 2005 in LSQ, which looks at divisive primaries for House seats and seems to apply to this presidential race as well. If the expectation was that McCain was going to win going away in the fall, then I expect that there would be more willingness for Obama or Clinton to drop out.

Unintended Consequences: Anticipation of General Election Outcomes And Primary Election Divisiveness

Author: Lazarus, Jeffrey

Source: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Volume 30, Number 3, August 2005 , pp. 435-461(27)

Abstract:
This article offers the first theory to explain the relationship between primary election divisiveness and general election outcomes that is grounded in candidates' own behavior. Conventional wisdom holds that divisive primaries cause candidates to do poorly in general elections. I show that primary divisiveness does not cause this or any other pattern of general election results. Rather, expectations about general election results cause primaries to be divisive. Non-incumbents enter races they think they can win, and they think they can win where the incumbent is vulnerable. More candidates enter those races than others, splitting the vote among them. This stampede creates divisive primaries in which incumbents are most likely to do poorly, and challengers well, in the general elections. As a result, divisiveness is associated with (but does not cause) better general election performances among challengers and worse performances among incumbents. In this manner, primary divisiveness is an unintended consequence of behavior directed towards the goal of winning the general election. I tested these propositions using data from major-party House primaries between 1976 and 1998 and found that (a) candidate expectations of victory determine when and where divisive primary elections occur, (b) those expectations drive the correlation between primary divisiveness and general election results, and (c) primary divisiveness correlates with incumbents doing poorly, and challengers well, in general elections.

[Micah]

Part of the problem with social science is that it deals, often, in "on average" explanations. It is somewhat comforting to me that, on average, divisive primaries do not weaken candidates for the general. I thought that the finding was, actually (and you'll forgive me if I save my JSTOR research for my own dissertation) that competitive primaries actually improve candidates chances for the general. But let's leave aside on average explanation for the moment to examine this particular case, which precious few people weighing in on this issue have done. The longer the Democratic primary is contested, the longer that McCain, not feeling the pressure, will toady up to unsavory characters like Hagee and hence reduce his chances of winning the general. And the more adversity Obama has had to overcome, the more - to borrow 2/3rds of a slogan from Giuliana - tested and ready he will seem for the general.

I don't think Barack can win the general if he wins the primary "on points." I think that he's got to find a way to score a knockout blow which he almost did in Texas, might have done in Ohio and will have another chance to do in Pennsylvania.

[Roy]

to describe `68 as a "long nomination fight" is a pretty huge understatement, the winner of the primaries, RFK, was assassinated, this following the assassination of MLK a couple of months earlier. Then at the convention a third force, not attached to either nominee, got invlved in rioting with the police in the city in which the convention was held.

All of this on top of a long divisive war, and an unpopular president, to which Humphrey, the nominee, was the VP for. Not to mention a third party run by McCarthy, the loser at the convention.

In an atmosphere of panic social breakdown and a widely held perception by the public that the country was heading toward civil war. Then you can add Wallace and the last hurrah of the Southern Segregationists after the Civil Rights Act.

All this without the factor of the creeping realighnment of Southern Whites toward the Republican Party.

I'd be very interested in hearing a similar scenario for 2008.