Thanks. It explains a lot, I guess.
From Washington - whose blanket primary California copied (and tried to ruin).
It gives voters something similar to ranked choice voting (it obviously isn’t exactly the same) with your primary vote being your “true” number one choice, but your vote still counts in the general election when you’re going to need to choose between two people who can actually win. There are a lot of weird parties in the primaries - they’re mostly gone by the general.
FTR - we do not register by party. There’s no space for party affiliation on the voter registration form. The only way to be a “registered ________” is to go to the party and sign up. Very few people actually do that.
Any such list kept by a party organization isn’t going to be available to the public anyway, and is very unlikely to be relevant to any public conversation about party support.
And, to be clear, the term “registered” is used quite loosely. In most states, there isn’t even such a thing as registering as a party member. Instead, the only public record is which party primary one voted in the last time around.
You could if you wanted include people who volunteer, people elected to various boards and committees—many of which operate on a very independent basis from any central party organization—various affiliated and non-affiliated fund-raising entities, people who manage to get elected to delegations and such.
It’s a very loose system. So, we don’t generally think of a party in terms of “membership.” Parties are professional political entities, not entities with deep roots in communities.
The only exception used to be close ties between labor unions and (mostly) the Democratic party. Now, labor leadership is often still close to Democrats, but their members aren’t very dedicated to political activism or party loyalty.
Banksian asked:
Does registering to vote for either party make you a member of that party or its purely for that election [I assume you need to be a member to directly influence policy and decide who your election candidates are]?
to which TriPolar responded:
I wouldn’t mind seeing a cite for that because AFAIK, that’s not the case.
I don’t think we even have actual party membership in any meaningful sense in the US. Would it even mean anything if someone said they are a member of the X Party? Isn’t just like saying “I’m a fan of the New York Mets.”
In some states people have to choose a party to vote in that election’s primary so people might say “I’m a registered Republican” or “I’m a registered Democrat.” But you don’t have to be a member of anything to choose to vote in either primary.
And we use the peculiar wording “identifies as a X” instead of “is a X” or “is a member of the X Party.” Here’s an example:
As of May 2020, Gallup polling found that 31% of Americans identified as Democrats, 25% identified as Republican, and 40% as Independent.[3] Additionally, polling showed that 50% are either “Democrats or Democratic leaners” and 38% are either “Republicans or Republican leaners” when Independents are asked “do you lean more to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?”
Too late for edit:
Curses! Looks like Acsenray beat me to it.
That is absolutely the case. Where do you think the party candidates come from? It’s not some smoke filled room, it’s a process in which the members of the party get to decide. There must be petitions filed with signatures of party members. Each party has organizations within each voting district which have appointed and elected leaders. Every member of the party has a say in the party business. When you vote in a primary you are enrolled as a member of that party. In most states you select a party when you register to vote. Just because most people don’t participate in the process does not mean it does not exist. Each state maintains the party status of it’s citizens, as well as the parties themselves. If you want to participate find your local district leader, or contact the party itself and you have a right to become a member of any political party and fully participate in their activities.
Do you have a cite for this? How would one show they’re a party member? How would they prove it?
Please show a cite for this.
I’ve voted in primaries before and no one told me afterward that I had instantly become a member of some party. And shouldn’t I have been sent a laminated membership card?
I did not know that.
You have no idea what you are talking about. Answer the simple question, where do the party candidates come from?
If I could please just see your cite first? This is General Questions, after all.
I’m not citing questions based on total ignorance. There are 50 different states and 50 different sets of rules and you don’t know the rules for any of them.
And just because this is so easy, here is the Rhode Island Running for Office Guide for Dummies. You can look this up for every state and see over and over again the processes you are totally unaware of and the fact that the states keep track of what party you belong to or your status as an independent.
Have it whatever way you want it, TriPolar. If I was wrong then I apologize. I don’t want to cause any grief. This is General Questions so I felt facts should be presented and cited. Maybe between you and the other posters they will be. I reckon I’m gonna just chill a bit. Cheers!
For what it’s worth, “ranked choice” is not a voting system. It’s a kind of ballot, which can be used in a wide variety of voting systems. In practice, it’s most often used to refer to instant-runoff voting, because that’s the system that is easiest to explain to most people, but there are other ways one could interpret a set of ranked-choice ballots, such as any of the Condorcet methods.
I’m in Ohio. I just want to make one point about the primary election that I don’t think has been mentioned yet. For the primary here, each voter gets a choice of which ballot he wants to vote for: the Republican ballot, the Democratic ballot, or the “Issues only” ballot. Frequently, school board tax levies and local city government charter revisions and the like are on the ballot along with the political party primaries. The tax and charter issues are included in both party’s primary ballot. The “Issues only” ballot allows a person to vote on the issues on the ballot without having to declare which party he or she is in.
Choosing the “issues only” ballot amounts to skipping the primary election and voting only in a general election for issues, so it doesn’t contradict anything else mentioned in the thread.
But there have to be some publicly available lists, don’t there? This article indicates that more Democrats have voted by mail than Republicans. Since the ballot is secret, it must be some list tied to party registration that they’re using to come up with that information:
Over 9 Million People Have Already Voted In The 2020 Election, The Majority Being Democrats
As of Saturday, among the nine states that provide party registration data, Democrats had returned more than 2 million ballots nationally, while Republicans had returned approximately 891,000, according to the U.S. Election Project data.
As I said above, such references to “Democrats” and “Republicans” are shorthand. They don’t refer to genuine, dues-paying, card-carrying, local-committee-meeting-attending “members” in the sense that parties in other countries have members. In most cases they’re referring to “voters who chose to vote in the Democratic/Republican primary the last time there was a primary election in that state.”
Some states do have party registration apart from “which party’s primary this person voted in last time, and on those states that’s what the references to “Democrats” and “Republicans” means. But again, this is not the same thing as a private entity’s actual membership roll.
I don’t know what point you are trying to make here. No, you don’t need a membership card or to pay dues to become a Democrat or a Republican, usually you just check a box on a form, but that makes you a full fledged member of that political party. It is a public record. Each state maintains a list of the party memberships to determine who is eligible to vote and run in primaries. There is nothing informal about this. There is no special membership beyond that.
Bolding added.
Some states do that. My state explicitly does not. Anyone can run in primaries and can express a preference for any political party. And anyone can vote for anyone in non-presidential primaries.*
(there is a slight difference for presidential primaries but even then, depending on the party in question and their declaration that cycle, it may not go as far as membership.)