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?