Why We Have Runoff Elections, And Whether They Help Or Hurt Parties

By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College

Georgia has just concluded its primary election, and braces itself for the runoff races. There will be no shortage of speculation about who might win the GOP primary runoff for the US Senate or Governor’s races, and some pundit forecasting and possibly early polling. In this article, I take a different approach, looking at evidence from political scientists about who tends to prevail.

The Regional Runoff Rationale: Partisanship, Race or Ideology?

It’s important to note that the “runoff system” has historical origins. According to James M. Glaser in his Electoral Studies article “The Primary Runoff as a Remnant of the Old South,” partisanship played a role in the rationale “During the Jim Crow era, the American South developed a distinctive one-party political structure. One important feature of that structure was the primary runoff, which was adopted to require candidates to generate majority support in the nomination process and to stimulate competition within the Democratic Party (thus keeping the Republican Party irrelevant).” Glaser contends that because it’s a two-party system, the practice as outlived its usefulness.

For Alexander P. Lamis in his PS: Political Science & Politics journal article “The Runoff Primary Controversy: Implications for Southern Politics,” he finds race at the core of this practice that’s largely concentrated in the South. “Of the 11 states of the former Confederacy, the most widely accepted definition of the political South, eight states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas—have runoffs. Tennessee does not. Virginia had them for some offices as late as the 1960s but does not at present. Louisiana operates under a unique open primary system that requires a nonpartisan runoff to serve as the general election. Oklahoma is the only other state currently to have runoffs, although Utah experimented with the system from 1937 to 1947.”

The idea behind the runoff, according to critics, was to ensure that African-Americans would never win a seat. A lone African-American candidate could win the most votes in a primary against several whites, but would lose in a runoff because districts were drawn then to ensure no district had a majority African-American population. As Lamis writes “For example, in the Mississippi suit, Jackson v. Allain, one of the plaintiffs, the Rev. Henry Ward, Jr., was the only black seeking the Democratic nomination in Mississippi Legislative District 28 in 1983 against a white incumbent and several other whites. Ward led the first primary with a plurality but lost the runoff.”

Some, such as Edward Foley (writing in the Lewis & Clark Law Review), likes the idea of runoffs so much that he implies that every Congressional office should have a majority of the district picking the winner, using runoffs if necessary. France chooses their elections by runoff, without the historical baggage of the South. And like Foley suggests, it’s a measure designed to reduce the power of ideological extremes from the left and right.

Runoff Concerns: Turnout, Divisiveness and Leaders Losing

There are worries that voter turnout could be depressed in runoffs. In the article “Voter Turnout in Runoff Elections” in the Journal of Politics, Stephen G. Wright states “Results indicate that turnout declined in almost 77% of all Democratic gubernatorial, senatorial, and congressional runoffs held from 1956 to 1984. The extent of decline is greater in congressional and senatorial runoffs than in gubernatorial runoffs and is especially pronounced in congressional runoffs unaccompanied by gubernatorial or senatorial runoffs.” Such a measure could benefit the party that doesn’t have such a runoff.

Those in runoffs are likely to get more attention than a candidate winning their party primary outright. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing, as Alexander Fouirnaies and Andrew B. Hall discover in their Journal of Politics article “How Divisive Primaries Hurt Parties: Evidence from Near-Runoffs in US Legislatures.” Primaries may help select quality candidates, but they can expose flaws and offend losing candidates’ supporters.

Do divisive primaries help or harm parties in the general election? Existing research is mixed, likely because of issues of selection and omitted variables. We address these issues by studying southern US states with runoff primaries—second-round elections that, when triggered, create more divisive primaries. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate that a runoff decreases the party’s general-election vote share in the House and Senate by approximately 6 percentage points and decreases the party’s win probability by approximately 21 percentage points, on average.”

Finally, Richard L. Engstrom and Richard N. Engstrom research primaries and runoffs in their Electoral Studies journal article “The majority vote rule and runoff primaries in the United States.” They research “Runoffs were necessary to decide the gubernatorial and senatorial nominations in the majority vote states in 29.9% of the contested nominations over the period. These included 27.1% of 85 gubernatorial nominations and 19.0% of 89 senatorial nominations (five gubernatorial runoffs and one senatorial runoff were unnecessary when the second-place candidate in the first primary withdrew from the runoff).” Their findings echo Wright about depressed turnout in the second round of voting.

Engstrom and Engstrom also claim “Allegedly, there has been a belief in southern politics that candidates who lead in the first primary, but with less than a majority, are disadvantaged in the runoff.…[R]unoff primaries are necessary in roughly one-third of the contested primaries held in the majority vote context, and in about one-third of them the primary leader loses the runoff.”

Solutions clump around casting two ballots in the first round, as well as one where there’s an “instate runoff” with ranked choice voting. But Lamis reports a different solution. “The South Carolina Democratic Convention this spring endorsed a compromise plan to reduce the threshold required to avoid a runoff from a simple majority (50 percent plus one vote) to 40 percent.” That’s what Costa Rica does in their multiparty system to pick a president. The question is whether either of these ideas catch on in the Southern part of the USA, the only place where such runoffs are the norm.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange Collegein LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.eduor on “X” at @johntures2. His first book “Branded” a thriller novel where corporate greed, media manipulation and academic intrigue collide in a deadly game of product placement, has been published by the Huntsville Independent Press (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/branded).