The authors of the Constitution seem to have believed that political differences would be resolved in the institutions they created, and did not expect political parties, which they called "factions", to become part of the US political system. As a consequence, in the absence of Constitutional provisions to regulate them, parties have grown up "on the margins" of Constitutional law (this is one more example, incidentally, of the indisputable fact that the Constitution establishes only general principles of government and leaves decisions about how to put those principles into effect up to political officials). Only the procedure for the actual designation of the President is outlined in the Constitution, the mechanisms for choosing candidates and campaigning are regulated by statutory law, but are not mentioned in the Constitution.
The Constitution provides that presidential elections take place every four years in years divisible by four (hence the need for a Vice-President, incidentally; more here), and that the two are chosen by the Electoral College (more here).
Most political party activity and organization in the US takes place at the state level, and the vast majority of political figures are state officials, such as governors, members of the state legislature, mayors of towns and cities and so forth. Even those who are elected to Congress, as members of the House of Representatives or Senators, are elected from individual states. The only public officials who represent the United States as a whole are federal judges (who are appointed, not elected), members of the executive branch such as Cabinet secretaries or ambassadors (appointed as well), and the President and Vice-President, the only elected federal officials who do not go to Washington, D.C. to represent a particular state. In other words, the system as a whole tends to favor state-level politics, and does not automatically generate potential candidates for the Presidency (except for the incumbent, i.e., the President in office, in any given election).
As there are many potential candidates from each party, it is necessary for each party to settle on one. This is done at party conventions (see below), which consist of delegates from each state. To choose the delegates, primary elections are organized in the states. At these elections, which are held on different dates during the late winter and spring in different states, members of the parties vote for lists of delegates who favor one candidate or another; state delegations to the convention are made up of groups in favor of one or another in proportion to the results of the primary election.
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Each Presidential year, usually during the summer, party delegates from all the states meet at a convention to make decisions about the party's objectives and how to achieve them. The two main areas to be discussed are a) the party platform, i.e., the party's program and policies, and b) the Presidential candidate who is most likely to win the national election and thus be able to put the platform into effect. Sometimes (in fact, almost always in recent elections), the state delegations chosen during the primary election season are composed in such a way that the choice of candidate is a foregone conclusion before the convention actually begins. In this case, debate is mainly about aspects of party policy, i.e., the platform.
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Election campaigns are extremely expensive: a great deal of campaigning is done on television, which
Because of the role of the Electoral College, election campaigns often concentrate their efforts on large states with lots of electors, and especially on "swing states", i.e., states in which the results are likely to be very close. In recent elections, for example, the Democrats spent very little effort in Kansas, considered to be an impregnable Republican stronghold, and the Republicans expended little effort in California, where the Democratic candidate was nearly certain to win no matter what the Republicans might do.
Recent election campaigns have often had little to do with politicla questions in a traditional sense, and, especially recently, focus on emotionally charged issues.
A New York Times editorialist, Paul Krugman, recently observed:
Right after the 2004 election, it seemed as if Thomas Frank had been completely vindicated. In his book “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America,” Mr. Frank argued that America’s right wing had developed a permanent winning strategy based on the use of “values” issues to mobilize white working-class voters against a largely mythical cultural elite, while actually pursuing policies designed to benefit a small economic elite.
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At its core, the political axis that currently controls Congress and the White House is an alliance between the preachers and the plutocrats — between the religious right, which hates gays, abortion and the theory of evolution, and the economic right, which hates Social Security, Medicare and taxes on rich people. Surrounding this core is a large periphery of politicians and lobbyists who joined the movement not out of conviction, but to share in the spoils.*
Krugman goes on to suggest that perhaps this coalition may soon collapse, as each member comes to realize that the other is largely indifferent to its objectives. It remains to be seen whether his prediction will be accurate, but it certainly seems true that many working-class voters are mobilized by moral issues that do not involve traditional political questions of economic benefits or personal freedom.
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* Krugman, Paul "Things Fall Apart" New York Times October 2, 2006 [back to text].