Wikipedia Deep Dive

Primary election

12 min read

In 1968, Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic presidential nomination without entering a single primary election. Not one. He simply showed up at the convention in Chicago, and the party bosses handed him the nomination. The public was outraged. Protesters filled the streets. Police cracked skulls. And American democracy would never be the same.

That chaotic summer forced a reckoning: who should actually choose the candidates that appear on our ballots? Party insiders meeting in smoke-filled rooms? Or ordinary voters casting ballots in their local precincts?

The answer—eventually—was primaries. But how we got there, and how different types of primaries actually work, is a story worth understanding. Especially if you've ever wondered why Iowa and New Hampshire seem to decide who becomes president every four years, or why your neighbor can vote in a different party's primary than you can.

The Basic Idea

A primary election is essentially a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Before the general election in November, parties need to decide which candidate will carry their banner. A primary lets voters—rather than party officials—make that choice.

Think of it like a tournament bracket. The primary is the semifinal round where each team (party) picks their champion. The general election is the final match between champions.

This seems obvious now, but it's actually quite unusual globally. The United States is one of only a handful of countries where regular citizens get to vote on who the candidates will be. In most democracies, party leaders or party members make that call behind closed doors. Americans didn't always do it this way either—the primary system is barely a century old, and it didn't become dominant for presidential races until 1972.

Open Versus Closed: The Great Divide

Here's where things get interesting—and contentious.

In a closed primary, only registered members of a party can vote in that party's primary. If you're a registered Democrat, you vote in the Democratic primary. Registered Republican? You vote in the Republican primary. Registered as an independent or unaffiliated? Sorry—you don't get to participate in either.

Thirteen states and the District of Columbia use this system. The logic is straightforward: parties are private organizations, and their members should choose their own candidates without interference from outsiders.

But many people find this frustrating. What if you're genuinely undecided between parties? What if you lean one direction but want to weigh in on a particularly important race in the other party? What if you simply refuse to register with any party on principle?

Enter the open primary. In fourteen states—including Texas, Michigan, and Virginia—any registered voter can participate in any party's primary, regardless of their own affiliation. You walk into the polling place, pick which ballot you want, and vote.

This sounds more democratic. And it is, in a sense. But it creates its own problems.

The Art of Raiding

Imagine you're a committed Democrat in an open primary state. Your party's nominee is basically decided—there's an incumbent running for reelection with no serious challengers. Meanwhile, the Republican primary is a heated contest between a formidable moderate and a fringe candidate who would be easy to beat in November.

Do you vote in your own boring primary? Or do you cross over and vote for the weaker Republican, hoping to saddle the opposing party with an unelectable nominee?

This is called "party raiding," and it's not just theoretical. In Vermont's 1998 Senate race, a retired dairy farmer named Fred Tuttle became the Republican nominee. Tuttle was 79 years old, had never held office, and had recently starred in a low-budget mockumentary about a fictional political campaign. He won the primary partly because Democrats crossed over to vote for him as a joke—or perhaps as a strategy to ensure their candidate would face the weakest possible opponent.

Tuttle lost the general election badly, as everyone expected. He even admitted he'd voted for his opponent.

The Messy Middle Ground

Between fully open and fully closed primaries lies a spectrum of hybrid systems.

Semi-closed primaries let registered party members vote only in their own party's contest, but they allow unaffiliated voters to choose a party on election day. Sixteen states use some version of this approach, including swing states like Arizona, Colorado, and Ohio. If you haven't committed to a party, you can show up at the polls and pick one—but only one—primary to participate in.

Massachusetts adds another wrinkle: unaffiliated voters can participate in either major party's primary, but they have to make any registration changes at least twenty days beforehand. The state wants to prevent last-minute strategic maneuvering while still giving independents a voice.

These compromises try to balance competing values: letting parties control their own nominations while not completely shutting out the large and growing number of Americans who refuse to affiliate with either major party.

The Jungle Primary: Louisiana's Wild Experiment

Louisiana decided to throw out the rulebook entirely.

Since the 1980s, Louisiana has used what's affectionately known as the "jungle primary"—or more formally, a nonpartisan blanket primary. All candidates from all parties appear on the same ballot. All voters can vote for any candidate. If someone gets more than fifty percent, they win outright. If no one does, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff, regardless of party.

This means you can end up with two Democrats or two Republicans facing each other in the general election. It happens fairly often in heavily partisan districts.

California adopted a similar system in 2012, as did Washington State in 2008. Proponents argue it produces more moderate candidates and better represents the actual preferences of the electorate. Critics counter that it can shut out third parties entirely and sometimes produces bizarre matchups that leave large portions of voters without a candidate who represents their views.

The Historical Accident of New Hampshire and Iowa

Every four years, a strange ritual unfolds. Candidates for president spend months trudging through the snows of Iowa and New Hampshire, attending countless town halls and diner visits in states that together represent less than two percent of the American population.

Why do these two small, predominantly white, rural states get such outsized influence over who becomes the leader of the free world?

The honest answer is: historical accident, fiercely defended by tradition.

Iowa holds caucuses—a different beast from primaries, involving neighbors gathering in school gymnasiums and physically grouping themselves by candidate preference. New Hampshire holds the first actual primary election. Both states have jealously guarded their first-in-the-nation status for decades, even passing laws requiring their contests to be held before any other state's.

The argument for this system is that it forces candidates to engage in retail politics—meeting voters face-to-face, answering questions in intimate settings, proving they can connect with ordinary Americans rather than just run expensive television campaigns.

The argument against is that it gives wildly disproportionate influence to two unrepresentative states. A candidate who does well in Iowa and New Hampshire gains "momentum"—a self-fulfilling prophecy where early success breeds media attention, which breeds donations, which breeds later success. By the time most states vote, the race is often already decided.

Candidates who might appeal to more diverse electorates—states with larger Black, Hispanic, or urban populations—often drop out before those states even have a chance to weigh in. South Carolina, which holds the first primary in the South and has a much more diverse Democratic electorate, has become increasingly important precisely because it offers a counterweight to the Iowa-New Hampshire dominance.

The Progressive Origins

Primary elections emerged from the Progressive movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s—the same reform impulse that gave us direct election of senators, women's suffrage, and antitrust laws.

The Progressives had a simple diagnosis: American democracy had been captured by political machines and party bosses. In cities like New York and Chicago, Tammany Hall and its equivalents controlled who got nominated, who got jobs, and who got contracts. Ordinary citizens had little say.

The cure was to take power away from the bosses and give it to the people. If voters could directly choose nominees through primary elections, the thinking went, corrupt insiders would lose their stranglehold on the political system.

Robert La Follette, the progressive governor of Wisconsin, championed the primary system, and his state approved it by referendum in 1904. Other states followed, particularly in the South—though for disturbing reasons.

In the post-Reconstruction South, the Democratic Party was so dominant that winning the Democratic primary was tantamount to winning the general election. Republicans barely existed as a competitive force. This gave Southern Democrats an incentive to hold primaries—but also an incentive to keep them white-only.

Because primaries were run by the parties rather than the government, they weren't considered official elections subject to constitutional protections. The Democratic Party simply declared that only white voters could participate in its primaries. African Americans were effectively disenfranchised not by being prevented from voting in general elections (though that happened too, through poll taxes and literacy tests) but by being excluded from the only election that actually mattered.

These "white primaries" persisted until 1944, when the Supreme Court finally struck them down in Smith versus Allwright. The court ruled that when a primary is an integral part of the election process, it's a state action subject to the Fifteenth Amendment's prohibition on racial discrimination in voting.

1968: The Year Everything Changed

For most of American history, primaries were more advisory than decisive. Candidates would enter some primaries to demonstrate popular appeal, but the real decision happened at the national convention, where party delegates—many of them chosen by state party organizations rather than by voters—would bargain and maneuver to select a nominee.

The 1968 Democratic convention shattered that system.

President Lyndon Johnson, battered by the Vietnam War and facing an insurgent challenge from antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy, withdrew from the race in March. Robert Kennedy entered, offering hope to a generation, then was assassinated in June. And Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, secured the nomination in August without having competed in a single primary.

The convention in Chicago was a disaster. Inside, party bosses controlled the proceedings. Outside, police beat antiwar protesters while television cameras broadcast the violence into American living rooms. The chant from the streets—"The whole world is watching"—became a defining image of a party in crisis.

In the aftermath, Democrats created the McGovern-Fraser Commission to reform the nomination process. The commission's recommendations fundamentally transformed American politics: states would be required to hold primaries or caucuses open to all party members, with delegates allocated based on the results. The smoke-filled room was out. Popular participation was in.

Republicans soon adopted similar reforms. By 1972, primaries had become the dominant method for selecting presidential nominees—a status they retain today.

Do Primaries Actually Work?

The promise of primary elections was that they would democratize candidate selection, wresting power from party elites and giving it to ordinary voters. The reality is more complicated.

Research suggests that formal party organizations still retain significant influence over nomination outcomes. Endorsements from party leaders, access to donor networks, and the institutional machinery of campaigning all matter enormously. Outsider candidates can win—Donald Trump's 2016 nomination proved that—but they have to overcome substantial structural advantages held by establishment-backed candidates.

Primary turnout is also typically much lower than general election turnout. The people who vote in primaries tend to be more partisan, more ideologically extreme, and less representative of the general electorate. This can push nominees toward the poles rather than the center, potentially contributing to political polarization—though studies examining top-two primaries (designed to encourage moderation) have found little evidence that they actually reduce polarization.

What top-two primaries do seem to produce is more voter confusion and lower electoral participation. When the final ballot features two candidates from the same party, or when party labels become less meaningful signals, some voters simply disengage.

The Ongoing Experiment

American democracy has always been a work in progress, and primary elections are no exception. States continue to tinker with their systems—opening them, closing them, experimenting with new formats.

In 2024, the Texas Republican Party voted to change from an open primary to a closed one, requiring voters to register with the party before participating. The change reflected concerns about crossover voting and a desire to ensure that Republican nominees are chosen by actual Republicans.

Oregon conducted the nation's first binding primary election entirely over the internet in 2010—a harbinger of potential future changes to how we vote.

St. Louis, Missouri has experimented with "unified primaries" using approval voting, where voters can support multiple candidates rather than just one. The top two then advance to the general election. Proponents argue this reduces the "spoiler effect" and produces winners with broader appeal.

These experiments reflect an enduring tension at the heart of democratic theory. How do we balance the legitimate interests of political parties—private organizations with their own values and goals—against the broader public interest in competitive elections and responsive government? How do we encourage participation while preventing manipulation? How do we give early states a chance to vet candidates without letting them dictate the outcome for everyone else?

There are no perfect answers. But the questions keep us searching, reforming, and trying to build a system that lives up to its democratic ideals.

Why It Matters for Regular Voters

Understanding primaries isn't just academic. It has practical implications for anyone who wants their voice heard in American politics.

If you live in a closed primary state and want to vote in primaries, you'll need to register with a party—often well in advance of the election. In some states, changing your registration close to an election is difficult or impossible.

If you live in an open or semi-closed primary state, you have more flexibility—but you'll need to decide strategically which party's primary matters more to you in any given year.

If you live in a top-two primary state, party labels matter less. You might find yourself choosing between two Democrats or two Republicans in November, so paying attention to the primary becomes especially important.

And if you care about who becomes president, understanding the primary calendar—and the outsized role of early states—helps explain why the nomination often seems decided before your state even votes, and what reformers are trying to do about it.

The messy, complicated, often frustrating system of primary elections is how Americans actually choose their leaders. It's worth understanding—flaws and all.