Primaries are elections used to nominate who will represent a party in a general election. When someone says they want to “primary a politician,” they mean mounting a campaign to unseat that politician by running a competitive challenge in the same political party during a primary election. This process is most common in systems like the United States, where parties hold internal contests to choose their official candidate for a given office. Key ideas

• Purpose: Replace an incumbent or current officeholder with another candidate from the same party.
• How it works: In a partisan primary, registered party members (or eligible voters in an open primary) vote to choose the party’s nominee for the general election.
• Context: Primaries can target incumbents perceived as vulnerable or unpopular within their own party, or challenge a sitting officeholder who has diverged from the party base on policy or leadership style.
• Outcomes: The primary winner becomes the party’s official candidate in the upcoming general election, facing candidates from other parties.

Common terms

• Primary challenge: The act of challenging an incumbent in a primary. It’s often concentrated in “safe seats” where the primary winner is more likely to win the general election.
• “Getting primaried”: Informal phrase describing an incumbent facing such a challenge.

If you want, I can tailor this to a specific country or election system (for example, U.S. states with open vs closed primaries, or parliamentary systems with party leadership contests).