American Political System: Difference between revisions
MediaWiki does not handle this diff well -- I moved up the last paragraph to the head of the Primary section, then elaborated on the process.
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Whichever presidential slate receives 50% + 1 of the electoral votes (currently, 270) is elected. In the rare event that no candidate receives the needed number of electoral votes, the House of Representatives votes in the new president, with the Senate selecting the Vice President.
On those occasions when a loser of the ''popular'' election gains office through this process—thankfully a rare occasion, but
Because of the number of electors being roughly equivalent to population density, all one has to do is be elected President is to win the 11 states that have the most delegates: California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, and New Jersey. A president carrying said 11 states will win the election even if their opponent wins all of the delegates of all the other 39 states ''and'' the District of Columbia. In practice, this doesn't actually work due to the fact that many states are considered "safe" for one party or another–for example, in recent elections the Democrats have won California by comfortable margins each year, while the Republicans have done the same with Texas.
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== Primaries ==
The majority of elections for office are a competition between two major candidates, one Republican and one Democrat. How each party picks their candidate is totally up to them (except in California, where the state has a blanket primary in place).
Every state has laws which regulate this practice but each law is written by the parties, so they can choose whatever they want. There is also sometimes tension between state and national party organizations about the process, because each state wants its primary to have as large an influence on the final selection as possible. In 2012, several states moved their primaries earlier in the season, to have greater sway in determining which candidates get "momentum" (starting with Florida, which kicked off a cascade of state parties shifting their primaries up -- including some which passed laws essentially stating that they would hold their primaries a week before any other state's), which resulted in the national committees cutting their delegate counts for that year and implementing stricter rules about primary timing. Starting 2016, no state may hold primaries before February, and only Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada may actually hold primaries in that month. By convention, the Iowa caucus<ref>''Yet another'' wrinkle in the primary system -- "primaries" or "primary elections" are just that, primaries, but ''caucuses'' are events where activists and supporters of each candidate within various districts get together and discuss the candidates. It's not an election so much as a statewide series of conventions, in which attendees not only see who others are supporting but have multiple opportunities to convince them to change their minds.</ref> comes first, followed by the New Hampshire primary.
For example, the Democratic Party had a primary election in 2008 to decide if [[Barack Obama]] or [[Hillary Clinton]] would be their candidate for President. One might think that the party would simply have all members vote for who they want and which ever one gets the most votes would win. This is not how it works. The leaders of the Democratic Party, who are not elected, can choose any method they want to decide who their candidate is. The current method involves having the vote of the members choose most of the "delegates" (who themselves are chosen by the party), while the remaining delegates are high ranking party members ("superdelegates"). Depending on state law and state party rules, the delegates who were voted for might or might not be required to support the candidate they were elected to <ref>The logic behind this system is that the appointed "superdelegates" may be able to influence the nomination if a candidate does something monumentally stupid or embarassing after the popular votes have been cast. Absent such an event, superdelegates generally vote with the national plurality.</ref>▼
▲For a more specific example, the Democratic Party had a primary election in 2008 to decide if [[Barack Obama]] or [[Hillary Clinton]] would be their candidate for President. One might think that the party would simply have all members vote for who they want and which ever one gets the most votes would win. This is not how it works. The leaders of the Democratic Party, who are not elected, can choose any method they want to decide who their candidate is. The current method involves having the vote of the members choose most of the "delegates" (who themselves are chosen by the party), while the remaining delegates are high ranking party members ("superdelegates"). Depending on state law and state party rules, the delegates who were voted for might or might not be required to support the candidate they were elected to
Just to mention, the Republican Party's rules are pretty much the same as far as this goes. The main differences are that they make far less use of caucuses and allocate delegates by winner-takes-all or by congressional district for many states, not proportionally to popular vote, and do not use the "superdelegate" system. There was once a time when Democrats didn't use superdelegates either, but after George McGovern's disastrous run in 1972—in which he picked Sam Eagleton, who proved to have had psychiatric issues in the past (as well as later having been found to have made some controversial remarks about McGovern to the press), as his running mate—and [[Jimmy Carter]]'s loss to [[Ronald Reagan]] in 1980, they added this feature as a safeguard. This has not been without controversy, and the irony of the party whose name means "rule by the people" having a cadre of insiders (initially 14% of the delegate votes, increasing over the years to 20% in 2016) to stack the deck is not lost on commentators. During the 2016 Democratic primary, tensions arose between supporters of [[Hillary Clinton]] and [[Bernie Sanders]] over DNC actions that seemed to show unfair favor to Clinton, and then boiled over<ref>Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the DNC chair, resigned over the scandal, and while Sanders rallied his supporters behind Clinton after she secured the nomination and was offered some concessions when it came time to write the party platform, Clinton struggled with poor favorability ratings, even among those who voted for her.</ref> when DNC emails were leaked and revealed party officials talking about Clinton as if her nomination were a ''fait accompli'' and badmouthing Sanders's campaign -- or even acting behind the scenes to undermine it. Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle, the often-contentious Republican primary probably had GOP leaders ''wishing'' they had some superdelegates to throw around, especially as [[Donald Trump]] accumulated popular support and controversy in equal measure while the more "conventional" candidates couldn't seem to find their footing.<ref>The winner-take-all nature of most of the primary races also worked to Trump's advantage. There were several conventional candidates with reasonable chances, so nobody could command a majority of primary voters, but whichever one nosed out ahead of the rest, as Trump usually did, would take 100% of the delegates up for grabs. Had the delegates been distributed proportionally, no candidate would have come to the convention with a majority, which would have led to much more back-room politicking to select the final nominee.</ref> Conventional wisdom was that the GOP's relatively undisciplined process had produced an undisciplined candidate who would not only lose the general election but hurt the party's "down-ballot" candidates for Congress, but then Trump won the general election, and the Republicans also won control of the Senate and maintained their control of the House. The future of primaries and superdelegates is surely a major topic of discussion in both political parties; we'll have an update when 2020 rolls around.
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