Do Democratic primary voters have a problem with white men?

So it would seem from this pretty cool new PS research.  It’s mostly focused on the growth of inexperienced candidates for Congress:

From the 1980s to the mid-2010s, nearly three-quarters of members newlyelected to the US House of Representatives had previous elected experience;however, only half of the freshmen elected from 2016 to 2020 held prioroffice. In this article, we investigate emergence- and success-driven expla-nations for the declining proportion of experienced officeholders enteringCongress. In our analyses, we find that the advantages traditionally affordedto experienced candidates are waning. First, we show that inexperienced candidates’ emergence patterns have changed; amateurs are increasingly apt to emerge in the same kinds of contests as their experienced counterparts. We then show that experienced candidates have lost their fundraising edgeand that—for certain kinds of candidates—the value of elected experience itself has declined. Lastly, we identify other candidate characteristics as strong predictors for success in modern elections. We demonstrate that these electorally advantageous identities overwhelmingly belong to candidates who lack elected experience.

There’s a nice section specifically on race and gender effects at the end:

The left panel of Figure 8 demonstrates that moving from a male to female identity increases a Democrat’s predicted probability of primary election victory by nearly 8%, holding all else constant. Moving from a white to non-white identity increases a Democrat’s predicted probability of primary election victory by 15%. Turning to the right panel of Figure 8, possessing a female identity decreases a Republican’s probability of primary election victory by about 7%. Republicans possessing a non-white identity were not any more likely to win an open-seat primary.

This actually comports quite well with what I’ve heard from many Democrats (of both genders) here in NC, expressing an inherent skepticism towards white male candidates.  Of course, it’s also pretty interesting to see Republican women paying a penalty.  

Of course, it’s worth mentioning that there are still plenty of very successful white male Democratic candidates, but this is a pretty interesting result.