Political Polarization and Voters in the 2018 Congressional Primaries

As intraparty divisions have solidified and lawmakers’ fears of getting “primaried” have intensified, many Americans have begun paying more attention to primary elections. To that end, this report on voters in congressional primaries—the second such report from The Primaries Project at Brookings—represents a sort of coming-of-age for research on congressional primaries. Thanks to the generosity of Democracy Fund, we were able to contract with Edison Research to conduct exit polls in the 2018 primaries, resulting in the best available data on this important subset of voters.