The timing of the primary election

The timing of the primary election influences voter turnout in a state, does it make sense to have a single election day when all states would hold their primaries? How might this influence which candidate becomes the party’s nominees? Is this process more or less democratic in your opinion?There has been substantial disagreement about the “best” time to hold primaryelections, yet there is little evidence about the effects of different election dates.

This paper represents the first attempt to utilize a newly-assembled dataset covering primary and general elections from 1984 to 2016 to assess theconsequences of primary election dates for turnout, cost, and competitiveness of primary elections to the U.S. House of Representatives. Searching over this full time period, we uncovered no evidence of a substantively meaningful effect of primary timing on either the cost or competitiveness of primaries. However,turnout does appear to dip in the summer months before recovering in the fall—a pattern that has become more pronounced in both parties in recent years.