Getting Primaried: The Changing Politics of Congressional Primary Challenges

5 | Interest Groups and Congressional Primaries

175 5 | Interest Groups and Congressional Primaries Chapters 2 and 3 of this book showed that congressional primary chal­ lenges are still somewhat rare but that there has been a change in the fund­ raising base of many ideological challengers over the past few decades. There is more money coming in to ideological primary challengers in small amounts, and there is more money coming into their campaigns from out of state than was once the case. It is virtually impossible to imag­ ine this happening without the existence of some sort of entity coordinat­ ing the efforts of donors nationwide. To return to the example of the Ar­ kansas Senate primary discussed in chapter 1, it is inconceivable that citizens from around the country could be motivated to care about the Arkansas race unless someone convinced them to care, and the challenger in that race showed no sign of having the ability to single­handedly make the non­Arkansan public care. In short, the financial data suggest that nonparty groups are increasingly focusing their efforts on congressional primaries. Traditional theories on interest groups provide little insight into why groups would do this, and as I argued in chapter 3, direct group contribu­ tions are a negligible part of challengers’ funds. As we shall see in this chapter, the task of nationalizing primary challenges has been taken up in many instances by interest groups such as MoveOn.org or the Club for Growth. Less formal political movements, such as the Tea Party move­ ment, can also fulfill this function, as can such blogs as DailyKos or Red­ State. Even an individual political actor—such as South Carolina senator Jim DeMint or former Alaska governor Sarah Palin—can call the atten­ tion of a nationwide audience to a primary challenge. It is difficult to take fingerprints from an individual primary challenger’s donor file to see who has drawn the attention of donors to that campaign. Yet the undeniable fact that some combination of groups, online communities, and individ­ ual political activists has touted the campaigns of several primary candi­ 176 | Getting Primaried dates over the past few election cycles indicates that we should narrow our focus somewhat. While it is evident that most PACs are skittish about be­ coming involved in congressional primaries, the decisions of one or two interest groups or other political actors can elevate the profile of a small number of primary challengers. The broad generalizations frequently drawn about politicians’ motives do not apply to all politicians or all groups. To say that, as a rule, incum­ bent members of Congress will not support primary challengers to their colleagues is not to say that there will not be one or two renegade mem­ bers who throw caution to the wind and get involved in primaries. To say that most interest groups do not get involved in primaries is not to say that one or two groups will not seek to distinguish themselves by focusing on primaries. Because of the rarity of such steps, a group or politician doing this draws attention. Some groups or politicians may benefit from this at­ tention; most will not. For the Club for Growth or MoveOn to do this is to serve notice of their independence from the parties; likewise, for Sarah Palin to do this is to serve notice of being a different kind of politician, of seeking reform above and beyond party labels. If we are to identify instances of this throughout the time period I con­ sider here, we must limit ourselves to what is measurable, but we can focus on the signals sent by endorsements or contributions. Instead of looking at contributions in the aggregate, as I have done in chapter 3, we can look at the behavior of individual groups. There were many attempts to do this in 2010—the national media periodically issued scorecards on how candi­ dates endorsed by Sarah Palin or by groups related to the Tea Party did— but these are rather idiosyncratic events and cannot be compared across time.1 A more systematic way to do this is to identify PACs that have con­ tributed to multiple primary challengers across time and to follow their behavior from one election to the next. This sort of analysis uses PAC contributions as a signal, of the sort that so­called lead PACs seek to send, not as determinants in themselves of a candidate’s level of overall group support. This chapter proceeds, first, by illustrating...