Hi, and welcome back to Legal Geek. This week, we explain the current status of how the different U.S. states run their presidential primary nomination process, and how that process is shifting once again.
The U.S. has a fairly unique method of nominating candidates for elected offices including the presidency. Unlike most countries where political parties have significant control over who is nominated, the U.S. conducts a patchwork series of 50+ contests over a few months to award delegates who then pledge votes at a party convention to finalize the party's nominee. These contests are run by state party entities and governments, leading to a lot of different types of primaries.
Of course, many states are what we call regular primaries, in which voters individually go into a voting booth and make their selections, and the winner is determined by simple popular vote. In the Democratic Party, any candidate receiving over 15% of the vote in a state earns some of that state's delegates, while in the Republican Party, most states apply delegates proportionally to multiple candidates while a few apply winner-take-all-delegates rules. It's more complicated than that in some respects, but those general rules are good enough to understand most of these contests.
But those aren't the interesting outliers, as we know from recent heavy news coverage of the first nomination contest of the cycle, the Iowa caucuses. Iowa is one of 6 states that still run a caucus, and the only state that still does a caucus for both political parties. In a caucus, voters all gather at a local school gymnasium or other meeting place and group themselves publicly based on which candidate they support, typically followed by a chance to re-align for any voters supporting a candidate who doesn't meet a viability threshold. This process engages fewer voters because in often requires a longer period of time at a specific time of day, as compared to primaries. Many more states previously conducted caucuses, but they are gradually being replaced in most states by primaries. On the Democratic side, the only remaining caucuses in 2020 for states are Nevada, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
The other main outlier is a newer modification to the primary system, this being ranked choice primaries. In ranked choice voting, voters rank the candidates in order based on their preferences when in the voting booth. If a candidate wins over 50% of the first preference votes, the process is over. If not, then the candidate with the lowest number of first-preference votes is eliminated, and those voters with that first preference have their second preference elevated to be a new first preference, and then the check for 50% is done again. This process continues until there is a true majority winner. Only Maine has adopted such a process for 2020, but some other localities in other states are trying the process and local legislation is pending or being implemented in other states to follow Maine's lead. We will see how this plays out differently than the known regular primary and caucus contests.
It seems that the current reforms for primary elections are to move away from caucuses and towards obtaining more information from voters in a different way, e.g., ranked choice voting. Furthermore, the long sequential nature of primary contests over a few months is also being challenged and perhaps will be replaced by a national primary day or several regional primary days where all states in a region vote at the same time.
However, the rules tend to change a little or a lot after each presidential nominating cycle based on feedback within and to the political parties running these contests. If you want a deep dive into the history of U.S. primary nominating processes and how we got to where we are today, check out the recent Primaries Project podcast series from the FiveThirtyEight team. But hopefully this brief overview helps those of you trying to understand the complexities of the U.S. nominating process as it continues from now through June in 2020.
The Bottom Line is: the general election for U.S. president and the electoral college rules are not the only unique and strange part of the process, as evidenced by this ever-changing landscape or patchwork of primary contests. The only constant is to expect further change and reform in this system, as it never stays exactly the same from presidential election to presidential election. Let's all do like Justin Robert Young does and enjoy the horse race for what it is.
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