this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Primaries are generally much more extreme, because everyone voting is part of the party. So the candidates will be closely toeing the party line to pick up the passionate voters.
To be clear, the individual parties aren’t actual government-funded organizations. They’re private entities, who choose to hold primaries and then put the party’s support behind whoever wins. This is an important distinction because this means the individual primaries can be run however the party wants, even if that means not having a primary and simply running a sitting president (like what happened to Biden, then later Kamala after Biden dropped out). And registering to vote with a party is typically exclusive, meaning you can only vote in one pre-chosen primary election per cycle. Like if I were to register as a republican to vote in the republican primary, the democrat party wouldn’t allow me to cast a vote in their primary.
Then whoever wins the primaries goes on to the general election. While winning the primary is only a soft requirement for the general election, (anyone can run as an independent candidate), the US’ first-past-the-post voting system means it’s virtually impossible to win the general election without the support of one of the two big parties. And if you want to get that support, you need to win the primary. Independent candidates are generally thought of as wasted votes, meme votes, protest votes, etc…
Notably, in the general election, democrats’ campaigns tend to take a strategy of “move farther right to grab the center/center-right swing voters.” Since any registered voter can vote in the general, swing voters often determine who wins and loses the general. Which means candidates tend to disproportionately focus on appeasing those swing voters. And this tends to piss off the democrats/leftists/etc who prefer the farther left policies. Especially when those same candidates have spent the past month parroting the official democratic party platform to win the primary, then suddenly about-face and cozy up to the centrists in the general.
So even if leftists were able to get enough votes for a far-left candidate in the primaries, (they can’t, because America has no notable far-left/leftist voting blocks), that same candidate would then immediately shift to the center to grab the swing votes in the general.