If primary elections are so critical, why don’t they happen?

What to do if you don’t have a primary this year.

In response to my last post “In NYC, primaries are the main course. Not the appetizer.”, a friend living in Murray Hill wrote: 

This was fun! We got these two:

https://nyassembly.gov/mem/Harvey-Epstein

https://www.nysenate.gov/senators/kristen-Gonzalez

But I tried pretty hard to google if there's an election this year and I couldn't tell… maybe I did a bad job? Like "nyc 59th district senate election 2024" didn't turn up anything useful on the first page. LMK if I'm doing something super wrong.

My reply:

Yayyy you looked it up! Yeah neither of yours are getting primaried, so actually you’ll just be voting for them in the general election haha. Which kind of seems like the opposite of the takeaway of my blog post🫠

Maybe the title of my last post should have been: “In NYC, primaries are the main course. Not the appetizer. But this only applies when there’s an open seat. Otherwise there’s no primary at all or the incumbent is going to win 98% of the time.”

City & State wrote the New York state Legislature 2024 races to watch. If yours isn’t on here, yours isn’t happening or isn’t interesting.

Need a refresher on what state legislators do? Read here.

The vast majority of state legislators do not face a primary challenger.

From 2001 to 2020, 83% of state legislators across the country did not face a primary challenger. For those who do have a primary challenger, only 2% of incumbents lose their primary election. Steven Rogers, the political scientist that investigated the above stats, reasonably concludes that there’s a lack of competition in state elections. State legislators can win reelection without much effort or any competition.

Rogers is right. A state legislator would need to really screw up in order for a challenger to smell blood in the water and go for it. One example from my last post was Marisol Alcantara’s 2016 primary election. She ran as a Democrat, then once she was elected, she allied with the Republicans to basically give them control of the state legislature. That’s egregious enough for her to get challenged by another Democrat in 2018, and she lost. 

I think lack of voter understanding about state politics is really to blame here. Like Mayor Eric Adams will be the incumbent in 2025, and he’ll get primaried because voters 1) have an opinion about the mayor and 2) enough voters have a negative opinion about Adams. In contrast, voters just aren’t paying enough attention to state legislators to have an opinion at all.  

You can still have a voice in state politics without a primary.

Okay then the next step is figuring out if you like the person that’s representing you. TBH, this is not easy. Information is hard to come by. The New York Times isn’t writing about what State Senator Kristen Gonzalez is doing on the day-to-day. 

Here’s what my approach has been so far, but it’s got more cons than pros:

1. Pick an issue that you care about. I care about housing. 

2. Find a group that advocates on that issue. I found Open New York. 

3. Use the group to learn what your state reps are doing on that issue. Maybe their website shows candidate endorsements. Or you can ask other members of the group. Open New York has a slack channel that I basically use as a hive AMA for housing stuff, but also other issues. So this is how I learned that my Assemblyperson, Tony Simone, is a great champion for housing production, and my State Senator, Liz Krueger, not as much.

But we all care about more than just one issue. This strategy doesn’t tell me whether I like Tony Simone’s approach to education policy. Side note: This is where party (Dem v Republican) is supposed to come in handy. But when you’re choosing between candidates that are different shades of blue, that’s where the available information starts to get thin.

In the next couple months, I’ll put together resources to make this easier. I’m thinking it could look something like a compilation of endorsements from a bunch of different organizations. That’s my first thought– but interested to hear your ideas too! Leave me a comment with a suggestion 🙂