Primary Elections

Primary elections can both benefit and damage political parties and individual candidates. Elections can benefit parties by allowing the public to gauge where the individual candidate stands. Additionally, parties can essentially weed out the weak candidates and put forth who their strongest candidate for a particular elections. Also, when the weaker candidates drop out of the race, they will put their support behind the strongest one and tell their supporters to do the same. On the other hand, primaries can have a bad effect on parties and candidates. During primary campaigns, candidates will often use mudslinging in order to make their oppinets look bad even though they are in the same party. Doing this can weaken the candidate in the general election, as their own party members have pointed out their weaknesses on certain issues. Primary elections are an important part of the politcal process, but they can also have negative effects.