Voting at the Political Fault Line "ss1.35"

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.