Primary Types

The use of primary elections to select party nominees for political office began more than a century ago, as a facet of Progressive Era political reform. But it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that a populist backlash against party machines and bosses made primaries the dominant means for nominating general election candidates.

Most states today do use primary elections to narrow candidate fields and choose the party nominees who will compete in the general election for congressional, state, and local offices. They also use primaries to allow voters to participate in the presidential nominating process.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was incumbent Jimmy Carter's major rival in the 1980 Democratic presidential primary. CQ Photo/Douglas Graham

The presidential primaries fall into two basic categories: the preference primary, in which voters vote directly for the person they want to see nominated for president; and the delegate-selection primary, in which the voters elect delegates to the national party conventions. Today, most states rely on preference primaries for president, with convention delegates allocated largely according to the vote percentage each candidate received in the primary.

Within the two basic types, a wide and often confusing array of variations makes it difficult to categorize primaries. How they operate may differ somewhat from state to state and from party to party within the same [Page 486]state. Because primaries are partisan events, state legislatures and election boards conform their primary laws and ballots largely to the wishes of the major political parties. presidential selection reforms within the democratic party have been particularly influential in shaping the U.S. primary election system.

With the available options for presidential primaries, a state may

• Combine the preference and delegate-selection primaries by electing delegates pledged or favorable to a candidate named on the ballot. Under this system, state party organizations may run unpledged slates of delegates but rarely do. The simplest form of presidential primary and the easiest for voters to comprehend, this system has emerged as by far the dominant one and is in use in most states. The preference vote usually is binding on the delegates, who are elected in the primary itself or chosen outside of it by a caucus process, by a state committee, or by the candidates who have qualified to win delegates.
• Have a preference vote but choose delegates at state party conventions. Votes of this type that do not affect the allocation of delegates are known as beauty contest primaries. Once highly common, to give guidance to state party leaders about voters' candidate preferences and to give voters a sense that they had a say in a process then dominated by party insiders, these preference primaries are nearly an anachronism. By 2004, when only the Democrats had a competitive nominating process—President George W. Bush was unopposed in the Republican Party—the only state that held a beauty contest primary was Idaho.
• Have an advisory preference vote and a separate delegate-selection vote in which delegates may be listed three ways: pledged to a candidate, favorable to a candidate, or unpledged. Like the beauty contest primary, this inherently confusing system has become rare to nonexistent.
• Have a mandatory preference vote with a separate delegate-selection vote. In these cases, the delegates are required to reflect the preference primary vote. In primaries run under this system, candidates for delegate will often publicly declare their candidate preference in hopes that voters supporting that candidate will also vote to send them to the convention.

For those primaries in which the preference vote is binding, state laws may vary as to how many ballots at the national convention are binding on the affected delegates. In recent years, however, this issue has been moot. Not since the 1952 Democratic convention, when Adlai Stevenson was nominated on the third ballot, has either party taken more than one ballot to nominate a presidential candidate.

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