Primary Politics: The Effects of Gender, Age, & Race in the 2008 Democratic Primary∗

Despite Barack Obama’s momentum in the early phase of the democratic nomi-nation, the process of selecting a nominee took longer than usual. Eight candidates were winnowed to two, but the remaining two were competitive until the last primary was held. Further complicating things, when it appeared Barack Obama would win the nomination, Hillary Clinton supporters vowed to defect from the party and support the opposition in the general election. Momentum, it seems, got stuck. How do we explain this unusual string of events? Why were some people unwilling to jump on the Obama bandwagon once he emerged as a viable front-runner – and utlimately, the nominee? In this paper we bring unique panel data to bear on questions about primary vote choice. While it is known that attitudes about race predict vote choice in partisan contests, we demonstrate that these attitudes interact with the race of the candidate to explain voters ’ choices and transitions among candidates even in an intra-party contest. ∗We thank Seth Hill, Michael Tesler, and Delia Bailey for help with comparisons to data from other election studies. We benefited greatly from conversations about race and politics with David Sears, Paul Sniderman, Michael Tesler, Frank Gilliam, Ryan Enos, and participants at the UCLA meeting on Rac