As New Jersey Democrats vote in Tuesday’s primaries, they’ll encounter a revamped ballot, stripped of a unique design that critics say has given party leaders the ability to hand-select primary winners.
Research has found that the line confers a measurable advantage to candidates who receive it. Julia Sass Rubin, director of Rutgers University’s public policy program and an expert witness in the lawsuit, found that gaining an endorsement by a county party organization, and a spot on the county line, boosts a candidate by about 12 percentage points on average.
Josh Pasek, another expert witness and a political science professor at the University of Michigan, reported similar findings. His study assessed that the line conferred an advantage of 10 to 11 points; the effect was far larger in primaries with no incumbents and candidates with little name recognition.
“The line undergirds an ability of political machines to control politics and policy of the state,” said Rubin. “That’s fundamentally the impact of the line.”
Earlier research conducted by Sass-Rubin assessed the effects of party support without teasing out the line from the other resources that come with it; she found candidates that received both performed 38 points better on average. But the strength of institutional get-out-the-vote operations absent organizational lines remains untested.
“One of the impacts is that more people will get into primaries to run,” said Rubin. “But you’re not seeing that in this cycle because the decision came after the cutoff to file to run this cycle.”