A Citizen's Guide to the Electoral Process
The U.S. presidential election is the biggest event in American politics. It’s an exciting and complicated process that begins immediately after the preceding election and doesn’t end until you, the voter, have your say. (And as we learned in the amazing aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, it’s possible for the campaign to continue even after Election Day.)
The most important players in the election of a U.S. president are not the candidates or their staffs, not the political parties or the other organizations with a stake in the outcome, and not the media pundits who often try to tell us what we think. No, as hard as it is to remember sometimes, a presidential election revolves around the beliefs and the actions of American voters. Come Election Day, no one else’s opinions matter, and no one else has control over the outcome.
The candidates, of course, are the star players in the presidential election. They get all the attention, and they select the issues they’ll focus on and the messages they’ll convey to voters. They also determine how their campaigns will be run—though the candidate’s campaign managers, pollsters, and other advisers usually play major roles in these decisions.
Chapter Three: The Parties and Other Behind-the-Scenes Players
The challenge of running a competitive campaign for the U.S. presidency is made easier by the existence of the political parties and other organizations—from the Sierra Club to the National Rifle Association—that support individual candidates and their agendas. The Democratic and Republican parties sponsor political advertising, organize volunteers, and help get out the vote on Election Day.
Broadcast television, radio news, and the mainstream newspapers and newsmagazines have enormous influence on the presidential election process. These pillars of the traditional media are still the sources from which the majority of Americans get most of their news and information about the candidates, the issues, and the election.
In recent years, however, Americans have become increasingly disenchanted with the traditional media and their dominant role in American politics.
Chapter Five: Money: Who Give It, Who Gets It
Overall, 2008 is likely to see the first $1 billion election, with the major party nominees for president each having spent over $500 million by the time Americans go to the polls in November. After adding the tens of millions of dollars that will be spent by all other challengers, the total cost of the 2008 presidential race may reach $1.4 billion, almost twice the $760 million spent by all candidates in 2004.
Presidential campaigns have always started well in advance of the first caucus or party primary. The 2008 election has followed, and even accelerated, this pattern. Because of the front-loaded primary schedule and the need to raise increasing amounts of campaign cash, contenders in the 2008 presidential contest were busy campaigning and raising money in 2006.
Chapter Seven: The Primaries and Caucuses
It used to be that a political party’s nominee for president was selected by influential party members at the party’s national convention—generally after a lot of wheeling and dealing in smoke-filled rooms. Realizing that this was not a very democratic way to choose a major-party presidential candidate, the Democratic and Republican parties have over the last half century opened up the process to voters. The result is today’s often confusing schedule of primaries and caucuses, which makes voters—and not party leaders—the VIPs in choosing the parties’ presidential nominees.
Chapter Eight: The Conventions
The national party conventions mark the official turning point in the presidential campaign from the primary season to the general election in the fall. Although it is generally widely known for months before who the presidential nominee will be, the convention allows the party to put aside any intra-party jockeying and squabbles that occurred during the primaries, unite behind its nominee, define itself for the voters, and set the tone for the fall offensive.
Chapter Nine: The General Election Campaign
After winning the Republican Party’s nomination in 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected to the presidency without ever leaving his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and without making a single speech. One hundred years later, Republican nominee Richard Nixon traveled 65,000 miles, made 212 speeches, visited all fifty states—and lost. The day of the “front-porch” presidential campaign that was the custom during Lincoln’s time is long gone. Today’s general election contest is an elaborate production, with the candidates and their supporters crisscrossing the country and blanketing the airwaves with poll-tested political commercials.
On the Tuesday in November that falls between November 2 and November 8, control of the presidential election finally passes into the hands of the American voter—where it belongs. After all the ceaseless campaigning by the candidates, all the news coverage, television and radio advertising, videos, blogging and expert punditry, and all the hard work by the candidate’s supporters, it comes down to this: the voters’ decision about which of the candidates they feel is most qualified to lead the nation.
