U.S. Senate Candidate Quality Data
Share of U.S. Senate candidates who had previously held elected office. Non-incumbent (challenger and open-seat) contests only. Hover any point for its value and the number of candidates behind it.
Prior Elected Experience of Senate Candidates
Most recent prior elected office held by non-incumbent Senate primary candidates, 1980–2024. Pooled over the whole period or broken out by decade and party.
Candidate Supply in Senate Primaries
How many candidates enter each non-incumbent Senate primary, and how many of them have held office before. Primaries actually held only, matching the inputs to the article's Table 1 and Figures 4–5.
Explore the Data
Pick a dataset, then search or filter its rows. Click a column heading to sort. The download gives you exactly the rows you have filtered.
Search matches any column; several words must all match. Blanks are missing values. Variable definitions are in the codebook.
Download the Data
The same three files posted with the article's replication package, trimmed to the variables used in the published analysis, as CSV. Each download asks you to confirm before saving.
Candidates, 1980–2024
One row per major-party candidate who filed with the FEC: prior elected experience, primary participation and outcomes under each candidate-pool definition, pre-primary fundraising share, covariates.
Party primaries, 1980–2024
One row per major-party Senate primary: nomination type, primary rules, seat status, counts of emerging and on-ballot candidates by experience, state co-partisanship.
General-election races, 1914–2024
Senate general elections with the Democratic two-party vote share and the prior elected experience of each party's nominee.
Codebook
Draft variable descriptions for all three files.
Downloads use the viewer's save dialog. If they are unavailable in your view, the archive of record on Dataverse holds the same files.
Codebook
Draft descriptions, written from the replication README and code. Coding rules are documented in the article's Data section and Appendix SA.1 and SA.3.
About the Data
The Rise of Amateur Candidate Pipelines & Declining Value of Candidate Experience in U.S. Senate Primaries, 1980–2024
Authors: Carlos Algara, Byengseon Bae, Isaac Hale, Michael Heseltine, and Evan Lieber. Legislative Studies Quarterly.
These are the cleaned analysis data behind the article: every major-party candidate who filed with the Federal Election Commission for the U.S. Senate from 1980 to 2024, coded for most recent prior elected office, primary participation and outcomes, and pre-primary fundraising; a primary-level file with candidate counts; and a general-election file (1914–2024) with nominee experience.
A quality candidate is one who has previously held elected office of any kind. Candidates with no prior elected office are coded Amateur.
Charts on this page are descriptive summaries of the posted data. The article's model-based estimates (Figures 4–7 and the appendix) are reproduced by the replication code on Dataverse. This page is a static preview of a fuller Shiny application that adds filters by primary type, year range and state, and RDS downloads.
Contacts
Carlos Algara, Claremont Graduate University · carlos.algara@cgu.edu
Isaac Hale, Occidental College · halei@oxy.edu
Michael Heseltine, University of Oxford · michael.heseltine@sociology.ox.ac.uk
- Dataverse
- doi:10.7910/DVN/52OFMP
LSQ Dataverse, deposited September 2026 - Author's Dataverse
- dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/carlosalgara
- Version
- 1.0 (2026-09-21 deposit)
- License
- CC BY 4.0 (proposed)
- Page built