Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day in 2004 in the Pennsylvania Senate race the

conservative Pat Toomey is challenging moderate Republican incumbent

Arlen Specter. It is a dynamic that just in the 10 years or so since has come to seem very normal, a primary

race that features a more established, often more moderate candidate, fending off a more ideological

challenger from further to the right or the left, though it often does seem to be from the right, and sometimes when that primary challenger wins, they go on to be exposed as maybe not quite so ready for primetime as they get to the general election. This phenomenon is so

common that it's kind of turned into a verb to primary someone is now

something we talk about in American politics. So let's talk about that

2004 Senate race the origins of getting

primaried and what this dynamic in the primary system means for our democracy

overall and our special guests for this episode is Nick Troiano, author of The Primary Solution,

rescuing our Democracy from the Fringe. He is also executive director of

Unite America, which is a group that invests in nonpartisan election reform.

He joins us from Denver.

Hello there, Nick.

Thanks for doing this.

Great to be with you.

And here, as always, Nicole Hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there. Hello Jody. Hey there. So Nick the timing for this is actually quite

nice for our show because we just finished a series that we called Hangers On Week

which was our look at primary candidates who like stuck

...