Googling the Top Two: Information Search in California’s Top Two Primary

Abstract

After California's adoption of the top two primary, voters faced the possibility of ballot choices between co-partisan candidates (two Democrats, for example, or two Republicans). We use the publicly available Google Trends data, which provides the rate of searching for particular words, to evaluate whether Californians are more likely to search for the names of legislators who faced co-partisan challengers in their general election than to search for the names of legislators who faced opposite-partisan challengers in the general election. We find evidence of increased search for the general election and, moreover, find that there is no increase for the primary election, suggesting that when the typical voter loses a key electoral cue (the party label) the voter will rely upon other sources of information to make a voting decision.

Candidate Ethnicity and Latino Voting in Co-Partisan Elections

“…Largely missing from the aforementioned studies is an explicit theory of how racial and ethnic dynamics, either related to a desire to see a co-ethnic elected to office (Wolfinger 1965, Simien 2015 or ethnic-oriented targeted campaign strategies (Leighley 2001, Fraga 2016, might influence the behavior of minority voters under the constraint of the top two primary. Sinclair and Wray (2015) find that in the absence of an explicit partisan cue, voters engaged in information-seeking behavior following the primary to help them make a decision in the general election. We contend that ethnic minority voters, such as Latino Democrats, turn to the heuristic of shared ethnicity, at least partly, to fill in as a cue of who might better represent them and who might be more ideologically aligned with them.…”

“…Kousser, Phillips, and Shor 2016), the behavior of voters as strategic actors (Nagler 2015, Alvarez and Nagler 2002, Leighley and Nagler 2013, and the changes in voters' information seeking behavior (B. Sinclair and Wray 2015).…”

“…In 2014, two Republicans-Devon Mathis and Rudy Mendoza-advanced to the district's general election under California's top two primary system, in which the two candidates who receive the greatest number of votes in the open primary advance to the general election. California's bold transition to a top two primary system has inspired significant scholarly debate about the potential moderating effect on policymaking (Gerber and Morton 1998;McGhee et al 2014;Grose 2014;Ahler, Citrin, and Lenz 2016), the strategies candidates use to distinguish themselves in co-partisan elections and the calculus of voters when faced with candidates from the same party (Alvarez and Nagler 2002, Nagler 2015, Sinclair and Wray 2015. Largely overlooked by these studies, however, is an explicit consideration of the way that race and ethnicity may powerfully influence the behavior of both candidates and voters from diverse communities.…”

The Impact of GOTV Depends Upon Campaign Context: A Field Experiment in the 2014 California Primary

“…Preliminary research suggests that the top-two primary system was likely successful at presenting voters with more moderate candidates (Sinclair 2015), but at some cost (Sinclair and Wray 2015). In particular, at the time of the implementation of the new system, voters needed to invest more effort into gathering information about candidates.…”

Some General Consequences of California's Top-Two Primary System

“…In an analysis of an assembly general election between two Republicans, Sinclair (2015b) explains how the more moderate of the two (Frank Bigelow) beat the conservative (Rico Oller). Sinclair and Wray (2015) analyze Google Trends data for state legislators seeking reelection and find that the "single greatest predictor of search volume is whether the legislator faced a co-partisan challenger" (10). Nagler (2015) analyzes turnout in same party general elections and finds that partisans of the excluded party had a higher rolloff (abstention) rate, which could limit the electoral advantage of the more moderate candidate of the other party.…”