ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the studies of sore loser laws in two new ways. First, it expands the findings on the polarizing influence of sore loser laws as applied to congressional and state legislative candidates by looking at the actual incidence of sore loser candidates where they were permitted by law. Second, the chapter details the state-by-state application of sore loser laws to presidential candidates. Scholars have rightly sought to understand the consequences of the permutations but have largely neglected one aspect of primaries that also affects general elections: the sore loser law. The mismatch between the national scale of the presidential election and the state-limited scope of any state sore loser law complicates the application. The normative desirability of sore loser laws reflects tradeoffs among a variety of goals and will depend on which of these values gets priority.
