How do American elections work? 303is determined on a state-by-state basis by the state and national party organizations.^7 In
some states, each candidate preselects a list of delegates who will attend the convention
if the candidate wins sufficient votes in the primary or caucus. In other states, delegates
are chosen by party leaders after the actual primary or caucus takes place. In both
cases, a candidate’s principal goal is to win as many delegates as possible—and to
select delegates who will be reliable supporters at the convention. Some states require
delegates to vote for the candidate they are pledged to—at least for the first ballot at the
party nominating convention. However, these laws have never been tested and it is not
clear that they are enforceable.
The details of translating primary and caucus votes into convention delegates vary
from state to state, but some general rules apply. All Democratic primaries and caucuses
use proportional allocation to divide each state’s delegate seats among the candidates;
thus, if a candidate receives 40 percent of the votes in a state’s primary, the candidate
gets roughly 40 percent of the convention delegates from that state. Some Republican
contests use proportional allocation, but others use a winner-take-all system. In these
states, the candidate who receives the most votes gets all the convention delegates.
These rules can have a significant effect on candidates’ campaign strategies and the
outcome of the nomination process (see How It Works: Nominating Presidential
Candidates in Chapter 8).
The order in which the primaries and caucuses in different states take place is
important because many candidacies do not survive beyond the early contests.^8 Most
presidential candidates pour everything they have into the first few elections. Candidates
who do well attract financial contributions, campaign workers, endorsements, and
additional media coverage, all of which enable them to move on to subsequent primaries
or caucuses. Candidates who do poorly in the first contests face the problem identified
by former congressman and presidential candidate Richard Gephardt: contributions
and coverage dry up, leaving these candidates with no alternative but to drop out of
the race. For example, a total of 17 candidates entered the race for the 2016 Republican
presidential nomination. Five withdrew before any convention delegates were selected.
By mid-March, two months into the process and six months before the convention where
the nominee was actually selected, the race was down to only three candidates. Thus,
the candidate who leads after the first several primaries and caucuses generally wins
the nomination—as was the case for both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.^9
However, when the first few contests do not yield a clear favorite, the race can continue
until the last states have voted or even until the convention.
If a sitting president runs for reelection, as Barack Obama did in 2012, he typically
faces little opposition for his party’s general-election nomination—not because
challengers defer to the president but because most presidents are popular enough
among their own party’s faithful supporters that they can win the nomination without
too much trouble. Only presidents with particularly low approval ratings have faced
serious opposition in their nomination bids.
Among the states, the presidential nomination process is always changing.^10 In
2016, many southern states held their primaries on the same day in early March (Super
Tuesday). Others moved the date of their primary (Florida), moved from a primary to
a caucus (Kentucky), or, on the Republican side, added a minimum number of votes
a candidate needed to win any delegates. For many years, Iowa and New Hampshire
have held the first presidential nomination contests, with the Iowa Caucuses held a
week before the New Hampshire primary. These states’ position at the beginning of the
process is largely a historical accident, but it is controversial. State party officials from
other states often complain about the media attention given to these contests and their
disproportionate influence in winnowing the candidate pool, but there is no consensus
on an alternate schedule. As a result, the 2016 nomination process was roughly theproportional allocation
During the presidential primaries,
the practice of determining the
number of convention delegates
allotted to each candidate based
on the percentage of the popular
vote cast for each candidate. All
Democratic primaries and caucuses
use this system, as do some states’
Republican primaries and caucuses.winner-take-all
During the presidential primaries,
the practice of assigning all of a given
state’s delegates to the candidate who
receives the most popular votes. Some
states’ Republican primaries and
caucuses use this system.Campaigns don’t end—they run
out of money.— Richard Gephardt, former
Speaker of the House and
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