Presidential Election - help for a non-American

Factual Questions
1

Hi Guys,

I’m hoping for some insight into this whole Presidential run off thing that is happening now. (I can’t think of the correct term for it at the moment)

I cannot recall there ever having been so much coverage here in Australia about the pre-election run-off. Previously we’d get an occasional news snippet about the run offs, this candidate had retired and given his votes to that candidate, the staging of one party or anothers big party rally (electoral colleges - is that the right term). We’d get get fuller coverage once the actual election commenced however.

But this time we seem to be getting full blow by blow coverage of the whole shebang. The democratic hopefuls just clawing away at each other, the recent debate amongst the republicans shooting each other down.

Can someone explain why the chosing of each parties candidate is done so publically? And exactly who are the people voting for the candidates? Is it (as it sometimes looks) an open vote for anyone, or are these people who are voting all registered members of the respective political parties?

It just seems a waste to me that half the work in mud-slinging a given candidate is being done by so called ‘party mates’, before they even have to face off against the opposition candidate in the presidential election proper.

2

One reason for this is that the election ‘process’ seems to have started much earlier this year than most years. Many Americans are similarly complaining about exhaustion from election coverage.

Mostly because there’s a lot of competition to get the nomination of a major party. Doing so gives you access to lots of resources, and many voters vote in the general election on party lines - they’ll vote for the democratic nominee, for instance, no matter who it is. So, getting the nomination is extremely important, and you need to persuade the public to give you that nomination.

It’s close to an open vote. The laws on registering for a party vary slightly from state-to-state, but generally speaking, anyone who can vote can register with a single party, and then participate in their primaries. In some states, you can register as an independent and still vote in the primary.

Yeah. This is one of the reasons that primaries are nearly a year before the actual election. The thinking is, its better to have the other party spending money on attack ads on your candidate than to have your own party doing so. However, all that moving the primaries earlier has managed to do is make the competition for the primaries start earlier, so there is no real gain.
On the other hand, its also important to note that America has waaaaay less party cohesion than in most parliamentary states. “Party loyalty” is not a given, and “party mates” certainly aren’t always friendly to one another, even outside of elections. Its extremely rare for even a single vote in US Congress to be entirely on party lines, without any defections, while that is the norm in the UK.
The parties are particularly divided internally today. The unpopular presidency and the war in Iraq have divided many Republicans, and the war on terror and immigration have fractured much of the Democratic party as well. As a result, the primaries really mean a whole lot this year, and the mud-slinging is done by factions within parties.

3

Okay. Here is the short-short version:

The Democrats and the Republicans each hold a convention late in the summer to nominate one candidate to be their representative on the November general election ballot.

The winner of the nomination in the one who receives the most votes at the convention. The delegates to this convention are selected by what amounts to contests in each of the 50 states to allocate delegates to the respective conventions.

So far, all that has happened is that Iowa and Wyoming has held cacuses (sp) to select delegates. As far as who can vote and whether they must be registered to a political party: These rules vary by state. I know that in Florida, you must be registered to a particular party to vote in that contest. In other states, you may choose which party you want to vote for regardless of how you are registered.

There are far more intracacies than this, but I hope this helps a little bit…

4

Nope. You’re thinking of the conventions. The primaries are individual-state elections for each party where the state determines who its delegates will vote for at the convention, and at said convention the states will vote that way. The conventions are thus essentially a rubber stamp.

The electoral college is a method by which the President is elected - it is composed of delegates from each state, one for each Senator and member of the House of Representatives, who are expected to (and if history is the judge, will undoubtedly) vote for the candidate who captured a majority in their states.

5

[QUOTE=Ace309]
Nope. You’re thinking of the conventions. The primaries are individual-state elections for each party where the state determines who its delegates will vote for at the convention, and at said convention the states will vote that way. The conventions are thus essentially a rubber stamp.
QUOTE]
The convention is not always a rubber stamp. We’ll see how it plays out this year, but in the past there has often been a lot of deal-making, behind the scenes (and sometimes even in front of them). For example, if three candidates split the primaries for a party, so that no one candidate has 50% or more, it could turn really interesting.

The original idea for the electoral college was that the individual voter could not hope to be well-informed enough to decide such an important matter. So each state would select a number of knowledgeable men (it was always men in the beginning) to meet and vote for President. They were not originally intended to be pre-committed to any specific person, just the smartest guys in the state who would make the choice for you. The first couple of elections under the Constitution, it was easy: All in favor of George Washington? The ayes have it.

Very soon after that it became incredibly more complicated. At the beginning the person with the most electoral votes was President and the first runner-up was vice president. This led to cases where the VP just hated the Pres. Also there got to be a behind the scenes deal where the electors would make deals like "I don’t have enough votes for my guy to be president, but neither do you, so if you vote for my guy for president, I’ll vote for yours to be veep. Of course, if some individual “forgot” who he promised to vote for, all heck could break loose.

6

The first contested election was 1796.

Gradually it evolved to the present system. Each state still selects, by a specific formula, a number of electors, but the ballot never has the electors’ names on it, just the name of the candidate they have promised to vote for. Some states it is a “winner take all” and in others it is proportional, so that each candidate gets a percentage of the electors corresponding to the percentage of votes cast for each candidate, with a minimum to have at least one elector.

What they’re doing right now is deciding, within each party, who will be the candidate offered by that party. So people are in one sense doing a miniature version of the electoral college by deciding within their own state how many convention delegates pledged to each candidate will go to the convention for the party they are registered for. Once the convention is actually in session, the delegates for a specific candidate could still decide their preferred person is just not going to make it, and change their convention vote to someone else.

7

Typically (meanign the ones I remember off-hand):

Closed primary: the people who elect the candidate (well, delegates to go to the convention and vote for them really, but let’s stick with simplicity here) must be part of the party, usually for x amount of time (for example here in Arizona today was the last day to register if you want a counted vote, though we have an odd case too more on this later).

Crossover primary: You have to be registered to vote, but it’s damn EASY tor register. Sometimes they’ll literally have a registrar outside of teh convention center or wherever they’re having it, so you can literally go vote in the republican primaries, reregister otuside and go vote in the democratic primaries. This is what Arizona has technically (again more later).

Open Primaries: Any schmuck can vote, to be honest I’m not entirely certain if they even need to be registered to vote much less a party member(as political parties are private organizations, I don’t think they technically need require a registration card just as your book club doesn’t need to make sure you ahve a voting card).

Now why does Arizona have crossover primaries technically but the last day to register was today? Well technically speaking we’re not havinga “primary” we’re having a “presidential preference election” yay convoluted terminology!

Yeah there are so many wedges now, odd though normally when this happens we end up getting a fringe party that makes the other party win because one decided to leave and form their own party/run independently and take their followers with them. Still time though for things to heat up I guess. This is a particularily devisive election it seems both parties are just heavily in disagreement within themselves.

8

I think we’re getting more coverage here this time for a few reasons:

1/ it’s a more open and therefore interesting election than for many a year
2/ there are a lot of interesting characters involved
3/ there is a genuine possibility that the first black or woman will be elected, which is exciting. We’ve just elected out first female deputy PM
4/ we’ve just had our own election and got rid of a regressive government who had hung around too long, so this situation strikes a familiar note
5/ we’re just coming out of a period of apathy about politics (related to 4/ above) and so we’re more engaged by the theatre of it
6/ we realise this time that said apathy, displayed re the US in 2000 and 2004 and locally since 1996, was out of place as it turns out it really really mattered who won those elections - the world would be a very different place if those outcomes had been different. All the current candidates could be expected to make a similarly huge difference in the next 4 or 8 years.

9

For a Brit - where we are also getting a lot of US Election coverage this time - can someone explain how the results of the primaries/caucuses are translated into votes at the Conventions?

The results of - for instance - the Democratic caucuses were 38/30/29 Obama/Edwards/Clinton. Does this mean that the Iowa delegates at the Convention are split in the same proportion? And how is it decided how many delegates Iowa will have? Is it based on the population of the state, or the number of registered Democrats, or something else? Also how are the individuals chosen? MLS mentions that deals can be made so the delegates are not absolutely bound to vote for one candidate so I would assume the actual choice of the individuals is important.

Any information would be helpful - I watch the last series of the West Wing but i never really got it :smiley:

10

Wikipedia is full of useful information but lacks some of the details I’d love to see. For now, a good top-level answer can be found here, under the heading “Types of Primary”. To save your time, I quote a portion here:

To use your Iowa example, the candidates who finished with delegates (over 15% of the vote) were Obama, Clinton, and Edwards. You can look here to see detailed results, but the upshot was that Obama got 16 national delegates, Hillary earned 15, and Edwards earned 14. This is a quirk of geography – Hillary won in a district that is allocated four delegates, and so made up some ground despite being lower in the vote totals than Edwards. Obama’s “big” win was mostly a psychological and moral victory over the supposedly-inevitable Clinton campaign.

Despite her third-place* finish in Iowa, Clinton still leads the count of “superdelegates” (delegates from all states who are not bound to respect primary results). These delegates are typically faithful party members, and I imagine that their support is based partly on deal-making and minor concessions. Right now, of the 796 superdelegates, most are undecided, but 160 have already shown support for Clinton, compared to 59 for Obama and 32 for Edwards. So Obama’s one-point lead from Iowa shows that he has momentum and appeal, but he’ll need to win some larger states to either overcome those superdelegates’ votes, or to convince them (with his momentum) to change their votes for him.

A total of 2,025 delegates (including the superdelegates) is required to secure the Democratic nomination. Florida and Michigan have had their 2008 delegates stripped for breaking with the party’s primary ordering (trying to make their primary occur earlier, which would garner them more national attention and campaign visits), meaning that other large states like California and New York become proportionally bigger prizes. “Super Tuesday” (5 February) will see ~40% of the delegates awarded and may very well secure the nomination for one candidate or another.

    • edited from “second place”… it’s one or the other depending whether you count votes or delegates.
11

Aha! Here is the table I was looking for: it tells how the Democratic party allocates its delegates between the states. Super Tuesday is worth 1,688 of the 2,025 votes needed. If Florida and Michigan’s delegates counted, it would be possible for a candidate to secure 450 votes before February 5th, but they’ve been excluded, so without the support of at least 200 superdelegates, no candidate can lock up the nomination by then.

In such a close race, it’s possible that a candidate with enough party support could sway the superdelegates and “steal” the nomination from a candidate who had an equal or greater number of state delegates. If the Democratic race stays close, expect to hear a lot more about Hillary’s strong and long-standing support within the party.

I’m sure similar information (and similar quirks of superdelegate allocation) are available for the Republicans, but I’m not likely to vote for any of their candidates so I’ve only been paying a little bit of attention to their race.

12

I hope you Americans won’t mind but I have to say this looks wierd to someone used to the British system. Disenfranchising the party members in two major states in the choice of your party’s candidate for the most important elected office in the world seem, super-delegates who aren’t bound by the results - it all seems odd.

13

I know they call it a two party system, but that’s not really the law is it?
How do third party candidates work?

I take it the other parties might have their own conventions. Do you even need the backing of a party to stand as a candidate for the Presidential election?
How would an American and his best friend put themselves up for President and VP?
Am I right in saying they technically just need enough signatures? I may have just seen that in a film though.

And then, in theory, members of the Electoral College could vote for them if they wanted to?

14

If it helps, you could probably think of American political parties (the Big Two, anyway) as less like British/Australian parties and more like semi-permanent coalitions. Both parties are composed of a number of loosely-allied interest groups: e.g., the Republicans (as has been discussed here before) have the Econo-cons (economic conservatives), the Neo-cons, the Paleo-cons (neanderthal conservatives), the Theo-cons (religious conservatives) and the Liber-cons (small-l libertarians). Historically, the Econo-cons and more recently the Neo-cons have been soaking up the votes of the rest of them but controlling the agenda. A lot of the contention on the Republican side of the primary season stems from that, because some of the factions (the Theo-cons and the liber-cons, especially) have woken up to the fact that they’ve been used.

Now, as convoluted and twisted-about as that sounds, historically, the Democratic coalition is even looser and less disciplined. Will Rogers, the cowboy humorist, said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” The Democrat coalition looks a little like the political equivalent of a table at the church rummage sale…you’ve got gays, feminists, libertines, near-anarchists, socialists, hippies, left-wing Christian factions of most denominations, pagans, progressives, liberals, the DLC (Democratic Leadership Council, sort of the Econo-dems), the Northeastern (and Northwestern, and Midwestern) Liberal M(b)illionaires (Bill Gates, the Kennedys, Warren Buffett), and pretty much the entire center-to-left spectrum except for Communists (they usually don’t deign to mingle their political seed with a mongrel like the Democratic party).

Party “membership” doesn’t necessarily mean voting in lockstep. The Republicans of the mid-90s to 2006 had a reputation for that, but that was more a leadership/financing equation than any ideological loyalty. The amount of financing chicanery involved on the Republican side with Tom DeLay,et. al., would curl your hair. But that was actually an aberration…the Republicans have been, historically, as contentious in voting record as the Democrats have.

Anyway, it helps to remember that the American parties are more like long-term coalition governments, only they hang together even when they’re out of power.

15

It’s not illegal to run “third” (or fourth, or fifth) parties in the US, but it’s damn difficult to do it. The last party that made any kind of major splash in an election was the Reform Party under Ross Perot, and that only happened because the man had mountains of money and the country was fed up with GHW Bush. If Perot hadn’t shown himself to be a loony nutcake and a flake to a nationwide audience, we’d have had 8 years of President Perot instead of President Clinton, I think. The mood among the electorate was THAT ugly in 1992.

Members of the electoral college could, technically, vote for Mickey Mouse if they wanted to, subject to state laws. Some states do require their electors to vote according to the state results, but not all do. There have been “faithless electors” before, and while it may not be illegal or invalid, by the name it’s given, you can tell people don’t like it much.

16

They can if they want to. Primaries and a convention are not required in order to get on the ballot in any state. If you can round up enough signatures for a ballot petition in a given state, you’re good to go. The small parties usually don’t have enough support to get ballot access in every state, though. (For example, in 2004, the Green Party candidate was on the ballot in 28 states.)

No. Independent candidates run all the time. The most successful was Ross Perot, who ran as an independent in 1992 and secured ballot access in all 50 states. In 1996 he ran again, this time as part of an organized party called the Reform Party, which has subsequently collapsed.

Yeah, basically, that’s all you need to run as an independent. But you need to do that in every state where you want to run; a minimum of many big states is required to have a chance at a majority in the Electoral College.

In theory, members of the Electoral College could vote for whoever they want, even if they didn’t stand for election in the first place. The presidential election is not really for the President, but for the group of electors from each state. Those electors are pledged to support a given candidate, but are free to vote for whomever they please. (See faithless electors.) It doesn’t happen very often, and has never actually affected the outcome of an election.

17

Neither of those factor seems odd to me, from a Canadian perspective. For example, in those Canadian parties that select delegates for a leadership convention, usually on a constituency basis, the party sets the rules for when the local votes may occur, and what process is to be followed. If a particular constituency association doesn’t follow those rules, I could see the party council refusing to seat the delegates that association elected. The refusal to accept delegates from entire states is a bit odd, but ultimately, it’s the party that decides who can participate in its nominating convention.

Similarly, we have super-delegates here at party conventions, and frankly, I’d be surprised if you don’t have them in Britiain. Here, in those parties that have leadership conventions, all of the sitting MPs for that party are usually automatic delegates to the convention, as are many senior party officials, and sometimes even the defeated candidates who ran for the party in that last general election (it depends on the particular rules of each party). Those delegates aren’t bound to vote for anyone at the leadership convention. (matt_mcl can give a lot more details, I’m sure.)

The point of this arrangement is to have a variety of interests represented at the convention - the party leadership and sitting MPs who have a strong personal knowledge of the candidates and how they are likely to perform; delegates elected at the grass-roots to bring local and regional representation, etc.

Don’t you have similar arrangements in Britain? For example, do sitting MPs have to be elected a delegate by the local constituency association in order to attend a leadership convention, or do they have ex officio status?

18

There is one substantive constitutional restriction on the electors: they must vote for at least one candidate (president or vice-president) who does not come from their home state. In practise, this means that the party will nominate a vice-presidential candidate who comes from a different state than the president, so that the members of the electoral college in each state can vote the party’s slate. (Although there are sometimes easy work-arounds to this requirement, depending on how laxly a state defines residency for election purposes.)

19

Greedy Smurf, the first thing you must understand in order to get a grasp on the primary process is that American political parties are not like parties in other countries. An American political party is not a single organization that has a defined membership. In fact, it is pretty hard to define what “membership” actually means for these purposes.

Generally speaking, you’re a member of a party as soon as you say “I’m a member of the X party.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean you get any privileges that someone who has never said that doesn’t have.

At the state level, the laws of each state individually define how one might become a candidate for office and a nominee for a particular party. That applies to pretty much all offices, except the U.S. president and vice president. It’s here that it gets a bit murky.

The two major parties (and some minor parties) traditionally nominate their presidential and vice presidential candidates at a national convention. The organization that runs the convention, the party’s national committee, decides how delegates will be allocated. Except for the “super-delegates,” delegates are generally allocated by state.

However, it is up to the individual state party organizations to decide how to fill their delegations for the national convention. These days, most of them use the primary election system, which is an election just like any other. It varies from state to state, but very generally speaking, almost any eligible voter can choose to vote in a party’s primary.

The system is completely ad hoc and has been subject to various “reforms.” The Democratic Party instituted the super delegate system as a reform to take some power away from local political party bosses (the legendary “smoke-filled rooms”) and to try to ensure that the party’s nominee is more palatable to the general voting public.

20

The last convention to go beyond a first ballot was in 1952, IIRC. 1952 is also the last time when neither party had a president or vice president on the ballot. That’s one major reason why this year’s process started so much earlier and contained so many more serious candidates.

I don’t remember a convention challenge that required trading delegates since that time. (There were some times when people tried, but all such efforts were non-starting failures.)

Certainly for the adult lifetimes of almost everybody in this country, the convention has been a rubber stamp for the decision made in the primaries. This is completely deliberate on the part of the parties. The membership got tired of the bosses doing horsetrading of promises for delegates and increased the number of primaries to the point where nothing could be changed at a convention.

The candidates this year will be decided on February 5, the day of the primaries in the big states. The conventions will be infomercials watched by almost no one.

From the perspective of someone in New York state it is odd to watch the primaries in other states. New York has a closed primary so that only registered party members can vote in that party. Registration must be done early as well. (I think 45 days before the primary, but I could be mistaken.) What the point is of being a registered member of a party if not for the privilege of getting to vote on who that party’s candidates will be? I’ve never understood open or crossover primaries. So if the process seems odd to those in other countries, there’s good reason for it. It makes no sense to me either.