Primary colours: How to navigate the US electoral maze

The simplest way to pick presidential candidates would be a one-day national primary, where voters indicate their preferred presidential nominee from among candidates in the party they are aligned to. The opposite of that is how the US does it.

Our national presidential election – effectively an aggregation of 50 state elections thanks to the bizarre antiquity called the Electoral College (more on that later) – is preceded by a candidate selection process that’s as convoluted as it is interminable. Consider this: Texas senator Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential candidacy 586 days before the November 8 general election. And when Connecticut senator Chris Dodd ran in 2008, he relocated his family to Iowa’s capital city, Des Moines, three months before the Democratic presidential caucus, going so far as to enrol his daughter in a local kindergarten. In comparison, the French national election, a two-round process, is staged over a fortnight.

The state primaries decide how many delegates go forward to vote for each candidate at their party’s national convention, where the presidential nominee is chosen. But it was not always this way, nor this crazy. For most of our pre-21st century history, presidential nominees were chosen by party leaders in proverbial smoke-filled rooms. There were some primary elections, but they were often won by local “favourite sons” – party leaders and/or elected officials who then controlled all the delegates to their party’s subsequent national conventions.

In 1960, a young Catholic senator named John F Kennedy wanted to be the Democratic nominee, but party leaders were concerned US voters thought his first allegiance would be to the Vatican – the only previous Catholic nominee lost in a landslide in 1928. So Kennedy ran in a number of primaries and proved he could win a national election, which he did in November.

But 1968 is when things really changed. Arguably the most turbulent year of the century, 1968 saw civil rights and anti-war protests and the assassinations of Dr Martin Luther King in April and Democratic frontrunner Robert F Kennedy in June – incumbent President Lyndon B Johnson had withdrawn from the race after nearly being beaten in the March New Hampshire primary by anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy. The Democratic convention in Chicago was marked by chaos inside the hall and violence in the streets, and a post-mortem commission urged opening the primary process to wider participation, especially from minorities and women. By 1976, the number of states holding primaries had gone from 16 to 30.

The national media, which used to wait until the conventions to focus on the race for delegates, started focusing on the early primaries, which magnified their importance. In 1976, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a former peanut farmer, spent months travelling in Iowa and finished a surprising second, which launched his journey to the presidency.

But after Carter was beaten badly in 1980 by Ronald Reagan, Democratic leaders tried to wrest back control of the process by creating what are known as “superdelegates” – members of the party elite and elected officials who were free to support any candidate they chose and to announce their preference at any time. (Other delegates, awarded proportionally according to primary vote totals, were pledged to their candidate for at least the convention’s first ballot.)

The number of superdelegates has varied from 15-20% of the total, but that means 30-40% of what a candidate needed to secure the nomination, so they were incredibly influential. Their influence was curtailed after a 2016 controversy, when they helped tip the scales toward Hillary Clinton in a close race with Bernie Sanders. Starting in 2020, they were not allowed to vote in the first convention ballot.

But as long as there are major political parties, those who lead them will seek to gain as much control over the nominating process as possible. Ironically, party leaders’ goal of ensuring that the few determine outcomes for the many is exactly what happens in both the nominating process and general election. Because the nominating process is so front-loaded, and candidates who do well early are flooded with campaign contributions and free media attention, voters in states with later primaries have little to say about who gets nominated.