Consider the following two-dimensional voting problem: In a two-party system, call the parties A and B, the electorate -divided into a majority and a minority- chooses their preferred candidate along two dimensions. First, voters are more likely to vote for a candidate representing their population subgroup and secondly, they care about the candidates’ political views.

Assume voters to be uniformly distributed over the unit interval in terms of their ideology. The current incumbent from the majority subgroup of the population belongs to party A and supports a median policy. Party B does not have a suitable candidate from the majority subgroup of the population but two promising minority candidates. It is immediate to see that in the simple voting model the minority candidate has no chance of winning the election. What about party B positions its candidates in the primaries to the left and right of the incumbent and has the looser endorse the winner? Assume an endorsement not to guarantee votes but to increase the likelihood of voters initially opting for the endorsing candidate to vote for the endorsed one. Now the primary winner could move for moderation in the main election and reap the benefits of endorsement.

Do we have models which shed light on this scenario?