Composition of the Electorate in Alaska’s Top-four Nonpartisan Primary Compared to the Partisan Primary

Studies document that US election rule changes intending to increase the demographic representation of electorates often failed to do so. Alaska changed to nonpartisan, single-winner top-four primary elections in 2022 with the expectation that the partisanship / ideology of the participating primary electorate would become more representative by opening new opportunities for independent and moderate voters to participate. We test if this change was associated with an alteration in the participating primary electorate. We utilise very large samples of voters from state voter files combined with commercial data over time to assess how the participation of various groups changed in Alaska from the 2018 partisan primary to the 2022 nonpartisan primary. We are interested if political independents, moderates and younger voters participated at proportionately greater rates in the 2022 nonpartisan primary than in the previous partisan primary. We find that while turnout increased, it increased the most among political independents, liberals, younger voters and to some extent, moderates. This is consistent with the idea that a change to nonpartisan primaries may alter the pool of voters who nominate candidates for the general election, but these observations are based on a rather narrow time horizon.