A lot of people and political pundits have been discussing how this protracted Republican Primary Season is bad for the eventual nominee for the Republican Party. The claim is that with all of the mud slinging that is going on, it will ruin the eventual nominee's chances in the general election. This would seem to make sense, but based on a research paper that I wrote senior year of college and some common knowledge this might not be the case.
Simply put my research found that the divisive primary was good for a challenger, but detrimental to an incumbent. The logic behind this is pretty simple. When a challenger to an incumbent has a tightly contested primary, then they come out already battle tested. There would not be much new dirt to use against them, and the candidate already looks successful as he or she has won a tough fought primary. While candidates that feel like they are winning want to end campaigns early to save money, or to avoid more bad publicity, many times the divisive primary can have good affects.
While these results were mostly based on primaries and general elections for the US Congress, it could easily be seen that if a good candidate were to win a divisive primary it would be beneficial for a candidate rather than detrimental.
No comments:
Post a Comment