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2. Crossover Voting

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5. The Causes and Consequences of Crossover Voting in the 1998 California Elections

John Sides, Jonathan, Cohen, and Jack Citrin

INTRODUCTION

Both advocates and opponents of the blanket primary believed that the change in rules could affect voting behavior, candidate attributes, campaign strategies, and ultimately election outcomes. In this chapter, we explore voting behavior, in particular the much-discussed, much-anticipated, and, in some quarters, much-maligned phenomenon of crossover voting—the act of voting for a candidate outside one's own party. Drawing upon a series of pre-and post-primary surveys conducted by the Field Institute as well as the Los Angeles Times primary election exit poll, we examine California's 1998 gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races.^[1] Of course, with only one blanket primary having taken place in California, its full impact is impossible to determine. However, our analysis of the 1998 elections suggests that the blanket primary leads to neither the millennium envisaged by its advocates nor the apocalypse predicted by its detractors.

We first discuss crossover voting in relation to two manifestations of partisanship: party registration and party identification. Our analysis then addresses the following empirical questions: How much crossover voting occurred in the primary election? For whom did crossover voters vote? Did crossover voting affect the election outcome? Finally, what motivates crossover voting?

CONCEPTUALIZING CROSSOVER VOTING

Crossover voting is, on its face, a simple notion: voting for a candidate outside of one's political party. However, this basic definition masks several more complicated issues (see Wekkin 1988). First, how should the political

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party to which a person belongs be defined? One possibility is party registration. Under this definition, voters cross over when they vote for a candidate from a party other than the one in which they are registered. The blanket primary, in doing away with the party primary, makes party registration electorally superfluous. There is effectively only one primary, and any registered voter can participate fully.^[2] The virtue of defining crossover voting based on party registration is that one can estimate what would likely have happened had the California primary still been closed. That is, one can "separate" the winning candidate's vote share received from minor-party, nonpartisan, and crossover voters, and then, given certain assumptions, gauge the chances of his or her winning this simulated primary. Defining crossover voting in terms of party registration therefore provides useful counterfactual comparisons across electoral regimes.

Another alternative is to define crossover voting based on party identification. Whereas party registration is a legal formality, party identification is a psychological construct, an enduring tie between a citizen and a particular political party. Party identification does not entirely determine one's vote, and therefore affiliating with a party is conceptually distinct from voting for that party's candidate (Miller and Shanks 1996). Nevertheless, if party identification constitutes, in V. O. Key's phrase, a "standing decision," then voting against one's normal affiliation in the absence of any strategic consideration implies a weakening of loyalty, either temporary or permanent. Because voters vary in the intensity of their party identification, defining crossover voting with this as the reference point allows for a deeper analysis of its underlying psychology, since one can compare strong and weak partisans.

Another definitional issue concerns the self-styled political independent. In the case of party registration, "independents" include both members of minor parties and those who do not register with any party ("nonpartisans").^[3] In the case of party identification, "independents" profess no attachment to any party. Strictly speaking, any independent (however defined) who votes for a Democrat or Republican engages in crossover voting (Adamany 1976). Under California's closed primary system, major-party primaries were restricted to voters registered in those parties, and minorparty members, nonpartisans, and members of the opposing major party could not participate. A blanket primary system effectively enfranchises these groups and thus creates a population of nonparty members who can vote for a major party's candidates.^[4] However, because Democratic and Republican party officials worry mostly about potential mischief by the major opposition party, not about the votes of minor-party members and nonpartisans, we focus primarily on crossover voting among Democrats and Republicans.

In California, party registration and party identification are closely interrelated.

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When the respondents from the four Field polls conducted before the primary are pooled (N ? 4,060), 91 percent of both registered Republicans and registered Democrats had a consonant party identification.^[5] A similarly strong relationship emerges when we construct measures of crossover voting.^[6] These variables are simply dichotomous, coded 1 if a respondent crossed over (i.e., a registered Republican or a Republican party identifier voted for a Democratic candidate, and vice versa) and 0 if not. In the case of crossover voting for Governor, the correlation between these two measures was .75. In the U.S. Senate race, the correlation was .71. Crosstabulating the two measures demonstrates that 93 percent of party identifiers who intended to cross over in their vote for Governor also intended to cross over vis-à-vis their party registration (the comparable figure for the Senate race was 91 percent).

THE MAGNITUDE OF CROSSOVER VOTING

We calculated overall estimates of crossover voting in the 1998 primary election for both the Governor's and Senate races, again analyzing the pooled Field poll dataset. In light of the measurement issues raised in the previous section, we calculated these measures using both party registration and identification, and then both including and excluding independents.^[7] In the gubernatorial race, 15.5 percent of respondents who identified with a major party planned to cross over by the identification measure, compared to 16.6 percent by the registration measure. The magnitude of crossover voting was similar in the Senate race: 13.7 percent as defined by identification and 14.8 percent as defined by registration. When independents were counted as crossover voters, the magnitude of crossover voting naturally increased (to the 20 to 30 percent range).^[8]

However measured, the extent of crossover voting is quite substantial: in both the gubernatorial and senatorial races, about one in six voters said they would choose a candidate outside their own party. Whether crossover voting changed electoral outcomes obviously depended on the circumstances of individual races. Nevertheless, the observed level of crossover voting can be put in some perspective by comparing it with the level of crossover voting in past general elections. Blanket primaries and general elections possess similar structural constraints (or lack thereof) in that all registered voters can select any candidate for any office. It is therefore reasonable to expect primary elections to resemble general elections in some respects. This claim is born out in the aggregate level of crossover voting. The number of partisan crossover voters in the 1998 primary was quite similar to the traditional level of defection in general elections (DiCamillo 1998). In the twelve presidential, gubernatorial, and senatorial races from 1984 to 1996, 20.8 percent of registered Democrats voted for

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Republican candidates and 14.3 percent of registered Republicans voted for Democratic candidates.^[9]

The comparability of crossover voting in the blanket primary and past general elections suggests something about the motivation for crossover voting. In general elections, raiding or hedging are not relevant strategies because the election determines who governs and thus most voters sincerely select the candidate they prefer to hold office.^[10] Because a segment of each party's registered voters regularly prefers candidates from the other party, the blanket primary, instead of creating partisan mischief, may simply allow these voters to express their true preferences earlier in the election season.^[11]

CROSSOVER VOTING IN THE PRIMARY CAMPAIGN

How did crossover voters cast their ballots in the 1998 California primary? Tables 5.1 and 5.2 present the distribution of votes for Governor and U.S. Senator, broken down by a three-point party identification scale.^[12] To portray the dynamics of voter preferences as the campaign unfolded, we present a separate distribution for each of the four pre-primary Field polls, beginning in February and ending in May.

The Gubernatorial Nomination Campaign

One dynamic of the campaign, as in most campaigns, was the winnowing of potential candidates. The earlier Field polls presented respondents with a broader array of candidates than did the later polls, when the candidate pool had narrowed. A second dynamic is the electoral fortunes of the candidates over time, as presented in the "Total within Party" column of table 5.1. Here, the major story was the come-from-behind victory of Lieutenant Governor Gray Davis in the Democratic primary. In the March poll, he lagged significantly behind both airline millionaire Al Checchi and Congresswoman Jane Harman, but by May he garnered more than half (51.3 percent) of the votes for Democratic candidates.

Tables 5.1 and 5.2 also track crossover intentions over time and by party identification. Though the large majority of partisan voters did not cross over, a notable fraction did, even in the earliest Field poll. In February 1998, 19.8 percent of Republicans and 7.6 percent of Democrats preferred a gubernatorial candidate in the other party. In the Governor's race, crossover voting was primarily a Republican phenomenon. This is not unexpected, since one might anticipate more crossover voters where there is electoral "action," that is, in races with several serious candidates. In the gubernatorial election, the Democratic race was contested, while the Republican, State Attorney General Dan Lungren, ran essentially unopposed.

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This arguably created an incentive for Republicans to cross over, since the outcome of the Republican primary was predetermined. Whether this incentive stimulated raiding, hedging, or sincere voting is explored below.

The magnitude of intended crossover voting in the gubernatorial race was quite stable during the four months before the primary, hovering around 20 percent among Republicans and 5 percent among Democrats. This stability suggests that crossover voting was not much affected by campaign events, by the shifting electoral fortunes of various candidates, or by the reduction in undecided voters over time. There seemed to be some fraction of voters in each party who were ready and willing to cross over, even as the likely winner in each race changed.

In comparing the vote choice of crossover voters and noncrossover voters, two findings emerge. First, and most important, similar trends affected vote intention within each group. In the Democratic race, Davis gained support over time among Democrats, independents, and Republicans alike. By May 1998, he won pluralities of all three groups. While both Republican crossovers and independents demonstrated a greater and more durable preference for Checchi than did Democrats, the similarity of the trends across parties suggests that most crossover voting was a genuine response to the perceived qualities of the competing candidates.

The Senatorial Nomination Campaign

As table 5.2 shows, the U.S. Senate race mirrored the Governor's race in that it featured one competitive and one uncompetitive primary. In this case, the Democratic nomination was a foregone conclusion: the incumbent Barbara Boxer was the only serious candidate. All of the action was on the Republican side, where the race became a duel between State Treasurer Matt Fong and car alarm magnate Darrel Issa, which Fong ultimately won.^[13]

Just as in the gubernatorial race, this disparity in competition resulted in asymmetric levels of crossover voting. As expected, there were fewer Republicans than Democrats crossing over. By May the fraction of crossover voters had shrunk to 8.6 percent among Republicans but had grown to 15.8 percent among Democrats. As in the Governor's race, trends in candidate preference appeared in all partisan groups. At first, the vote choice of Republicans, independents, and Democrats was somewhat different, but as the campaign unfolded Fong gradually became the preferred Republican among each group.

In sum, the locus of crossover voting varies with the competitiveness of the contest both between parties and within each party. Crossover voting tends to increase in primaries with asymmetric competition, as voters desert their own party's uncompetitive race to participate in a competitive race in the

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TABLE 5.1 Preference for Governor, by Party Identification

SOURCE: Field Institute, Field Polls (San Francisco: The Field Institute, 1998). NOTE: The total crossover rates differ from those presented earlier in the text because here they are expressed as a percentage of all voters, including those without a preference (undecideds).
	February 1998				March 1998
	Republican (N = 318)	Indepedent (N = 56)	Democrat (N = 355)	Total within Party	Republican (N =496)	Indepedent (N = 117)	Democrat (N = 565)	Total within Party
Republican	57.9	19.6	7.6	100.0	47.4	7.7	4.6	100.0
Lungren	36.5	7.1	1.7	56.8	45.0	6.8	3.4	92.6
Riodran	21.4	12.5	5.9	43.2
Peron					2.4	0.9	1.2	7.4
Democrat	19.8	32.2	65.6	100.0	20.1	28.1	65.0	100.0
Checchi	10.4	12.5	16.3	31.2	10.9	17.9	20.0	37.6
Davis	4.7	7.1	22.5	31.5	3.4	3.4	17.9	24.4
Harman	0.3	1.8	4.5	5.7	5.8	6.8	27.1	38.0
Panetta	3.8	5.4	18.6	25.8	—	—	—
Vasconcellos	0.6	5.4	3.7	5.7	—	—	—
Other	—	—	—		3.4	6.8	3.5
Undecided	22.3	48.2	26.8		29.0	57.3	26.9
	TOTAL CROSSOVER:9.0%				TOTAL CROSSOVER: 8.9%
― 83 ―
	April 1998				May 1998
	Republican (N = 353)	Indepedent (N = 99)	Democrat (N = 478)	Total within Party	Republican (N = 279)	Indepedent (N = 62)	Democrat (N = 373)	Total within Party
Republican	51.6	6.1	5.0	100.0	65.9	14.5	5.1	100.0
Lungren	51.6	6.1	5.0	100.0	65.9	14.5	5.1	100.0
Riordan
Peroin
Democrat	21.5	48.4	68.7	100.0	22.6	48.4	80.1	100.0
Checchi	11.9	23.2	24.7	40.5	7.5	16.1	15.0	22.2
Davis	6.8	14.1	26.2	36.0	9.7	19.4	43.4	51.3
Harman	2.8	11.1	17.8	23.5	5.4	12.9	21.7	26.5
Panetta	—	—	—		—	—	—
Vasconcellos	—	—	—		—	—	—
Other	3.1	7.1	2.7		3.6	11.3	4.0
Undecided	23.8	38.4	23.6		7.9	25.8	10.7
	TOTAL CROSOVER: 10.8%				TOTAL CROSSOVER: 11.5%

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TABLE 5.2 Preference for Governor Senator, by Party Identification

SOURCE: Field Institute, Field Polls (San Francisco: The Field Institute, 1998). NOTE: The total crossover rates differ from those presented earlier in the text because here they are expressed as a percentage of all voters, including those without a preference (undecideds).
	February 1998				March 1998
	Republican (N = 318)	Indepedent (N = 56)	Democrat (N = 355)	Total within Party	Republican (N = 496)	Indepedent (N = 117)	Democrat (N = 565)	Total within Party
Democrat	9.4	35.7	67.6	100.0	47.4	7.7	4.6	100.0
Boxer	9.4	35.7	67.6	100.0	47.4	7.7	4.6	100.0
Republican	73.8	32.1	17.4	100.0	51.7	14.5	8.8	100.0
Fong	11.6	7.1	3.7	17.1	19.2	3.4	4.2	38.1
Issa	13.8	7.1	2.8	18.4	25.8	9.4	3.4	48.9
Riggs	2.5	0.0	0.8	3.5	6.7	1.7	1.2	13.0
Wilson	45.9	17.9	10.1	61.0	—	—	—
Other	—	—	—		5.4	7.7	3.4	13.0
Undecided	16.7	32.1	14.9		32.7	47.0	115.6
	TOTAL CORSSOVER: 9.2%				TOTAL CROSSOVER: 7.2%
― 85 ―
	April 1998				May 1998
	Republican (N = 353)	Indepedent (N = 99)	Democrat (N = 478)	Total within Party	Republican (N = 279)	Indepedent (N = 62)	Democrat (N = 373)	Total within Party
Democrat	11.6	30.3	69.7	100.0	8.6	38.7	73.7	100.0
Boxer	11.6	30.3	69.7	100.0	8.6	38.7	73.7	100.0
Republican	53.9	23.2	10.9	100.0	73.8	33.9	15.8	100.0
Fong	24.4	12.1	6.1	47.7	38.0	21.0	9.4	53.8
Issa	29.5	11.1	4.8	52.3	35.8	12.9	6.4	46.2
Riggs	—	—	—		—	—	—
Wilson	—	—	—		—	—	—
Other	4.2	6.1	5.0		2.9	8.1	2.9
Undecided	30.3	40.4	14.4		14.7	19.4	7.5
	TOTAL CROSSOVER: 10.0%				TOTAL CROSSOVER: 11.6%

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opposite party. Furthermore, within a given party's primary, the candidate preferences of crossover voters ebb and flow with candidate fortunes much as do party members' preferences. Since the trends in the preferences of loyal, presumably sincere partisans and crossover voters were very similar, it seems unlikely that many crossover voters were raiding the other party's primary in 1998.

THE IMPACT OF CROSSOVER VOTING ON THE PRIMARY ELECTION'S OUTCOME

Several studies of crossover voting (e.g., Hedlund, Watts, and Hedge 1982; Hedlund and Watts 1986) conclude that crossover voting rarely changes the outcome of a primary election. Others (Adamany 1976; Wekkin 1988) argue that since crossover voters' preferences usually differ significantly from those of same-party voters, they may have an indirect impact on electoral outcomes by influencing factors such as a candidate's momentum and fund-raising capacity. The present analysis examines the election tally itself. It draws upon the Los Angeles Times primary election exit poll to address the counterfactual question of whether Gray Davis and Matt Fong would have won under a closed primary, where crossover voting is by definition impossible.

The Governor's Race

The top panel of table 5.3 shows that Davis won among exit poll respondents with 57.4 percent of the votes for Democratic candidates, a result quite close to the final tabulation (57.6 percent). If the old closed primary rules had been in effect, all Democratic candidates would have lost the votes of registered Republicans, decline-to-states, and members of minor parties. It appears that Davis would have won even with this restriction, other things equal. First, looking only at Democratic voters, Davis beat out his opponents with 59.3 percent of the vote. Second, even if all of the registered Democrats who crossed over and voted for Lungren had voted for either Checchi or Harman, Davis still would have won. Among Democrats in the exit poll, Davis's margin of victory over Checchi, his nearest challenger, was 994 respondents. There were only 224 Democratic crossovers in this sample, so even if every one of them had voted for Checchi rather than Lungren, Davis would have won handily.

Another indication that the new rules did not affect the outcome is the pattern of preferences among voters who were not registered Democrats. Davis won a majority or near-majority of the votes of Republican crossovers, decline-to-states, and minor-party members, so it seems quite certain that these voters did not help elect a different candidate than the one Democrats themselves preferred.

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TABLE 5.3 Primary Vote Choice, by Party Registration

SOURCE: Los Angeles Times Primary Election Exit Poll, June 1998 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times Poll).
Vote for Democratic Gubernatorial Candidates
	Vote Choice
Party Registration	Checchi	Davis	Harman	Other Democrat	Total
Democrat	18.5%	59.3%	20.8%	1.4%	100%
Decline-to-state	18.0	59.3	21.7	1.0	100
Republican	29.5	49.7	19.1	1.7	100
Other party	29.7	51.7	16.0	2.5	100
TOTAL	20.8	57.4	20.4	1.4	100
Vote for Republican Senate Candidates
		Vote Choice
Party Registration		Fong	Issa	Other Republican	Total
Democrat		56.0%	31.5%	12.5%	100%
Decline-to-state		59.8	35.0	5.2	100
Republican		45.0	42.0	13.0	100
Other party		39.8	44.1	16.1	100
TOTAL		47.3	40.0	12.7	100

The U.S. Senate Race

According to the Los Angeles Times poll, Fong beat Issa in the Republican primary 47 percent to 40 percent, a result that overestimated Fong's actual margin of victory by about 2 percent. The lower panel of table 5.3 shows that Fong probably would have won under California's previous closed primary regime as well. First, Fong won among Republicans (i.e., the electorate in the hypothetical closed primary). At the same time, Fong's margin of victory among Republican voters (45 percent vs. 42 percent for Issa) was markedly smaller than it was among Democrats or decline-to-states. In this case, Republican crossovers, had they been limited to voting in the Republican race as a closed primary dictates, theoretically could have changed the outcome. In the exit poll sample, Fong beat Issa by only 156 votes among Republican voters; Republican crossovers numbered 219.

However, the interplay of two factors reduces the likelihood that these Republican crossovers would have changed the outcome: these voters were quite liberal (38 percent classified themselves as such), and Fong appeared more attractive than Issa to liberals. Among Fong voters, 17 percent classified

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themselves as liberals, 12 percent as conservatives, and the vast majority as moderates. The comparable percentages among Issa voters were 12 percent liberal and 40 percent conservative, with many fewer moderates. Thus, it appears that Republicans who voted for Boxer would have been more likely to vote for Fong than Issa in a closed primary (assuming constant turnout). Similarly, the 378 Democrats who voted for a Republican candidate could have changed the outcome of the Republican primary if they had favored Issa over Fong by a significant amount. However, Democrats, like Republicans, favored Fong and did so by even larger margins than Republicans did.^[14]

In sum, while crossover voting was substantial, it does not appear to have altered the outcome of either the gubernatorial or the senatorial race in California in 1998. The distribution of candidate preferences among crossover voters in each primary was similar to the distribution among all voters. Moreover, because both Davis and Fong garnered the support of their respective party faithful, they probably would have won in a closed primary as well.

THE MOTIVATION BEHIND CROSSOVER VOTING

We now analyze the motivational basis of crossover voting, using the tripartite typology introduced in chapter 1. One motivation is sincerity, which means that voters select the candidate they like best. A second motivation is hedging. In this case, voters actually prefer a candidate in their own party, but cross over to select their favorite candidate in the other party, thereby hedging their bets in the general election. If their preferred candidate in each party wins the nomination, then no matter who wins the general election, hedgers will find the outcome acceptable. A third motivation is raiding. Raiders vote for the putatively weakest candidate in the opposing party in hopes of helping their own party's candidate win the general election. The incentive for organized raiding—by which outsiders could determine the nominee—is what political party organizations fear most about the blanket primary.

Previous studies have found little evidence of hedging and raiding in American primary elections (Hedlund, Watts, and Hedge 1982; Hedlund and Watts 1986; Abramowitz, McGlennon, and Rapoport 1981; Southwell 1991; Wekkin 1991). One hypothesized reason is that most voters lack the political sophistication to vote strategically, particularly in a state like California, where the length and complexity of the ballot challenges the interest and capacity of most citizens. Knowing how to hedge or raid is thus not always obvious, and organized efforts to mobilize voters to act in these ways are likely to be difficult and costly. If so, then crossover voting should be mostly sincere.

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A Los Angeles Times Poll conducted in October 1997 provides initial support for this conclusion. Among the respondents, 90 percent of registered Democrats and 82 percent of registered Republicans said the most likely reason that they might vote for a candidate of another party was simply that they favored that person. Only 7 percent of Democrats and 5 percent of Republicans said they would be likely to raid. Eighty-seven percent of the decline-to-state respondents also said they would choose their most preferred candidate.

Theoretical Expectations

The analysis undertaken here assumes that most crossover voting is sincere or possibly hedging. Essentially, we propose that crossover voting will be more likely among respondents with attitudinal or demographic attributes that deviate from the core constituencies of their party—for example, a conservative Democrat or a female Republican. However, it is important to point out that crossover voting under these circumstances could reflect either sincere voting or hedging. A conservative Democrat could cross over because he or she genuinely prefers the views of the Republican candidate. Likewise, because this conservative Democrat sits somewhere "in between" the two parties, he or she could also hedge to ensure that if the Democrat lost the general election, the Republican victor would be entirely palatable. Given these preliminaries, we can then ask, What are the likely characteristics of crossover voters?

One obvious hypothesis is that the strength of party identification should influence the likelihood of crossover voting. Strong partisans should be less likely to cross over than weak partisans. Similarly, crossover voting should be more likely among those whose ideology is out-of-step with the dominant outlook of their party. Thus, conservative Democrats should cross over to the Republican party at a higher rate than do liberal Democrats. In the same vein, crossover voting might also have some specific issue content. For example, pro-choice Republicans might have an incentive to vote for a Democratic candidate if the Republican candidates are explicitly pro-life (as Dan Lungren was in the gubernatorial primary).^[15]

It is quite likely that ideology, partisanship, and policy preferences do not exhaust the reasons for crossover voting. Because demographic variables may function as proxies for political values and interests, they may affect crossover voting as well. In the 1998 California elections, gender may have played a role, as numerous pundits speculated about the attractiveness of Democrats like Jane Harman and Barbara Boxer to female Republicans. The presence of female candidates thus may cue gender considerations otherwise absent in an all-male race.^[16] However, the effects of gender might vary across party, "pushing" Republican women to cross over more than

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men without exerting a comparable "pull" on Democratic women to keep them in the party. Gender issues might also push Democratic men to defect.

Race and ethnicity could also have impacts on crossover voting. Blacks and, to a lesser extent, Latinos are predominantly Democratic constituencies. Black or Latino Democrats should be less likely to cross over than their white counterparts, especially because the California Republican party is often identified with conservative stances on affirmative action and immigration that tend to alienate racial minorities. The ethnic background of candidates themselves might make voters' ethnic ties even more salient. However, in June 1998, only one nonwhite, Matt Fong, was a major candidate. It is nevertheless possible that Asian voters in particular were attracted to Fong.

Similarly, given that high income is generally associated with a Republican vote, rich Democrats may be more likely to cross over to the Republican party, and rich Republicans less likely to cross over to the Democratic party. In the current electoral climate, religiosity may also benefit Republican candidates. Union membership could function the same way for Democrats, especially in an election featuring the anti-union Proposition 26.

Two variables, age and education, do not generate clear directional hypotheses. Age could have a consistently negative impact on the propensity to cross over regardless of party, if one assumes that partisan loyalties, whether Democratic or Republican, ossify with age. However, to the extent that age is associated with increasing conservatism, as is the conventional wisdom, it should associate negatively with crossover voting among Republicans, but positively with crossover voting among Democrats. As for the influence of formal education, one hypothesis is that it will have a consistently negative impact on crossover voting, since educated voters could be more dedicated partisans. However, it is probably also true that educated voters more diligently consume political information, and thus are likely to learn about and perhaps support candidates in the opposing party. Furthermore, educated voters' greater cognitive capacities may provide the wherewithal to vote strategically. Education could also have a varying impact on crossover voting among Democrats and Republicans if it is generally associated with a loyalty to one party or another—e.g., if more education leads to a stronger Democratic party identification.

Data and Measures

To test the hypotheses spelled out above, we estimate multivariate models of crossover voting. To ensure an adequate number of cases for analysis, we rely on the pooled Field poll dataset. The choice of dependent variable again depends on whether we define crossover voting as voting against

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one's party identification or party registration. Since an analysis of motivations is in essence an examination of the psychology of voters, crossover voting is measured as defecting from one's party identification. Thus, the dependent variable is coded one if the respondent intends to vote for a candidate in a party other than the one with which he or she identifies, and zero otherwise. Among our predictors, gender; ethnic identification as black, Latino, or Asian; and union membership are dichotomous variables.^[17] Religiosity is measured with two dummy variables, one for Protestants and one for Catholics. Age is the number of years, education a ten-point scale, and income a five-point scale. (Detailed descriptions of variable coding are provided in the appendix to this chapter.)

Ideology is measured by a seven-point self-identification scale, with a score of one representing a strong conservative and seven a strong liberal (thus we refer to the measure as "liberalism"). Strength of partisanship is measured by "folding" the standard seven-point party identification scale at the mid-point to create a four-category measure, where one indicates independents, and four indicates strong partisans.^[18] The only consistently available indicators of issue positions in our dataset are questions about two highly contested ballot propositions on the June ballot, Propositions 226 and 227. Proposition 226 would have mandated that unions obtain the permission of all members before spending their dues for political purposes. Proposition 227 radically limited bilingual education programs in California public schools. Proposition 226 failed by a narrow margin, while Proposition 227 passed easily. Although this interpretation is somewhat crude, we construe a vote for either of these propositions as conservative, and thus more congruent with a vote for a Republican candidate.^[19]

Multivariate Results: The Governor's Race

The multivariate analysis is comprised of a series of logit models, one for each party-contest combination.^[20] Table 5.4 presents the results for the gubernatorial race. The logit model for Republican crossover voting in the first column confirms several of our expectations. For one, the coefficient for liberalism is statistically significant and positive. As Republicans became more liberal, the probability of a crossover vote increased. Furthermore, the coefficient for strength of partisanship is negative and statistically significant, indicating that increased partisanship was associated with a declining probability of crossing over. The coefficient for gender is also significant and positive; other things equal, Republican women were more likely than their male counterparts to cross over in the gubernatorial race. By contrast, income is negatively associated with a crossover vote. The wealthier the Republican voter, the less likely he or she was to vote for a Democrat in the primary. Votes for both Prop 226 and Prop 227 are

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TABLE 5.4 Logit Models of Crossover Voting for Governor

	Republicans		Democrats
	Coefficient	Probability	Coefficient	Probability
SOURCE: Field Institute, Field Polls (San Francisco: The Field Institute, 1998). NOTE: Table entries are logit coefficients, with standard errors in parentheses. The dependent variable is coded 1 for a crossover vote and 0 otherwise. The rate of Republican crossover was 27.8 percent, and the rate of Democratic crossover was 7.1 percent. Change in probability is the change in the probability of crossover voting associated with a shift from the minimum to the maximum value of the independent variable, holding all other variables at their mean values. *p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .0001
Liberalism	0.18*	.27	−0.27**	−.07
	(0.07)		(0.11)
Strength of partisanship	−0.63***	−.30	−0.14
	(0.14)		(0.20)
Prop 226 vote	−0.32		1.03**	.05
	(0.22)		(0.34)
Prop 227 vote	−0.12		0.14
	(0.25)		(0.34)
Gender	0.41*	.10	−0.34
	(0.20)		(0.31)
Protestant	−0.19		−0.44
	(0.23)		(0.38)
Catholic	−0.06		−0.24
	(0.27)		(0.39)
Income	−0.22**	−.18	0.23*	.04
	(0.08)		(0.12)
Age	−0.005		0.008
	(0.006)		(0.01)
Education	−0.04		−0.16*	−.07
	(0.05)		(0.08)
Black	—		−0.59
			(0.56)
Latino	—		−0.79
			(0.54)
Union member	—		0.66*	.03
			(0.31)
Constant	1.98**		−1.55
	(0.73)		(1.11)
−2 x log-likelihood	664.3		339.6
Percentage correctly predicted	74.6		92.9
No crossover	94.9		100.0
Crossover	21.8		0.0
Pseudo-R 2	.11		.11
N	627		743

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insignificant: opinions about these two initiatives were not related to the probability of a crossover vote, net of the other variables in the model. The rest of the variables in the model are also insignificant at the .05 level, though the coefficients for Protestantism and Catholicism are in the expected direction.

Table 5.4 also presents the change in the predicted probability of crossing over associated with a shift from the minimum to the maximum value of the statistically significant variables. The results for Republican crossover voting demonstrate the power of partisanship and ideology. With all other variables held at their means, the probability that a strong liberal Republican crossed over was .27 greater than that of a strong conservative Republican. A comparable probability obtains for strength of partisanship. Income also had a strong effect: the highest income group is predicted to have a probability of crossing over .18 lower than that of the poorest group. Gender has a weaker effect.^[21]

Comparable models of Democratic crossover for Governor, presented in column two of table 5.4, produce generally similar results. While liberalism has the hypothesized effect—the probability of crossing over declines with increasing liberalism—the strength of partisanship variable is insignificant. However, the Prop 226 vote is statistically significant. Support for Prop 226, which is in essence an anti-union vote, is associated with a higher probability of crossover voting among Democrats.

That gender is not significant in this or any model of Democratic crossover demonstrates that the "pull" effect of gender—its ability to keep Democrats within the party—is not as strong as its "push" effect—its ability to drive Republicans toward Democratic candidates. In other words, Democratic men are less likely to defect than Republican women are. Of the remaining demographic variables in this model, income, education, and union membership have significant effects. As income increases, the propensity to cross over among Democrats increases. Education has the opposite effect. As Democratic respondents become more educated, ceteris paribus, their propensity to cross over in the gubernatorial primary decreases. Curiously, the effect of union membership is in the opposite direction than expected: being a union member (or having one in the family) was associated with a greater likelihood to cross over and vote for Lungren. However, the associated change in predicted probability shows that this unanticipated effect was relatively weak.^[22]

Multivariate Results: The U.S. Senate Race

Table 5.5 presents two comparable models of crossover voting for Senator. By and large the results for Republican crossover generally conform to those for the gubernatorial election, despite the differences in the size of

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TABLE 5.5 Logit Models of Crossover Voting for Senator

	Republicans		Democrats
	Coefficient	Change in Probability	Coefficient	Change in Probability
SOURCE: Field Institute, Field Polls (San Francisco: The Field Institute, 1998). NOTE: Table entries are logit coefficients, with standard errors in parentheses. The dependent variable is coded 1 for a crossover vote and 0 otherwise. The rate of Republican crossover was 13.7 percent, and the rate of Democratic crossover was 17.6 percent. Change in probability is the change in the probability of crossover voting associated with a shift from the minimum to the maximum value of the independent variable, holding all other variables at their mean values. *p < .05 **p < .01 ***p < .001
Liberalism	0.45***	0.34	−0.40***	−.30
	(0.10)		(0.08)
Strength of partisanship	−0.40*	−.06	−0.76***	−.16
	(0.18)		(0.14)
Prop 226 vote	−0.74**	−.06	0.40*	.04
	(0.28)		(0.21)
Prop 227 vote	0.13		0.31
	(0.33)		(0.23)
Gender	0.44*	.03	−0.33
	(0.26)		(0.21)
Protestant	−0.14		−0.35
	(0.30)		(0.25)
Catholic	0.08		−0.37
	(0.35)		(0.30)
Income	−0.07		−.04
	(0.11)		(0.09)
Age	−0.002		0.005
	(0.008)		(0.007)
Education	0.02		−0.16**	−.14
	(0.06)		(0.05)
Asian	0.55		—
	(0.52)		—
Black	—		−0.18
			(0.32)
Latino	—		0.07
			(0.32)
Union member	—		0.11
			(0.22)
Constant	−1.50		2.94***
	(0.98)		(0.77)
−2 x log-likelihood	414.2		621.0
Percentage correctly predicted	86.7		82.9
No crossover	99.4		98.0
Crossover	6.1		12.2
Pseudo-R 2	.13		.16
N	600		791

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the Democratic field (there were three Democratic gubernatorial candidates but only one in the Senate race). As hypothesized, greater liberalism is associated with an increased probability of crossover; greater partisanship is associated with a declining probability of crossover. The effect of liberalism was quite strong: the associated change in predicted probability is .34. Voting intention on Prop 226 is also significant and in the expected direction: a pro–Prop 226 stance, meaning a vote against unions, was negatively associated with crossover voting. In general, Republicans are more likely to remain loyal when they are more conservative, more partisan, and antagonistic to unions, a traditional Democratic constituency. Interestingly, gender is again significant: even after controlling for "political" variables, women were more likely than men to cross over and vote for Boxer.^[23]

The results for Democratic crossover voting for Senator, presented in column two of table 5.5, again confirm our theoretical expectations. Liberalism and partisanship have significant negative effects on the probability of a crossover vote. The coefficient for the vote on Prop 226 is again significant and in the hypothesized direction: a vote against unions was associated with a greater likelihood of a Democratic crossover vote to Fong or Issa. The coefficient for education, as in the analysis of Democratic crossover for Governor, is significant and negative. Among Democrats, a higher level of formal education was associated with a declining propensity to cross over and vote for a Republican candidate for Senator. The changes in predicted probability again underscore the power of liberalism and partisanship as predictors of defection.

Crossover voting thus derives from relatively weak party ties, sympathy with the ideological orientation of the other party, and membership in demographic groups generally linked to support for the opposition. This pattern of associations suggests that most crossover voting is sincere voting or hedging. If raiding were prevalent, crossover voting should be concentrated among strong partisans and others with an interest in sabotaging the other party's nomination process. Instead, just the opposite holds true.

Crossing Over Consistently? Synthesizing Electoral and Individual Motivations

Thus far, two sorts of motivations for crossover voting have emerged. First, the aggregate level of crossover voting tends to increase when voters confront an uncompetitive race in their own party but a competitive race in the other party. Thus, the percentage of Republicans crossing over into the Democratic gubernatorial primary was much higher than the percentage of Democrats crossing over to Lungren. Second, the multivariate analysis of individual behavior shows that the strength of partisanship and ideological self-identification consistently influence the decision to cross over. Taken together, these two sets of findings suggest that crossover voting

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depends first on the choice structure. Weak partisanship or ideological distance from the party's core beliefs does not necessarily lead to crossover voting. Likewise, the mere presence of asymmetric competition stimulates crossover voting mainly among those voters who are already predisposed to defect from their party or, at the least, who find it wise to hedge their bets.

Further evidence for the confluence of electoral and individual attributes comes when we analyze the "consistency" of crossover voting—whether respondents crossed over in either the gubernatorial or senate race, or whether they crossed over in both races. We thus cease treating crossover voting in the gubernatorial race and crossover voting in the senatorial race as independent acts.

The incidence of consistent crossover voting—that is, in both the Governor's and U.S. Senate races—is quite small. For example, among Republicans who crossed over in the gubernatorial race, only 30 percent crossed over to vote for Boxer in the Senate race. Among Democrats who crossed over in the Senate race, only 18 percent crossed over to Lungren in the gubernatorial race.^[24] Altogether, only 4.3 percent of Republican identifiers and 1.7 percent of Democratic identifiers were consistent crossover voters, demonstrating the important role of factors such as the competitiveness of each party's contest. Confronted with a competitive Democratic gubernatorial primary, a sizable number of Republican voters crossed over to Davis, Checchi, or Harman; by contrast, confronted with an uncompetitive Democratic senatorial primary, very few of these gubernatorial crossover voters preferred Boxer as well.

However, a simple descriptive analysis of the demographic and political attributes of consistent crossover voters demonstrates something more: as one would expect, these voters are even further out of step with their party than are those who crossed over in just one of the races. Table 5.6 shows that consistent crossover voters in both parties tend to be weak partisans and ideological misfits when compared to voters who either did not cross over or who crossed over in only one race. For example, only 11.6 percent of Republicans who crossed over in both races were strong partisans, as compared to 26.7 percent of Republicans who crossed over in one race and 43.6 percent of those who did not cross over at all. Those who crossed over twice were also less conservative and less supportive of Prop 226. Similarly, the Democrats who crossed over in both races were weaker partisans, less liberal, and more supportive of Prop 226.

This suggests that individual attributes and electoral circumstances combine to encourage crossover voting. Within each party, there exists a subset of voters with a predisposition to defect. In a sense, the party identification of consistent crossover voters in particular was an error in judgment. The blanket primary allowed them to find their true homes. Thus, these voters

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TABLE 5.6 Characteristics of Consistent and Inconsistent Crossover Voters

	Strong Partisan	Prop 226	Supported Conservative
SOURCE: Field Institute, Field Polls, February–May 1998 (San Francisco: The Field Institute, 1998).
Republican crossover
None	43.6%	64.2%	79.3%
One race	26.7	48.1	71.2
Both races	11.6	33.3	56.6
Democratic crossover
None	39.5	12.9	48.3
One race	24.6	20.2	58.3
Both races	20.6	26.5	77.4

were almost surely acting sincerely. However, defection is not a given; instead, it is inspired by the nature of the race itself. In particular, competitive races tend to attract crossover voters, especially when their own party's race is a foregone conclusion.

THE EFFECT OF THE PRIMARY VOTE ON THE GENERAL ELECTION VOTE: DO CROSSOVERS RETURN HOME?

The previous analysis clearly indicates a limited incidence of raiding in the 1998 California blanket primary. However, that finding does not speak to the relative incidence of sincere voting and hedging. One way of disentangling these motivations is to examine how crossover voters in the primary election behaved in the November general election. Sincere voting in the primary means that one chose one's favorite candidate, regardless of his or her party affiliation. Such voters should stick with this choice in the general election rather than return to their partisan home. By contrast, hedging is motivated by risk aversion. Hedgers vote for their second choice in the primary in order to reduce the chances of the worst-case scenario—a general election victory for their least-liked opposition candidate.

Accordingly, crossover voters who persisted in their partisan disloyalty, such as Republicans who voted for Davis in both the primary and general elections, are deemed sincere, while the primary crossover voters who returned to their own party in November may have been hedging in the primary. We say "may have" because the phenomenon of returning home could also indicate sincere voting. Suppose a Republican crossed over to vote for Checchi in the gubernatorial primary but then cast a vote for Lungren in the general election. The primary vote would be hedging, if Checchi

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were his or her most favored Democratic candidate but Lungren the first preference overall, but it would be an act of sincere voting if this Republican actually preferred Checchi above everyone else, and Lungren was simply his or her second choice. With the present data, it is difficult to distinguish hedging from sincere voting among crossover voters who voted for Checchi or Harman rather than Davis and Issa rather than Fong. But we can provide a reasonable, if inexact, estimate of the relative prevalence of these two voting strategies.

The data in this analysis come from the last preelection Field poll in October 1998. This poll not only asked voters their intended vote in the general election, but also their vote in the primary, if they stated that they had in fact voted in the primary. Naturally, such a recall measure is problematic. People tend to overstate their participation and may not accurately remember their primary vote, which occurred five months before. In this sample, more voters reported that they voted for the candidate who won the primary election than reasonably could have done so—evidence of the familiar bandwagon effect. According to this poll, Davis won the "recall" primary with 76 percent of the vote, instead of the 51 percent he actually garnered. Similarly, Matt Fong's vote share increased to 74 percent of the Republican "recall" electorate, whereas he actually won 45 percent.^[25]

While both margins of victory were significantly inflated, there was a much more modest bias in respondents' recollections of crossover voting. Sixteen percent of the gubernatorial voters recalled crossing over against their party registration, as did 14 percent of senatorial voters.^[26] These rates are similar to those from both the pre-primary Field polls and the Los Angeles Times exit poll. For example, according to the exit poll, 17.5 percent of voters crossed over in the gubernatorial race and 15 percent crossed over in the Senate race. The recall questions can thus help identify the motivations behind crossover voting, despite the uncertainty about how the aggregate recall bias toward Davis and Fong affects the individual results.^[27]

If crossover voting was largely sincere, most Republican crossovers in the gubernatorial primary should have supported Davis in the general election, and Democratic crossovers in the Senate race should have supported Fong in the general election. Table 5.7 shows just that. The top panel shows that 63.3 percent of Republican crossovers stuck with Davis in November. The bottom panel presents a comparable result: 64.6 percent of Democratic crossovers stuck with Fong in November. This tendency indicates another similarity between the blanket primary and the general election. In a sense, the blanket primary is a preview, or even a first stage, of the general election campaign.^[28]

General election preferences among crossover voters depended somewhat on their primary vote choice. Table 5.7 shows that, while only 25.4 percent of Republicans who voted for Davis in the primary returned to

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TABLE 5.7 General Election Preferences

SOURCE: Field Institute, Field Poll, October 1998 (San Francisco: The Field Institute, 1998). NOTE: Weighted N s appear in parentheses.
Among Republican Crossovers for Governor
	Percentage of Crossovers Who …
Primary Vote Choice	"Returned Home" in General Election	Also Crossed Over in General Election
Davis	25.4%	74.6%
	(44)	(129)
Checchi	66.7	33.3
	(40)	(20)
Harman	46.7	53.3
	(7)	(8)
TOTAL	36.7	63.3
	(91)	(157)
Among Democratic Crossovers for Senator
	Percentage of Crossovers Who …
Primary Vote Choice	"Returned Home" in General Election	Also Crossed Over in General Election
Fong	22.5%	77.5%
	(27)	(93)
Issa	70.5	29.5
	(31)	(13)
TOTAL	34.5	64.6
	58)	(106)

their party, 46.7 percent of Harman voters and 66.7 percent of Checchi voters did so. A similar pattern emerges in the Senate race: Democratic voters who supported Fong in the primary were much more likely to stick with him in the general (77.5 percent did so) than were Issa voters, most of whom (70.5 percent) returned to the Democratic Party and supported Boxer in the general. Whether this pattern of voting represents hedging or sincere voting cannot be stated with precision.

However, it is possible to generate some minimum and maximum estimates of sincere voting and hedging. In the Governor's race, the hedgers include, at the minimum, everyone who supported Davis in the primary but not in the general.^[29] Let us assume, for the moment, that Checchi and Harman voters who returned home were expressing their sincere preference

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in both the primary and the general; that is, these Republicans preferred a (losing) Democratic candidate in the primary, but Lungren in the general election. If this assumption is true, these voters should not be counted as hedgers. Thus, hedging is limited to those voters who voted for Davis in the primary but Lungren in November (i.e., 17.7 percent [44 of 248] of the Republican crossover voters analyzed in table 5.6). The maximum proportion of sincere crossover voters is thus 82.3 percent. At the maximum, the hedgers include every Republican who returned home in the general election—36.7 percent of the Republican crossover voters (91 of 248).^[30] This leaves a minimum of 63.3 percent sincere crossover voters. In the Senate race, similar computations among Democratic crossover voters generate nearly identical results: the minimum rate of hedging is 16.5 percent, and the maximum is 35.4 percent.

Thus, it appears that crossover voting in both of these races was largely sincere. First, a variety of evidence suggests that raiding was scarce. Crossover voters tended to support the winning candidate in each party's primary, and their preferences followed the overall trend as the primary campaign wore on. Furthermore, multivariate analyses show that crossover voting is most prevalent among voters with a predisposition to support the other party, not among the strong partisans and ideologues who would most likely perpetrate electoral mischief.

Second, the relationship between the primary and general election vote demonstrates that, at the most, hedging occurred among just over a third of crossover voters, meaning the majority of these voters were sincere. This estimate must be treated with some caution, given the vagaries of how respondents remembered their primary vote choices. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to conclude that California's electoral reform did not radically affect voting behavior. It merely allowed voters to express their true preferences earlier in the campaign.

CONCLUSION

A broad array of evidence indicates that crossover voting in the June 1998 blanket primary was largely sincere. Party mischief was minimal; moreover, crossover voting did not affect the outcome of the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races. Therefore, this election was no apocalypse for the parties. Neither was it an Eden for the blanket primary's proponents: 1998 did not produce moderate, centrist candidates in these races. The blanket primary's most important impact may be how it prefigures the general election. Those involved in the 1998 campaign expressed a similar sentiment. Davis's campaign manager, Garry South, has said, "For all practical purposes, the general was over on primary night, barring some cataclysmic

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event or huge mistake on our part" (Lubenow 1999, 147). Doing well overall, not just among the registered voters of one's own party, thus can be critical. If this is so, an additional set of research questions emerges. How do the results of the primary election affect voters' perceptions of the viability of the candidates who emerge? Moreover, at an institutional level, how does the need to fuse partisan and more general appeals even before the primary shape the nature of campaigns and campaigning?

APPENDIX: VARIABLE CODING

Dependent Variable
Crossover Voting	Coded 1 if a respondent intends to vote for (or stated that they voted for) a candidate of the opposing major party, as defined by the respondent's party identification (or registration), and 0 otherwise.
Independent Variables
Strength of Partisanship	Coded 1 (independent) to 4 (strong partisan). This was constructed by "folding" the standard, seven-point party identification scale.
Liberalism	Coded 1 (strong conservative) to 7 (strong liberal).
Prop 226 Vote	Coded 1 (yes) and 0 (no). A yes vote indicates, support for Prop 226, which mandated that unions get the permission of members before spending their dues on political purposes, such as advertisements during campaigns.
Prop 227 Vote	Coded 1 (yes) and 0 (no). A yes vote indicates support for Prop 227, which was designed to restructure, and largely do away with, bilingual education in California public schools.
Gender	Coded 1 (female) and 0 (male).
Protestant, Catholic, Latino, Black, Asian	Coded 1 if respondent identifies as a member of religious/ethnic group, and 0 otherwise.
Age	Coded 1 (18–24), 2 (25–29), 3 (30–39), 4 (40–49), 5 (50–59), 6 (60 and older).
Education	Coded 1 (eighth grade or less), 2 (some high school), 3 (high school graduate), 4 (trade/ vocational school), 5 (1–2 years of college), 6 (3–4 years of college, no degree), 7 (college graduate), 8 (5–6 years of college), 9 (master's degree), 10 (graduate work past master's).
― 102 ―
Income	Coded 1 (under $20,000), 2 ($20–40,000), 3 ($40–60,000), 4 ($60–80,000), and 5 (more than $80,000).
Union Member	Coded 1 if respondent or a member of respondent's family is a union member, and coded 0 otherwise.

NOTES

We thank Liz Gerber and Bruce Cain for their helpful comments. Mark DiCamillo of the Field Institute and Susan Pinkus of the Los Angeles Times graciously made available the data analyzed here.

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REFERENCES

Abramowitz, Alan; John McGlennon; and Ronald Rapoport. 1981. “A Note on Strategic Voting in a Primary Election.” Journal of Politics43: 899–904.

Adamany, David. 1976. “Crossover Voting and the Democratic Party's Reform Rules.” American Political Science Review70: 36–41.

Cain, Bruce E. 1997. “Report on Blanket and Open Primaries.” Expert testimony in California Democratic Party et al. v. Jones 984 F. Supp. 1288 (1997).

Cohen, Jonathan; Thad Kousser; and John Sides. 1999. “Sincere Voting, Hedging, and Raiding: Testing a Formal Model of Crossover Voting in Blanket Primaries.” Paper presented at the 1999 Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA.

DiCamillo, Mark. 1998. “Californians Vote in the State's First Blanket Primary.” Public Affairs Report39, no. 5: 1, 4–5.

Hedlund, Ronald, and Meredith Watts. 1986. “The Wisconsin Open Primary, 1968 to 1984.” American Political Quarterly14: 55–73.

Hedlund, Ronald; Meredith Watts; and David Hedge. 1982. “Voting in an Open Primary.” American Political Quarterly10: 197–218.

Keith, Bruce E., et al. 1992. The Myth of the Independent Voter. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lubenow, Gerald C., ed. 1999. California Votes—The 1998 Governor's Race: An Inside Look at the Candidates and Their Campaigns by the People Who Managed Them.Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies Press.

Miller, Warren E., and J. Merrill Shanks. 1996. The New American Voter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ranney, Austin, and Leon Epstein. 1966. “The Two Electorates: Voters and Non-Voters in a Wisconsin Primary.” Journal of Politics66: 598–616.

Robeck, Bruce. 1984. “The Representativeness of Congressional Primary Voters.” Congress and the Presidency11: 59–67.

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Southwell, Patricia. 1991. “Open versus Closed Primaries: The Effect on Strategic Voting and Candidate Fortunes.” Social Science Quarterly72: 789–96.

Wekkin, Gary. 1988. “The Conceptualization and Measurement of Crossover Voting.” Western Political Quarterly41: 105–14.

Wekkin, Gary. 1991. “Why Crossover Voters Are Not ‘Mischievous Voters': The Segmented Partisanship Hypothesis.” American Politics Quarterly19: 229–47.

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6. Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Sincere and Strategic Crossover Voting in California Assembly Races

R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler

INTRODUCTION

There are at least two important questions about voter behavior in California's blanket primary. The first is, How many voters took the opportunity to cast a ballot for a candidate of a party different than that of the voter's registration or identification? The second question is, Why did these crossover voters decide to defect from their own party's nomination campaign and to support a candidate from another party?

In this chapter, we focus on these two questions at the Assembly district level. We examine Assembly district crossover voting for a number of reasons. First, there are eighty Assembly districts in California, and with the large number of races, we are given a unique laboratory in which to study crossover voting in many diverse geographic, political, and strategic contexts. Second, Assembly districts are the lowest level of statewide representation in California politics; thus, if strategic politicians and their advisors were going to attempt to coordinate crossover voting, it would be easiest to attempt in an Assembly race, given the relatively smaller size of these electorates.

The introduction to this volume defined several types of crossover voting behavior:

1. Sincere crossover voting occurs when a person votes for a candidate of another party because he likes that candidate better than any of the candidates in his own party primary. Thus, a sincere crossover voter has evaluated all of the candidates running for nomination in all parties and has decided to vote for the candidate he most prefers, regardless of that candidate's party affiliation.
2. Hedging is a form of strategic crossover that occurs when crossover

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   ― 108 ―
   voting is motivated by the fact that the voter is faced with a situation in her party where the winner is certain, either due to incumbency or to a very strong candidate in that party. The voter thus crosses over to vote in the other party's primary, since that primary is more com petitive and thus the voter's ballot might have greater influence in that race than in her own party's race.
3. A second type of strategic crossover, which we call impact voting, is another form of hedging. Impact voting occurs in one-party districts when a voter from the minority party casts a ballot in the dominantparty primary because she is certain that the nominee of the dominant party will win the general election and thus wants her vote to have some influence or impact on which dominant-party candidate will win the general election and represent her own interests.
4. Raiding is strategic crossover in which voters support a weak candidate in the opposing party's primary so that their own party's candidate will have a better chance of winning in the general election.

Thus the empirical questions we will answer by examining Assembly races are: (1) How much crossover is there? (2) How much crossover is sincere? (3) How much crossover is strategic? and (4) Of the strategic crossover, how much is raiding? The next section outlines our study, which was designed to answer these questions.

We conducted an exit poll on election day, June 2, 1998, in five different Assembly races statewide. After discussing the Assembly races and our rationale for picking these particular races, we present our analysis of crossover voting in these Assembly races. While we find relatively significant amounts of crossover voting in some races, we conclude that almost none of it is motivated by a malicious intent to raid. Where we are able to classify intent, the amount of strategic voting among those crossing over varied considerably. We chose the five Assembly districts in our study because of their high potential for strategic crossover voting; thus, the overall amount of strategic crossover is probably significantly lower than in these districts.

STUDY DESIGN

To determine the extent of crossover voting in Assembly races and the underlying motivations for this crossover behavior, we conducted an exit poll of approximately 3000 California voters spread throughout five Assembly districts as they left the polls on June 2, 1998. The five different Assembly districts fit into three distinct classifications—each defined by a unique strategic context that allowed us to answer different questions about the extent of and motivations for crossover voting in Assembly races:

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• Type 1 Districts: Competitive Primary in a Dominant Party in an Electorally Safe District. Type 1 districts allow us to examine whether voters in the nondominant party will cross over to vote in the competitive primary of the dominant party. We expect the crossover voting in such districts to be motivated by impact voting. We selected Assembly Districts 9 (Sacramento) and 75 (East San Diego County). Assembly District 9, in the city of Sacramento, was an open seat in the primary election, in a heavily Democratic district, where five Democrats and two Republicans were contesting each party's nomination. On the other hand, Assembly District 75, in East San Diego County, was considered a safe Republican seat, with three strong Republican candidates battling for an open seat. There was one Democrat on the ballot in Assembly District 75.
• Type 2 Districts: Competitive Primary in One Party in an Electorally Competitive District Likely to Be Hotly Contested in the Fall. Type 2 districts allow us to see if voters in the party with the uncompetitive primary engage in strategic crossover. These voters should be most likely to engage in hedging behavior. We selected Assembly Districts 53 (South Bay, LAX) and 61 (Pomona and Montclair). District 53 ranges from LAX to the South Bay in Los Angeles County. This was a competitive district, with an open Assembly seat. Seven Democratic candidates and one Republican participated in the primary. In Assembly District 61, which is mainly in San Bernardino County and partly in far eastern Los Angeles County, there was another open Assembly seat in what was likely to be a closely contested district in the fall. There were two Democratic candidates in the race (with one, Nell Soto, a clear frontrunner) and four well-matched Republican candidates.
• Type 3 District: Majority-Minority District. We were interested in studying a majority-minority district because we wanted to examine whether racial and ethnic minority candidates and voters were in any way adversely affected by the open primary, or would behave differently than whites. We selected Assembly District 49 (East Los Angeles and Monterey Park). This district is heavily Latino (45 percent) and Asian (11 percent), and is considered a strong Democratic seat. Here also there was an open Assembly seat, with five Democratic candidates in the primary and two Republicans.^[1]

In each of the Assembly Districts, we selected at least eight polling places, and the interviews were all conducted by professional interviewers on election day.^[2] Our exit poll instrument was two pages long, copied on the front and back of one sheet of paper; it was self-administered. The first page of the survey instrument contained brief demographic questions, questions about vote choice in the Assembly race and either the gubernatorial or U.S.

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Senate race, and the partisan identification of the voter. Partisan identification was based on what the respondents "usually thought of (themselves) as"; thus, we were measuring partisan identification, not partisan registration. Since the primary purpose of the survey was to measure the intent of voters, this is the more appropriate partisanship measure (see chapter 5 by Sides, Cohen, and Citrin in this volume). The first page also contained a series of questions vital for our analysis of crossover voting motivations. First, voters were asked to rate candidates on a 1–10 scale, where 1 meant they disliked the candidate, and 10 meant they liked the candidate. Then voters were asked to rate the chances that these same candidates, if nominated, would win the general election in November, again on a 1–10 scale, where 1 meant that the particular candidate was "not likely to win," and 10 meant that the candidate was "very likely to win." Voters without an opinion were asked not to mark anything for a particular candidate. The entire sample of voters in each Assembly race was asked to complete these two sets of rating questions for all Assembly candidates; half of the sample was asked to rate the gubernatorial candidates and the other half was asked to rate the U.S. Senate candidates. The back side of the instrument contained questions asking voters to evaluate the open primary, to state how they had voted on three propositions, their opinions on issues, and additional demographic information.^[3] Respondents were able to request questionnaires in English, Spanish, and Chinese, and bilingual interviewers were sent to precincts with large Latino and Asian populations.

Thus, using our exit poll data, we can operationalize a simple measure of crossover voting. Given a voter's stated partisanship and the vote he cast in the Assembly race, we define crossover voters as those who cast a ballot for an Assembly candidate who was running for the opposite party's nomination. Given that we limit our analysis to Democratic and Republican Assembly races, this means that a crossover voter is either a Democrat who voted for a Republican Assembly candidate or a Republican who voted for a Democratic Assembly candidate.

Among the subset of crossover voters, we want to understand their motivations for crossing over. We refer to sincere voters here as sincere crossers. We refer to hedgers and impact voters as strategic crossers; they are not voting for their first choice, but are trying to ensure that they have the best slate of candidates to choose from in the general election. Raiders are neither voting for their first choice nor trying to have the best set of candidates to choose from in the general election. We used our exit poll data to determine the motivations for crossover voting. Using the information from the two rating scales, we could determine whether crossover voters were sincere crossers, strategic crossers, or raiders. Since not all voters were able to rate all candidates, nor were all voters able to estimate the probability

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that each candidate would win the general election, we are not able to classify all voters into the different categories. Thus the sample we work with here is smaller than the sample we report for overall crossover results. This means we are almost certainly overstating the amount of strategic voting, especially the amount of raiding.^[4] To engage in raiding requires that voters know precisely the information we are asking. If a voter is not able to determine the likelihood of different candidates winning the general election, then they are not able to engage in raiding.

In the next section we present the results from our exit poll on crossover voting in these five Assembly districts. In the subsequent section we examine the motivations underlying the crossover voting. We conclude with a summary of our results and a discussion of whether the crossover vote had an impact in any of these Assembly races.

CROSSOVER IN ASSEMBLY RACES

We begin by presenting, in table 6.1, an overview of our crossover voting results. We present the proportions of voters in each Assembly race who reported a crossover vote, with the first row presenting the rate of Democratic crossover into Republican races, the second row presenting the Republican crossover into Democratic races, and the last row giving the overall crossover voting rate in that Assembly district.

Our two Type 1 districts were Districts 9 and 75. District 9 was considered a safe Democratic seat and District 75 was considered a safe Republican seat. What we see in both cases in terms of voter crossover is quite consistent with our expectations. In District 9's safely Democratic seat, there is very little Democratic crossover into the Republican races; rather, most of the crossover voting is by Republicans crossing over to vote in the Democratic race (28 percent of Republicans crossed over in this race). In District 75's safely Republican seat, there was heavy Democratic crossover into the Republican race (41.2 percent), and (as expected) there was very little Republican crossover into the Democratic primary (5.6 percent).

Both of our Type 2 districts (Districts 53 and 61) were thought to be strongly competitive, and we expected to see crossover voting in both directions. But in both of these districts, crossover voting was actually lower than in each of the Type 1 districts. In both Districts 53 and 61 the Democratic crossover was quite low (5.7 percent and 10.7 percent respectively), while it was higher for Republicans (23.5 percent and 15.1 percent respectively).

In Assembly District 49, our Type 3 district, notice that virtually none of the Democrats in this strongly Democratic district crossed over into the Republican race. Republican crossover in this district was very heavy, however,

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TABLE 6.1 Crossover Voting, by Assembly District

	AD9	AD75	AD53	AD61	AD49
	(Type 1)	(Type 1)	(Type 2)	(Type 2)	a (Type 3)
a This district was expected to be a Type 2 district; it turned out to be more like a Type 1 race.
Democratic crossover	5.2%	41.2%	5.7%	10.7%	1.5%
Republican crossover	28.0	5.6	23.5	15.1	85.9
TOTAL CROSSOVER	12.7	25.6	12.6	12.3	17.1

with 85.9 percent of the Republican voters in our sample reporting a crossover vote for one of the five Democratic candidates in this party primary.^[5]

Turning now to a more detailed discussion of each Assembly race, we present the results for each race in table 6.2. This table is organized with the partisanship of the voters in the rows, and the candidate vote shares in the columns (the number identifying with each party [PID] is given in the first column).

Beginning with the first panel in table 6.2, Assembly District 9 in Sacramento offered Republicans two reasons to cross over. First, the Democratic race was expected to be much closer than the Republican race; thus, a vote in the Democratic primary was more likely to influence the outcome of the primary. Second, the district is a safe Democratic district, where the winner of the Democratic primary is likely to actually represent the district. Republicans who wanted to be involved in selecting their representative would have to vote in the Democratic primary. This is exactly what we see: Republicans crossed over at a rate of 28 percent, while only 5.2 percent of Democrats crossed over to vote in the Republican primary. This suggests that much of the Republican crossover may have been sincere crossover, or crossover by impact voters. However, from the aggregate data alone, specific motivations are impossible to infer.

State Assembly District 75 in San Diego County was similar. It was a safe Republican seat, and the action in the primary was on the Republican side, with three candidates running. We observed what we would expect: 41.2 percent of Democrats crossed over into the Republican race; while only 5.6 percent of Republicans crossed into the Democratic race. Again, these Democrats could have been sincere or hedgers.

Assembly District 53 in Los Angeles was expected to be competitive between the two major parties in the general election. But in the primary only the Democratic side was contested. Again, crossover occurred as expected, with 23.5 percent of Republicans crossing over into the competitive Democratic primary, and only 5.7 percent of Democrats crossing over into the

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uncompetitive Republican primary. Here we would infer that the Republicans crossing over were either sincere or hedgers.

In Assembly District 49—East Los Angeles and Monterey Park—there was a tightly contested race between two prominent Latina Democrats and one well-known female Asian candidate. Most Democrats stayed within their party primary, since a mere 1.5 percent reported crossing over to vote for the Republican candidate. Republican crossover here was extremely high: 85.9 percent of Republicans crossed over. Again, since this was a district where the Democratic nominee was sure to win in November, we would expect this crossover to be motivated by sincere voting or impact voting.

Assembly District 61 in Los Angeles and San Bernardino County was expected to offer a similar scenario. The district was expected to be competitive in the general election, the Republican race was highly contested, and the Democratic race was expected to be one-sided. However, the Democratic race turned out to be more competitive than we expected when we chose the district (Soto beat McLeod by 53.2 percent to 46.8 percent). Here crossover was closer: 15.1 percent of Republicans and 10.7 percent of Democrats crossed over.

Thus our expectations of where we would see crossover voting based on the strategic circumstances in a district were confirmed. However, it is not possible to precisely infer individual motivations from aggregate data, since several different motivations could be consistent with the same observed patterns. Thus, while these numbers suggest some strategic behavior, we pursue the question of motivation in the next section using the same individual-level survey responses.

MOTIVATIONS FOR CROSSOVER VOTING

One of the central elements of a blanket primary is that it gives voters more opportunities to engage in strategic behavior. Here we examine voters' intent. While the context of each Assembly race suggests why voters crossed over, the only true way to know their intent is to find out their preference rankings of the candidates and their perceptions as to each candidates' chance to win the general election. This is why our exit poll asked respondents to rate the candidates on a 10-point scale and to say how likely they thought each candidate was to win the general election. Given those two pieces of information from each voter, we can infer whether or not they were behaving sincerely or strategically. Moreover, if they were behaving strategically, we can determine whether they were acting as raiders or as one of the two more benign types of strategic voters: hedgers or impact voters.^[6]

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TABLE 6.2 Voting Results in Five Assembly Districts

NOTE: Proportion of total crossover (30.2%) is the total number of Democratic and Republican crossover voters (111) divided by the number of Democrats and Republicans voting (273; i.e., total votes minus the independents and other party votes).
Voting in Assembly District 9 (Sacramento)
			Republicans		Democrats				Republican and Democratic
		PID	Boreman	Dismukes	Gracechild	Huffman	Pernell	Steinberg	Crossover
Democratic		253	3.6%	1.6%	21.7%	17.0%	21.3%	34.8%	5.2%
Independent		56	5.4	16.1	23.2	7.1	12.5	35.7	—
Republican		125	24.0	48.0	4.8	1.6	5.6	16.0	28.0
Other		20	5.0	5.0	5.0	5.0	15.0	65.0	—
TOTAL		454	9.5	16.3	16.5	11.0	15.6	31.1	12.7
Voting in Assembly District 49 (East Los Angeles, Monterey Park)
		Republicans	Democrats					Others	Republican and Democratic
	PID	Imperial	Bruesch	Chu	Martinez-Baker	Messina	Romero		Crossover
Democratic	343	1.5%	5.0%	21.6%	10.8%	12.8%	44.9%	3.5%	1.5%
Independent	85	27.1	4.7	25.9	5.9	11.8	11.8	12.9	—
Republican	78	10.3	12.8	34.6	6.4	9.0	23.1	3.9	85.9
Other	19	5.3	0.0	15.8	5.3	10.5	21.1	42.1	57.9
TOTAL	525	7.1	5.9	24.0	9.1	12.0	35.4	6.5	17.1
Voting in Assembly District 53 (South Bay, LAX)
			Republicans	Democrats				Others	Republican and Democratic
		PID	Eggars	Nakano	Pinzler	Wirth	Zeidler	Romero	Crossover
Democratic		263	5.7%	32.3%	15.2%	11.4%	21.3%	14.1%	5.7%
Independent		134	55.2	13.4	6.7	3.0	3.7	17.9	—
Republican		166	60.2	18.1	0.0	2.4	3.0	16.3	23.5
Other		20	20.0	5.0	15.9	0.0	5.0	55.0	45.0
TOTAL		583	33.1	23.0	8.9	6.5	11.5	17.0	12.6
― 115 ―
Voting in Assembly District 61 (Pomona, Montclair)
		Republicans				Democrats		Others	Republican and Democratic Crossover
	PID	DeMallie	Skropos	Thalman	Wickman	McLeod	Soto	—	—
Democratic	214	0.9%	6.5%	1.9%	1.4%	37.9%	41.1%	10.3%	10.7%
Independent	87	31.0	27.6	16.1	6.9	5.8	6.9	5.8	—
Republican	112	32.1	22.3	11.6	2.7	7.1	8.0	16.1	15.1
Other	11	18.2	0.0	18.2	18.2	0.0	9.1	36.4	63.6
TOTAL	424	15.8	14.9	7.8	3.3	22.2	24.5	11.6	12.3
Voting in Assembly District 75 (East San Diego County)
				Republicans			Democrats	Others	Republican and Democratic Crossover
			PID	Anderson	Price	Zettel	Debus		Crossover
Democratic			153	4.6%	3.9%	32.7%	45.1%	13.7%	41.2%
Independent			280	31.1	22.5	36.1	1.8	8.6	—
Republican			120	20.9	21.7	35.0	5.6	16.7	5.6
Other			21	19.1	0.0	9.5	0.0	71.4	28.6
TOTAL			574	21.4	16.6	34.0	14.1	13.9	25.6

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Voters were classified as sincere if they crossed over to vote for a candidate they preferred over all other candidates in their own party. Voters were classified as strategic crossers if they preferred a candidate in their own primary to the candidate they crossed over to vote for. Voters were classified as raiders if they preferred a candidate in their own primary to the candidate they crossed over to vote for, and there was a candidate available in the primary they voted in whom they recognized as having a better chance of winning the general election than the candidate they voted for. Because of ties among the ratings of candidates on the 10-point scale, some voters could not be uniquely categorized, and we report them as a separate "sincere or strategic" category.

In table 6.3 we can see that most crossover voting was in fact sincere. In Assembly District 75 at least three-fourths of Democratic crossover and at least one-quarter of Republican crossover (though there was virtually none) was sincere. It is surprising that so much of the Democratic crossover here was sincere, since it was a situation ripe for strategic behavior by Democrats: the Democratic primary was not competitive, and the district was almost certain to be won by the Republican in November. In Assembly District 53 at least 87.2 percent of Republican crossover was sincere, and as much as 66.6 percent of Democratic crossover was sincere. While we would expect the Democratic crossover here to be sincere—these voters were leaving a competitive Democratic primary to vote in an uncompetitive Republican race—we would not have expected the Republican crossover to be sincere. These voters were leaving an uncontested race to vote in a contested race. In Assembly District 61 at least 82.4 percent of Republican crossover was sincere, and as much as 87 percent of Democratic crossover was sincere. This should not necessarily be a surprise, since the general election was expected to be competitive, and it turned out that both primaries had competitive races. Thus voters had little incentive for strategic behavior. In Assembly District 49, at least 70.1 percent of Republican crossover was sincere, and as much as 85 percent may have been sincere. And this is a district where we would expect Republicans to engage in strategic voting because it is a safe Democratic district. Yet few Republicans actually crossed over, and over half of those crossed over to vote for a candidate they preferred to the Republican alternatives. However, again we observe that inferences from context are misleading: voters we might think were behaving strategically were actually behaving sincerely.

Finally, we turn to the question of raiding. Did voters engage in strategic crossing over designed to nominate weak candidates for the opposing party? In three of the four State Assembly races in which we could classify people, the percentage of raiders among any partisan group was never more than 6.7 percent. In one district, Assembly District 49,9.0 percent

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TABLE 6.3 Classification of Sincere and Strategic Intent among Crossover Voters

NOTE: Table entries give the percentage of crossover voters fitting into each category of intent. The numbers in parentheses give the number of voters in the category. The data in this table are based only on the voters who were able to rate all of the candidates and give their estimate of the likelihood of all candidates winning the general election.
Assembly District 49
	Party Identification of Crossover Voters
	Democratic	Republican
Sincere; sincere crossers	20.0	70.1
	(1)	(47)
Sincere or strategic	0.0	14.9
	(0)	(10)
Strategic crossers	80.0	0.0
	(4)	(0)
Raiders	0.0	9.0
	(0)	(6)
Non-classifiable crossover	0.0	6.0
	(0)	(4)
TOTAL SUBSAMPLE	5	67
Assembly District 53
	Party Identification of Crossover Voters
	Democratic	Republican
Sincere; sincere crossers	33.3	87.2
	(5)	(34)
Sincere or strategic	33.3	7.7
	(5)	(3)
Strategic crossers	26.7	0.0
	(4)	(0)
Raiders	6.7	5.1
	(1)	(2)
Non-classifiable crossover	0.0	0.0
	(0)	(0)
TOTAL SUBSAMPLE	15	39
Assembly District 61
	Party Identification of Crossover Voters
	Democratic	Republican
Sincere; sincere crossers	0.0	82.4
	(0)	(14)
Sincere or strategic	87.0	11.8
	(20)	(2)
Strategic crossers	00.0	00.0
	(0)	(0)
Raiders	0.0	5.9
	(0)	(1)
Non-classifiable crossover	13.0	0.0
	(3)	(0)
TOTAL SUBSAMPLE	23	17
Assembly District 75
	Party Identification of Crossover Voters
	Democratic	Republican
Sincere; sincere crossers	76.2	28.6
	(48)	(2)
Sincere or strategic	15.9	57.1
	(10)	(4)
Strategic crossers	3.2	14.3
	(2)	(1)
Raiders	1.6	0.0
	(1)	(0)
Non-classifiable crossover	3.2	0.0
	(2)	(0)
TOTAL SUBSAMPLE	63	7

of Republican voters could be classified as raiders. Thus raiding is clearly a rare event.

Because the questionnaire for Assembly District 9 omitted Darrel Steinberg from the list of candidates for voters to rate, we could not analyze raiding in that district as we did in the other four.^[7] However, we can still draw inferences about the behavior of most voters. First, this is a safe Democratic

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district, so it is hard to imagine any strategic reason for Democrats to vote in the Republican primary. This may explain why only 5.1 percent of them crossed over at all. Second, while 28.0 percent of Republicans crossed over,12.0 percent of Republicans voted for a Democratic candidate other than Steinberg. Of those 12.0 percent,86 percent of them voted for

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a candidate they preferred to either Republican. This suggests that they were sincere voters.

CONCLUSION: DID CROSSOVER VOTING MATTER?

In only one of the five Assembly races we studied—Assembly District 61—was there enough crossover voting to have had an impact on the outcome of either party's primary nomination. In the Republican race, DeMallie won with 19.2 percent of the actual election's total vote; his closest rival was Skropos (15.5 percent of the total vote). In this race,15.1 percent of the Republicans crossed over to vote in the Democratic races. If these Republican crossover voters had to vote for one of the four Republican candidates, our predictive model (presented in table 6.4) states that 15.4 percent would have supported DeMallie and 84.6 percent would have voted for Skropos.^[8] Adding these crossover voters to the DeMallie and Skropos vote columns from our exit poll sample, though, would give DeMallie a 33.9 percent to 32.1 percent victory over Skropos in this race among Republican voters. Given the sample size, this is essentially a statistical dead-heat. Thus Skropos's chances were compromised by the blanket primary.^[9]

The second race in Assembly District 61 in which crossover voting might have mattered was the Democratic campaign between the two frontrunners McLeod and Soto. Here,12.0 percent of the Democrats crossed over to vote in the Republican primary. Our predictive model states that 36.8 percent of these Democratic crossover voters would have supported McLeod in a closed primary and that 63.2 percent would have voted for Soto in a closed primary.^[10] By adding these votes to each candidate's vote total from our exit poll sample, we end up with Soto receiving 46.1 percent of the Democratic vote to McLeod's 41.1 percent (with the remainder going for "other"). Soto still wins this primary election.

Not only do we find little evidence that crossover voting could have changed any of the five Assembly races we studied, we have found generally low levels of crossover voting in the Assembly races. Furthermore, very little of the crossover voting we observe in any of these different races is motivated by strategic reasons. Instead, crossover voting in these races is overwhelmingly sincere—Californians in these Assembly Districts were crossing over to support candidates they sincerely liked more than the candidates who were seeking nomination in their own party.

These results are generally consistent with the conclusions we reached in earlier analyses of crossover voting in Washington State primaries and in presidential primaries (Alvarez and Nagler 1997) and in other analyses of the June 1998 primary in California (Alvarez and Nagler 2000a). In all of these studies, we find that most crossover voting is motivated by sincere considerations, and that very little of such voting is motivated by a desire

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TABLE 6.4 Multinominal Logit Estimates for Assembly District 61 Voting

	Probability of Supporting:
Independent Variables	DeMallie	McLeod	Skropos	Thalman	Wickman	Other Candidates
NOTE: Soto is the baseline or comparison category in this model; thus the coefficients are interpreted as giving the relative impact of each predictive variable on the probability that a voter would choose any of the Assembly candidates relative to the probability that they would choose Soto.
Females	0.41	−0.13	0.02	−0.96	0.00	−0.63
	(0.44)	(0.35)	(0.40)	(0.58)	(0.65)	(0.40)
Age	0.07	0.03	−0.50	−0.16	−0.80	−0.27
	(0.22)	(0.17)	(0.20)	(0.26)	(0.35)	(0.20)
Latinos	−1.20	−1.30	−1.80	−2.10	−0.77	−0.40
	(0.68)	(0.55)	(0.71)	(1.10)	(0.91)	(0.52)
Hispanics	−1.90	−0.34	−1.10	−2.20	−0.62	−0.29
	(0.59)	(0.37)	(0.46)	(0.84)	(0.69)	(0.42)
Prop 226	0.54	0.57	1.10	−0.13	1.20	0.28
	(0.41)	(0.34)	(0.38)	(0.52)	(0.61)	(0.40)
Prop 227	0.46	0.30	0.12	0.84	0.54	−0.24
	(0.45)	(0.34)	(0.40)	(0.62)	(0.65)	(0.40)
Ideology	1.60	−0.21	0.78	1.50	1.20	0.69
	(0.27)	(0.19)	(0.23)	(0.33)	(0.37)	(0.22)
California economy	−0.10	0.27	−0.09	−0.09	0.16	0.33
	(0.25)	(0.19)	(0.23)	(0.32)	(0.37)	(0.21)
Jobs and economy	0.05	0.39	−0.12	0.23	0.07	−0.18
	(0.47)	(0.35)	(0.42)	(0.58)	(0.68)	(0.41)
Crime	−0.79	−0.10	−0.45	−1.90	−0.27	−0.54
	(0.44)	(0.35)	(0.40)	(0.59)	(0.65)	(0.40)
Experience	−0.12	0.29	0.45	0.10	0.79	0.59
	(0.57)	(0.43)	(0.50)	(0.71)	(0.80)	(0.48)
Abortion	−0.69	−0.19	−0.67	0.16	−1.60	−1.10
	(0.76)	(0.60)	(0.75)	(0.83)	(1.40)	(0.88)
Bilingual education	−0.26	−0.39	−0.45	−0.04	0.09	−0.32
	(0.49)	(0.41)	(0.46)	(0.57)	(0.69)	(0.44)
Special interests	1.00	1.00	1.20	1.20	−0.30	0.20
	(0.51)	(0.42)	(0.48)	(0.59)	(0.91)	(0.52)
Health care	−0.76	0.45	−0.26	−0.14	−0.19	−0.31
	(0.48)	(0.35)	(0.42)	(0.58)	(0.70)	(0.42)
Environment	−2.30	−0.33	−1.50	−0.64	0.52	0.40
	(1.10)	(0.48)	(0.74)	(0.83)	(0.84)	(0.53)
Cutting taxes	0.92	−0.002	0.17	0.27	−0.22	−0.41
	(0.44)	(0.36)	(0.41)	(0.55)	(0.70)	(0.44)
New leaders	−0.28	0.28	0.25	−0.61	0.98	0.09
	(0.53)	(0.41)	(0.47)	(0.71)	(0.69)	(0.47)
Constant	−5.50	−0.76	−1.30	−4.60	−4.90	−1.80
	(1.40)	(0.94)	(1.10)	(1.80)	(1.90)	(1.10)

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to raid the other party's primary. The main motivation for crossover voting, in fact, stems from incumbency; when an incumbent is in a primary election, there is usually high crossover for the incumbent candidate.

Outside of crossover voting for incumbents, though, why is there so little crossover voting? More to the point, why is there so little strategic crossover voting? We believe that there is a simple explanation: strategic crossover voting requires a great deal of voter coordination (Cox 1997). That is, to be a strategic crossover voter requires a fair amount of information about both the dynamics within your own party and the other party primaries and about what is likely to happen in the general election. To be successful, strategic crossover needs to be coordinated on certain candidates—and it is difficult for voters on their own to engage in such coordination. Only when political elites, the mass media, or candidate campaigns provide these coordination cues will there be high levels of strategic voting and will this strategic voting sway the election outcome. Thus the important question really should be, Under what circumstances will elites or candidates be willing and able to undertake the costs of voter coordination in blanket primary elections?

NOTES

We wish to thank Tony Quinn for his help with identifying all of the Assembly Districts in our studies.

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REFERENCES

Abramson, P. R.; J. H. Aldrich; P. Paolino; and D. Rohde. 1992. “Sophisticated Voting in the 1988 Presidential Primaries.” American Political Science Review86: 55–69.

Alvarez, R. Michael, and Jonathan Nagler. 1995. “Economics, Issues, and the Perot Candidacy: Voter Choice in the 1992 Presidential Election.” American Journal of Political Science39: 714–44..

Alvarez, R. Michael, and Jonathan Nagler. 1997. “Analysis of Crossover and Strategic Voting.” Expert Witness Report, California Democratic Party v. Jones.

Alvarez, R. Michael, and Jonathan Nagler. 2000a. The Expressive American Voter. Unpublished typescript. Pasadena, CA.

Alvarez, R. Michael, and Jonathan Nagler. 2000b. “A New Approach for Modeling Strategic Voting in Multiparty Systems.” British Journal of Political Science30: 57–75.

Bartels, L. M. 1985. “Expectations and Preferences in Presidential Nominating Campaigns.” American Political Science Review79: 804–15.

Bartels, L. M. 1988. Presidential Primaries and the Dynamics of Public Choice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Cain, B. E. 1978. “Strategic Voting in Britain.” American Journal of Political Science22: 639–55.

Cox, Gary W. 1997. Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Galbraith, J., and N. Rae. 1989. “A Test of the Importance of Tactical Voting: Great Britain, 1987.” British Journal of Political Science19: 126–36.

Niemi, R. G.; G. Whitten; and M. N. Franklin. 1992. “Constituency Characteristics, Individual Characteristics, and Tactical Voting in the 1987 British General Election.” British Journal of Political Science22: 229–54.

Southwell, P. 1991. “Open versus Closed Primaries: The Effect on Strategic Voting and Candidate Fortunes.” Social Science Quarterly72: 789–96.

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7. Peeking Under the Blanket

A Direct Look at Crossover Voting in the 1998 Primary

Anthony M. Salvanto and Martin P. Wattenberg

Before California's blanket primary went into effect in 1998, its proponents argued that the new system would produce more moderate candidates: with all voters now able to vote in any contest, they reasoned, candidates with broader appeals would win. Opponents of the new system saw it as an infringement on a party's right to choose its own nominees. They feared that Democrats' nomination fights could now be unfairly influenced—perhaps even determined—by registered Republicans, and vice-versa. Minor-party contests might be especially vulnerable; with their low vote totals, they could easily be flooded by voters from the major parties. Moreover, many opponents argued that the new rules could advantage incumbents, whose name recognition would draw voters from outside the party in numbers that their challengers could never match.

All of these predictions—whether hopeful or fearful—rested on one key idea: that voters would move back and forth across party lines in significant numbers. In this chapter we take a direct look at voting behavior in the blanket primary and examine whether or not this was the case. We show how much crossover voting actually occurred, and we address why it occurred, including the electoral conditions that encouraged or discouraged it. We also consider the critical issue of whether crossover voting could potentially change electoral outcomes, either because it favors a certain type of candidate or because the vote choices of party members differ from those of crossover voters.

Our data consist of more than one-quarter million actual absentee ballots cast in the 1998 primary election in Los Angeles County. With the actual ballots, we can provide a complete and accurate picture of voters' selections across the entire range of contests. The ballots are anonymous,

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but each does contain the party registration of the voter who cast it, so this allows us to show precisely where and when partisans crossed over.

CROSSOVER VOTING: WHAT WE EXPECT

We consider three possible reasons behind crossover voting. These reasons correspond to the three motivations for crossover voting discussed in the introduction to this volume. First, as an example of sincere crossover voting, voters may cross party lines to support an incumbent when one is on the ballot. This is a form of sincere crossover voting in the sense that the voter prefers the incumbent to the other candidates by virtue of the former's incumbency status. We may attribute this preference to available information: incumbents enjoy a strong advantage in name recognition (Jacobson 1992), particularly in local and district-level contests. This factor might play an especially large role in a blanket primary, as voters who are faced with a long list of candidates might simply gravitate to the most recognizable name. By and large, incumbents also have more money and more avenues through which to communicate with the voters, and (if they are popular) they are likely to have supporters among nonpartisans and members of the other party. For these reasons, we expect to see large numbers of voters crossing party lines to vote for incumbents.

Electoral competition may suffer as a result of such behavior. Opponents of the blanket primary argued that the new system would greatly benefit incumbents. To the extent that voters engage in this sort of crossover voting, incumbents draw votes not only from supporters in their own party but also from any other voters who might approve of their performance, or who simply recognize their names. Meanwhile, candidates challenging incumbents for a nomination could rarely hope to match that influx of votes from outside their party. We expect that incumbents, when challenged, will receive the vast majority of all the crossover votes cast in the race.

A second hypothesized reason behind crossover voting is that voters might be drawn to where the action is: they might cross party lines to vote in competitive nomination fights whenever their own party offers an uncontested or noncompetitive race. This voting would not necessarily be sincere, as their most preferred candidate might still be the one running unopposed in their own party, but the chance to cast a meaningful or even decisive vote in the competitive race could provide enough incentive to make them cross (Downs 1957). In the language of the introductory chapter, these voters are engaging in strategic hedging. Such voting could also be inspired by a heavier flow of campaign information emanating from the close races, which usually produce more advertising and more news stories—thus making more information available. Information leads to participation:

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people cast ballots in contests when they feel they know something about the race, and shy away from races when they feel uninformed (Vanderleeuw and Utter 1993; Bowler, Donovan, and Happ 1992; Darcy and Schneider 1989). Overall, we expect to find many people drawn toward competitive races, especially when their own party does not offer one.

In a more general way, a lopsided flow of information could spur crossover voting among registered partisans who live in districts dominated by the other party. These voters would likely be exposed to a steady stream of political information from the other party—and the blanket primary would now give them a chance to act on it. We expect to see them do so.

Under a blanket primary system, voters also have the chance to use their votes in a malicious way: they could try raiding into another party in an attempt to sabotage outcomes there. This is the third possible motive behind crossover voting that we consider. Registered members of one party can, conceivably, study the other party's candidates and try to pick out the weakest one—that is, the one with the least chance of winning the general election. These partisans could then cross party lines in the primary and vote for that weak candidate in an attempt to throw the nomination to her. If they prove successful, then their own party's candidate would face that weaker nominee in November.

Although it represents an insincere vote choice, such strategic behavior might sound like an irresistible, even ingenious, idea for party loyalists. Indeed, many opponents of the blanket primary feared that this type of sabotage would unfairly swing some election results. Yet we expect that raiding in a blanket primary system will be very rare. First, the amount of political knowledge required to engage in such behavior is very high, and probably beyond the level of most voters. It would involve not only learning about candidates in the other party, but also making savvy predictions about their long-term fortunes. Second, without a massive and coordinated effort from thousands of voters, any single person considering a raiding strategy would probably come to see it as a wasted vote. If she did not fully anticipate like-minded fellow partisans acting in concert, then her vote would be squandered on a weak candidate from another party who was probably certain to lose.

DATA SOURCES

The absentee ballots examined in this chapter offer a unique insight into crossover voting. There were more than two hundred and fifty thousand absentee ballots cast in L.A. County in the June 1998 primary election, which constituted more than 20 percent of all the ballots cast in the election. The absentee ballots were reasonably representative of the full election-day canvass. (See the appendix and table 7.10, at the end of this chapter,

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for details and a note on our collection methods.) This means that our comparisons of vote choices between party members and crossover voters should reasonably reflect the pattern in the whole electorate.

One possible limitation with the absentee ballots, however, is that absentee voters fill out ballots early in the campaign. They would therefore have been at a disadvantage in planning strategic votes, because information that could have aided in that planning—such as media coverage of campaigns and the reporting of poll results—intensifies closer to election day. Thus, whatever amount of strategic voting we see here may represent the minimum found in the election. This factor could be offset, however, by the fact that absentee voters had plenty of time with the ballot in hand and perhaps used it to consider all their options. That extra time could also mean that absentee voters were the least likely (all else being equal) to pick the first candidate on a list whose name they recognized. Hence, the amount of crossover voting to support incumbents found among absentee voters was probably at least matched by the overall electorate. The final vote tallies support this conjecture as well.

A second possible limitation with the absentee ballots is that we cannot measure any possible campaign-specific effects that could have affected voters' decisions, such as a vote-by-mail drive in a particular district. However, we compensate for this possible limitation by examining more than fifty state and local contests and by observing voters across a range of electoral scenarios. Our conclusions about how voters behaved in any given electoral scenario (e.g., with the presence of an incumbent or of a competitive race) are drawn from crossover rates in a number of such cases.

OVERALL PATTERNS OF CROSSOVER VOTING

We begin the analysis by showing the overall patterns of voting in the sample. Table 7.1 shows how voters distributed their votes among the parties across eleven major offices. It shows the breakdown of votes cast by each of four types of voters: registered Democrats, registered Republicans, registered minor-party members, and nonpartisans (decline-to-states).

In the case of Democrats and Republicans, a plurality of voters cast votes only for candidates of their party of registration. However, the majority of registered partisans split their tickets in some way. For instance, 28.6 percent of Democrats mixed in some Republican votes, and another 10 percent selected at least one minor-party candidate. Registered Republicans were even more prone to cross party lines, with more than 37.8 percent selecting some Democrats and another 10 percent selecting minor-party candidates as well as Democrats.

Among nonpartisan voters, about one-quarter stayed loyal to a single party throughout. Some of these voters were probably people with strong

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TABLE 7.1 Patterns of Party Voting for Eleven Major Offices, by Party Registration

	Party Registration
Pattern	Democrat	Republican	Nonpartisans	Minor Parties
Democrats only	45.6%	2.7%	9.6%	14.1%
Republicans only	2.0	40.5	16.8	5.9
Third parties only	0.2	0.2	0.8	5.1
Democrats and third parties only	11.5	0.9	8.2	18.0
Republicans and third parties only	0.6	6.5	3.3	8.4
Democrats and Republicans only	28.6	37.8	37.4	19.6
Democrats, Republicans, and third parties	10.6	10.8	22.0	27.7
Skipped all eleven offices	0.9	0.7	1.8	1.2
TOTAL	100.0%	100.1%	99.9%	100.0%

NOTE: Figures are percentages of each voter type casting a given vote pattern. (Figures may not total 100 percent due to rounding.)

party affiliations who preferred not to officially declare themselves. Thus, the new rules gave them a chance to participate in a primary for the first time. However, the vast majority of nonpartisans split their tickets, and did so predominantly between the two major parties.

Just 5.1 percent of all voters registered with a minor party selected only minor-party candidates. It was not as if they had no one to vote for: most minor parties fielded candidates in all the major statewide races and in many of the district-level races. Most of those candidates ran uncontested, however, which may suggest that minor-party members were more concerned with the contested races or incumbents elsewhere than they were with giving their party a larger share of the overall vote.

All of this ticket-splitting made the ballot patterns of this primary election look remarkably like a general election. To illustrate this, table 7.2 shows the distribution of votes in this election compared to the same county in the 1994 general election. (The 1994 data also come from the Los Angeles County Registrar and reflect a random sample of election-day ballots.) The percentages show a very similar pattern: voters' propensity to split their tickets, and the way in which they did so, was nearly the same under this new primary format as it was in the 1994 general election. Crossover voting may well be routine behavior for voters any time they are given choices among many parties.

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TABLE 7.2 Patterns of Party Voting for Eleven Offices in 1998 California Primary and 1994 General Election

Pattern	1998 Primary	1994 General
Democrats only	26.7%	20.5%
Republicans only	17.1	16.5
Third parties only	0.3	0.5
Democrats and third parties only	7.4	8.8
Republicans and third parties only	3.2	4.9
Democrats and Republicans only	32.6	30.6
Democrats, Republicans, and third parties	11.9	18.0
Skipped all eleven offices	0.9	0.3
TOTAL	100.1%	100.1%
NOTE: Figures are percentages of ballots showing a given pattern. (Figures may not total 100 percent due to rounding.)

This finding helps to shed light on the motivations behind crossover voting. The patterns in table 7.2 suggest that on the whole, voters were not acting maliciously toward the other party in their crossover voting, because the voting trends in this primary looked so much like they did in a general election. In a general election voters have no incentive to try to sabotage the other party because there is no second, subsequent election for them to influence. More direct evidence in support of this conclusion comes later, when we examine specific vote choices.

CROSSOVER VOTING AND STATEWIDE RACES

In order to show the conditions under which voters crossed party lines, we can examine voting behavior by party affiliation for the eight statewide offices that were on the 1998 ballot. Table 7.3 shows the amount of crossover voting by registered Democrats and Republicans, as well as how nonpartisan voters cast their votes. The figures show that the highest rates of partisan crossover for any one party occurred among registered Republicans voting for Democrats in the races for Governor and Controller. In each case, about 27 percent of registered GOP voters crossed party lines. These two races illustrate the two most viable explanations for partisan crossover: the appeal of a hotly contested race in the Governor's contest, and the appeal of a popular incumbent in the Controller's race. In both cases, crossover voting was no doubt stimulated because of the lack of any real contest in the other party.

In the Governor's race, the Democratic nomination fight was a highly visible contest between Gray Davis, Al Checchi, and Jane Harman. Although Davis pulled away at the end, the race had been considered close throughout

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TABLE 7.3 Major Partisan Defections and the Nonpartisan Vote for Eight Statewide Elections

	Percentage of Other Party Crossing into:		Percentage of Nonpartisans Voting in:
	Democratic Race for:	Republican Race for:	Democratic Race for:	Republican Race for:
Governor	26.9%	8.7%	62.6%	24.0%
Lieutenant Governor	10.2	12.9	37.3	33.1
Secretary of State	6.0	17.9	25.8	37.9
Controller	27.0	5.2	54.1	16.8
Treasurer	11.1	9.5	40.0	28.5
Attorney General	15.3	12.3	40.5	29.8
Insurance Commissioner	10.4	17.6	34.9	35.5
U.S. Senator	12.1	15.4	40.0	44.4

the early phase of the campaign. Television advertising was heavy and started early, with Checchi leading the charge with a barrage of TV ads. By contrast, the Republican side saw no real contest, as Dan Lungren wrapped up the nomination easily. Lungren's clear path to the nomination meant that he did not need to spend as much on advertising, and he held off doing so until later in the campaign season. Thus Republican voters probably saw more of the Democratic candidates than they did of their own, and many found reason to vote for one of them. One simple reason may have been to make their vote count for more by casting it in a contested race.

In the Controller's race, Kathleen Connell clearly benefited from incumbency, facing no heated competition from within her own party. On the other side, there was no contest among Republicans to draw the attention of voters. Thus, Republican voters who felt Connell was doing a fine job were free to cross party lines and vote for her. There is no way to tell conclusively from these data to what degree name recognition alone was a factor, but given the lack of a campaign on the Republican side, one can reasonably suspect that it was strong. To a lesser extent, crossover voting in the Secretary of State's race was also skewed, this time to the Republican side. This is likely a result of the same phenomenon, as Bill Jones was a well-known Republican incumbent, while Democrats had no nomination contest.

The figures for nonpartisan voting support these patterns and conclusions. Almost two-thirds of nonpartisans voted for a Democrat in the gubernatorial race. These voters decided to weigh in on the Democratic side

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TABLE 7.4 Comparison of a Democratic Nonminority District (HR 29) to a Republican District (HR 28)

	Percentage of Other Party Crossing into:		Percentage of Nonpartisans Voting in:
	Democratic Race for:	Republican Race for:	Democratic Race for:	Republican Race for:
NOTE: Figures are percentages in Democratic area minus percentages in Republican area.
Governor	+6.6%	−5.2%	+5.6%	−2.1%
Lieutenant Governor	+4.0	−12.1	+7.9	−11.0
Secretary of State	+1.3	−6.2	+9.7	−7.7
Controller	−3.1	−2.6	+3.9	−0.4
Treasurer	+2.5	−4.7	+4.7	−3.6
Attorney General	+3.5	−6.7	+6.3	−4.8
Insurance Commissioner	+2.3	−8.4	+8.8	−5.7
U.S. Senator	+4.8	−9.7	+17.4	−20.6

of the Controller's race by a sizeable 54 to 16 percent margin over the Republican side. The fact that nonpartisans, like their partisan counterparts, chose to cast ballots on the Democratic side of the gubernatorial race is further evidence that voting did not involve strategic sabotage attempts. Nonpartisans would generally have no incentive to sabotage one party or the other, and their voting patterns and the partisan voting patterns mirror each other. These findings point squarely to the impact of a contested race and to campaign and information effects as the main causes of crossover voting.

Information effects may not be confined to individual races; they may also affect the overall rate of crossover voting. We hypothesized that a registered partisan, living in a district dominated by a different party, might receive more information about that party and be more inclined to cross into it. As an example of this, table 7.4 compares crossover voting rates in the statewide races in two congressional districts, one heavily Democratic (but nonminority) and the other heavily Republican. The figures reflect the percentage difference between crossover voting in the Democratic and Republican districts. They show that Republicans were more likely to cross over if they lived in the Democratic district; Democrats were more likely to cross over when they lived in the Republican district. The right side of the table, meanwhile, gives the difference in crossover among nonpartisans. It is clear that these voters were more likely to vote in accordance with the partisanship of the district in which they lived, probably because they were more exposed to information about these campaigns.

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ELECTORAL SCENARIOS: CROSSOVER IN DISTRICT ELECTIONS

By examining specific district-level races, we can gain further insight into when and why voters cross party lines. There were a variety of electoral scenarios spread among the dozens of district races in 1998. For example, some had contested races in only one party, some had incumbents facing challengers, while others had incumbents running unopposed, and so forth. In this section, we set up some of those various scenarios as comparative cases, and use them to examine the electoral conditions under which voters cross party lines. We use three types of district-level offices in the analysis: U.S. House, State Assembly, and State Senate.

Races with Incumbents

We begin with table 7.5, which explores the drawing power of an incumbent and shows when partisans are willing to cross party lines in order to vote for one. Included here are all districts in which an incumbent was running for renomination in one of the major parties. The behavior of registered Democrats and Republicans is considered in the table. Significantly, when one party had an incumbent on the ballot, and the other party offered a competitive race for its nomination (defined here as a final margin between candidates of 10 percent or less), a full 30.8 percent of that party's registered members still crossed over to support the incumbent. This stands as a testament to the power of incumbency in district elections, at least in comparison to the drawing power of a competitive race. Nearly one-third of registered partisans left their own party even though a battle for the nomination raged within it—a battle that their vote could have helped decide.

Name recognition, especially given the long, pooled list of candidates on the 1998 ballot, may have played a role in this result. It is also possible that voters saw the contested race in their own party as meaningless anyway, because the eventual winner would probably lose to the incumbent in the general election. However, such reasoning would still not directly compel a partisan voter to cross the party line: why not put up your party's best candidate, anyway? The preference for the incumbent over all others was therefore most likely a sincere choice. The number of voters crossing over when their own party offered no real contest for the nomination was roughly identical at 27.1 percent, and more than half of all registered partisans defected to vote for the incumbent when their own party offered no candidate at all. This result probably reveals as much a cause as an effect: incumbents in these districts were probably seen as so widely popular that no one from either party bothered to mount a challenge.

This strong drawing power for incumbents will certainly be seen by some

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TABLE 7.5 Drawing Power of Incumbents: Conditions under Which Partisans Crossed

	Other Major Party Offered:
	Competitive Race	No Viable Contest or One Candidate	No Candidate
NOTE: Figures are percentages of voters casting ballots in the race. Districts used include U.S. House, State Senate, and State Assembly.
Mean percentage crossing to vote for incumbent	30.8%	27.1%	56.7%
N of cases	(2)	(22)	(7)

as cause for concern. Some opponents of the blanket primary format predicted that precisely this kind of voting pattern would emerge, and would help incumbents overcome challenges from within their own party. Our data indicate that crossover votes flow disproportionately to incumbents and raise their overall vote totals above the number of tallies received from registered voters within their own party. Candidates challenging the incumbent for the nomination, meanwhile, generally do not attract these crossover votes. Their resources, which are usually far more limited, are probably strained simply by trying to reach the voters in their own party, never mind additional potential crossover voters from the other party. They undoubtedly cannot match an incumbent's name recognition throughout the district, either. (Of course, some challengers will be well-funded or have great personal resources, but this is not often the case.) Hence the blanket primary, by allowing those crossover votes, could further disadvantage anyone who wants to challenge an incumbent for a party's nomination.

There is potential for an indirect incumbency advantage to emerge from this scenario as well. Incumbents, helped by crossover voting, could increase their share of the total primary electorate and perhaps even collect more than 50 percent of it. That could translate into easier fund-raising for the general election: the incumbent could trumpet these results to potential contributors as a sign of a coming victory in the general election, and by so doing gather even more money for the November contest. If this were to occur, the other party's nominee would need to gear up for a general election in which he was not only pitted against an incumbent, but against one with an even greater monetary edge.

Competitive Race

When one party offers a competitive race for its nomination while the other does not, we expect voters to gravitate toward it: their votes are more meaningful

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TABLE 7.6 Drawing Power of a Competitive Race: Conditions under Which Partisans Followed the Action

	Other Major Party Offered:
	No Incumbent	Incumbent	Competitive Race
NOTE: Figures are percentages of voters casting ballots in the race. Districts used include U.S. House, State Senate, and State Assembly.
Mean percentage crossing to follow the action	41.7%	6.7%	16.0%
N of cases	(8)	(2)	(1)

when cast in a close race, and these heated contests generate more media and campaign activity to catch their interest.

In table 7.6, we consider districts where voters had the chance to cross over into such a race. It clearly shows that voters did seize the opportunity to vote in competitive races—except when an incumbent was present. In openseat districts where both parties offered candidates but only one of those parties had a competitive race (again, defined as one in which the final vote margin was less than 10 percent), 41.7 percent of registered partisans left their own party to join the action in the other. Yet, when voters were faced with a choice between an incumbent in their own party and a competitive race in the other, they stayed put: only an average of 6.7 percent crossed party lines. This is the flip side of the effect shown in table 7.5. Incumbents were clearly bigger draws than competitive races when put head-to-head. In only one case did voters see a heated race in each party in an open-seat district, so it is hard to draw generalities from this. However the number of voters crossing in that district was but a sliver of those seen crossing in other districts; a contest in their own party kept partisans largely at home in this circumstance.

Strategic Sabotage?

Next we assess whether voters undertook strategic attempts to raid, or sabotage, other parties. The absentee ballots do not allow us to study candidate preference rankings such as those used by Sides, Cohen, and Citrin (chapter 5) and Alvarez and Nagler (chapter 6; both in this volume) to assess raiding, so we infer motivation from actual vote choices and the strategic context in which they took place. To do this, we compare the actual candidate choices made by registered partisans when they crossed into the other party with the vote choices of the party's own faithful. We make these comparisons in races where conditions were ripe for strategic sabotage to

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TABLE 7.7 Votes of Potential Partisan Raiders in Districts Where an Incumbent Faced Opposition

District	Party of Incumbent	Percentage of Other Party's Registered Voters Crossing Over ("Raiding")	Percentage of Partisan "Raiders" Voting for Incumbent	Incumbent's Support in Own Party	Incumbent's Margin
NOTE: Figures are percentages of all voters casting ballots in the race.
HR 26	D	84.0%	80.4%	74.9%	33.3%
HR 28	R	32.7	95.5	87.6	88.8
HR 37	D	32.8	83.9	76.5	41.2
HR 38	R	39.1	91.9	82.8	72.2
HR 41	R	31.7	36.5	23.3	−23.9
AD 55	D	30.2	41.3	56.1	19.7
AD 57	D	35.2	46.7	63.7	39.6

occur: contested races involving an incumbent ought to have provided opposing partisans with a prime—and highly visible—opportunity for sabotage. With the other party's incumbent facing challenge, these partisans could cross into that party's primary and vote for the challenger. If these efforts helped the challenger win the nomination, it would mean that their own party would not be up against the incumbent in November—and thus would have a better chance to win the office.

The data in table 7.7 indicate, however, that the behavior of crossover voters depends more on the incumbent's overall standing in the district than it does on any sinister strategies. Note that in the first four districts listed, overwhelming numbers of the crossover partisans voted for the incumbent in the opposite party. In these districts, the incumbents were strong in their own party as well, drawing huge numbers of their own partisans and winning by large margins. In districts where incumbents were on the ropes in their own party, however, they did not get the support of crossover partisans. The three districts listed at the bottom of table 7.7 (HR 41, AD 55, and AD 57) had incumbents with much lower levels of support among voters in their own party, and the levels of support from crossover partisans largely mirrored this trend. There were no districts in which an incumbent was the overwhelming choice of his own party while crossover partisans rushed in en masse to back a different challenger.

All this amounts to more evidence that widespread raiding simply did not occur. When an incumbent was popular in a district, that popularity was sweeping and crossed party lines; when an incumbent was in trouble, he or she was in trouble everywhere.

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TABLE 7.8 Voting for Fong versus Issa (U.S. Senate), by Party Registration

	Countywide		Minority Districts
	Fong	Issa	Fong	Issa
Democrats (19.3%)	51.9%	33.4%	56.2%	27.9%
Nonpartisans (8.0%)	59.2	26.2	67.4	18.7
Minor party (1.4%)	42.3	37.7	48.8	26.4
Republicans (71.3%)	44.6	40.8	46.7	37.5
Overall sample (100.0%)	47.1	38.2	51.9	32.3

THE CONSEQUENCES OF CROSSOVER VOTING

The electoral consequences of crossover voting depend very much on whether the preferences of partisans and crossover voters match. If they do not, it is possible that a blanket primary will produce different nominees than a closed system would have, even with all voters voting their sincere preferences.

One instance where this may have occurred was in the Republican U.S. Senate contest between Matt Fong and Darryl Issa. Table 7.8 shows how the votes were split among the different sets of voters who selected one of those candidates. Note that while Fong held a slight plurality among registered Republicans, 44.6 percent to 40.8 percent for Issa, registered Democrats who made a choice between the two were solidly in favor of Fong, 51.9 to 33.4 percent. Nonpartisans showed an even larger discrepancy. In the last two columns of the table, these figures are shown only for congressional districts with nonwhite majorities (districts 30–35 and 37). In these districts, the discrepancy between Republican and other voters was even larger.

Because this analysis is relegated to one county, we cannot prove that crossover voting caused Matt Fong to win his party's nomination. Yet these data do illustrate that there can be large differences between the preferences of a party's own voters and the preferences of voters who cross into that party's nomination contest. This indicates that the switch to the blanket primary format has the potential to change outcomes.

At the district level, the results were often similar. There were sometimes substantial differences between those in a party and those outside of it, and most of these were large enough to have swung the outcome of a close election. However, the difference was never large enough in these instances to have swamped the preferences of a major party and throw the nomination to a Democrat or Republican who did not have a plurality of support

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TABLE 7.9 Where the Minor-Party Vote Came From

	Minor-Party Members	Nonpartisans	Democrats	Republicans
NOTE: Figures are percentages of all votes cast in minor-party contests.
Assembly	10.1%	13.9%	45.5%	30.5%
U.S. House	8.4	14.6	46.6	30.4
U.S. Senator	13.9	15.3	45.9	24.9
State Senator	8.5	15.2	43.2	33.0
Governor	13.8	15.0	40.5	30.7
Lieutenant Governor	10.5	14.8	51.6	23.1
Secretary of State	14.6	8.9	51.8	24.7
Controller	11.0	14.4	40.7	34.0
Treasurer	11.0	14.7	45.2	29.1
Attorney General	7.1	10.5	52.7	29.6
Insurance Commissioner	9.2	14.3	41.4	35.2

in her own party. This finding also holds in districts where there was no incumbent running. To examine the differences in voter preferences without incumbency effects, we considered eight districts where there was a contested race but no incumbent. In four of those districts, the percentage of partisans voting for the eventual winning candidate was more than ten points greater than the percentage of raiders doing so.

CROSSOVER INTO MINOR-PARTY CONTESTS

Minor-party candidates also appear frequently on the California ballot, and they may potentially be the most affected by the consequences of crossover voting. Discrepancies between the preferences of voters in and outside a party can readily have consequences for minor parties. As these parties draw very few total votes relative to the major parties, it takes far fewer crossover votes to swing an election within them. With this in mind, table 7.9 shows that the bulk of votes cast in a given minor party's race did not always come from voters registered in that party. In this election votes for minor-party candidates came very heavily from outside the minor parties. Only 13.8 percent of the minor-party vote for Governor, for example, came from registered members of a minor party, while most of it came from registered Democrats and Republicans. The pattern is very similar for all the statewide offices. This is not a concern when a minor-party candidate is uncontested, as was the case with most of the minor parties and most of the offices. However in some instances, such as in the Peace and Freedom party's contest for Governor, there were two candidates competing. It is entirely possible

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that, given the source of most minor-party voting, the candidates who emerged as their party's nominees were not always the ones most preferred by the party members.

CONCLUSION

One of the objectives of the blanket primary was to allow voters to split their tickets. It is very clear that voters took much advantage of that opportunity. The overall pattern of voting in this primary was in fact comparable to a general election. Voters seemed to treat this primary as if it were simply round one in a two-round election: they selected candidates of either party, just as they do in November. We found no evidence that crossover voting involved deliberate strategic attempts by voters to raid the opposite party by aiding its weakest candidate.

When registered partisans supported candidates from outside their own party, their voting patterns indicate that they did so for one of two reasons: to vote for an incumbent from another party, or to vote in a competitive race—especially when there was no contest in their own party. Both actions have potentially serious electoral consequences. The former could give incumbents an additional advantage, not just in the primary contests but also in fund-raising for the general election. The latter certainly has the potential to swing a close primary election.

A contest held under a blanket primary system is not assured the same outcome as would have occurred under a closed primary: we showed that the vote choices of those registered within a party can vary substantially from those of voters who cross over. This crossover effect may be of particular concern for minor parties, whose low vote totals make it easy for crossover voters to affect a nomination if the race is contested. In fact, so much of the minor-party vote came from crossover voting that this effect could be greatly magnified. The major parties are surely susceptible to this influence as well. It is entirely possible that with enough crossover voting, or a close enough election, a different nominee could emerge under blanket primary rules than would have under a closed primary system. We cannot say for certain that it happened in 1998, at least not in the areas studied here—but it could undoubtedly happen in some other election held under blanket primary rules. The potential may rise higher still as candidates learn from California's experience with this primary and become more savvy at targeting voters from other parties.

This potential change in outcomes is undoubtedly what the proponents of the blanket primary wanted to see happen, in the hope that the winning nominees would be more moderate. However, this also confirms some of the worst fears of the blanket primary's critics, as the ability of a party and its members to choose their own nominees could most certainly be influenced

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by this new system. Ultimately, the Supreme Court decided that such influence would constitute an infringement upon the rights of political parties.

APPENDIX: DATA AND SAMPLES

Through 1998 Los Angeles County used a punch-card tabulation system that could save digital images of each absentee ballot as it was processed. (The system has since been retired.) The Registrar of Voters was kind enough to make the absentee ballot images from the primary available to us for this project. These images, however, were stored by the computer only in raw hexadecimal form and had to be decoded back into voters' actual punches, while accounting for the candidates' positions rotating on the ballot. This extensive process was accomplished with a computer program that one of this chapter's authors, Anthony Salvanto, developed for the task. The authors are grateful to Vern Cowles and the staff at the Los Angeles County Registrar's Office, who made the images available to us and without whom this study would not have been possible. We are also indebted to Bill Detlof for his technical advice and to Chad Rosenberg for his programming assistance and tireless work during the decoding process.

REFERENCES

Bowler, Shaun; Todd Donovan; and Trudi Happ. 1992. “Ballot Propositions and Information Costs: Direct Democracy and the Fatigued Voter.” Western Political Quarterly45: 559–68.

Darcy, R., and Anne Schneider. 1989. “Confusing Ballots, Roll-off, and the Black Vote.” Western Political Quarterly 42: 347–64.

Downs, Anthony. 1957. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

Jacobson, Gary. 1992. The Politics of Congressional Elections. New York: HarperCollins.

Vanderleeuw, James M., and Glenn H. Utter. 1993. “Voter Roll-off and the Electoral Context: A Test of Two Theses.” Social Science Quarterly74: 664–73.

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TABLE 7.10 Absentee Sample Percentages Compared to Overall Percentages for Eight Statewide Offices, Major Partisan Candidates

Contest	Percentage of Popular Vote in Absentee Sample	Percentage of Popular Vote in County
Governor
Davis	34.0%	36.9%
Harman	11.4	12.0
Checchi	14.5	18.1
Lungren	30.6	27.8
Lieutenant Governor
Bustamante	37.9	43.3
Hentschel	15.0	14.2
Leslie	10.9	9.1
Mountjoy	15.3	12.2
Secretary of State
Alioto	41.9	45.1
Jones	49.7	44.0
Controller
Connell	65.1	65.3
Barrales	29.5	27.9
Treasurer
Angelides	26.0	28.2
Robles	22.7	23.2
Goldsmith	14.2	12.0
Pringle	27.5	24.8
Attorney General
Calderon	13.9	17.3
Lockyer	25.3	25.5
Schenk	10.2	12.3
Capizzi	13.6	12.8
Stirling	33.3	29.5
Insurance Commissioner
Brown	21.3	22.6
Martinez	26.5	29.6
Quackenbush	46.5	40.3
U.S. Senator
Boxer	51.3	52.0
Fong	21.6	18.9
Issa	17.5	16.5