Pedro Rodríguez
Professor of International Relations and content director of the journal Política Exterior
There is an old debate about whether politics is an art or a science. As of the primaries, there is no doubt that the uneasy politics in the United States has been transformed into a question of mathematics.
The race to the White House formally kicks off with the Iowa caucuses (15 January) and the New Hampshire primaries (23 January), culminating in the general election scheduled for 5 November 2024. In less than three hundred days, what Pulitzer Prize winner Theodore White described in far less ominous times as “the most impressive transfer of power in the world” will take place. For all its viscerality and tribalisation, US politics now becomes a matter of mathematics: a majority of delegates at the national convention to secure the presidential nomination and then a minimum of 270 electoral votes to sit in the Oval Office.
Polls and early results suggest that Trump will once again sweep the Republican Party primaries, potentially returning to the White House with a visceral appeal to all those who do not believe in America’s democratic ideals. His justification for a second term is essentially about revenge. Without hiding his authoritarian, xenophobic and supremacist bias, he accuses immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country” and promotes violence as a legitimate defence against who knows what.
Meanwhile, given the impossibility at this point of a competitive Democratic primary, President Joe Biden is holding private luncheons at the White House with his top donors and supporters. Meetings organised by his campaign to try to address widespread doubts among Democratic voters about the stamina and commitment that an 81-year-old president seeking a second term can offer.
1. Iowa and New Hampshire. In an effort at democratic renewal – initiated during the so-called progressive era between the late 19th and early 20th centuries – the two major parties that have come to monopolise US politics choose their candidates for the White House through a first round of elections in the form of completely open primaries. In essence, each contender for the presidential nomination competes to gather as many delegates as possible for their respective parties’ national conventions.
Since the years following the end of World War II, a period considered to be the start of the current US presidential campaigns, this selection process begins with the very, very peculiar voters of Iowa and New Hampshire. This substantial privilege is questioned by the rest of the states of the Union who consider this pair of Hercules columns in American politics as electoral jurisdictions too homogeneous, too small and too unrepresentative to retain much influence.
In historical perspective, the US process for nominating presidential candidates was always dominated by considerable opacity and tight control by party apparatuses, not unlike what is still the case in other Western democracies. Since the 1960s, however, this privilege has been democratised. Almost all EU states apportion their delegates to national conventions on a proportional basis, but an increasing number of jurisdictions use a winner-takes-all method, where the candidate with the most votes gets all the delegates at stake.
2. What is a caucus? Iowa has the peculiarity of using caucuses to hold its primaries. This system is known as a caucus (or caucuses in plural). A verb and a name that comes from the Native Americans with the meaning of a decision-making meeting. Any resident of legal age and registered Republican or Democratic voter can participate in these caucuses. In the case of Iowa, most voters are registered as independents but can make an instant change of status at the door of these meetings held in gyms, schools, churches, firehouses or even private residences. Around 1,700 precincts covering all of Iowa’s 99 counties.
In these caucuses held simultaneously when the two presidential candidacies are at stake, Iowa Republicans – aligned around the evangelical bloc – have the opportunity to argue in favour of their candidates and then vote more or less discreetly. But Democrats operate under different, much more complicated and public rules. Each candidate’s supporters congregate in a corner. Those challengers who do not receive the backing of 15% of those gathered are eliminated. But with the option for supporters in groups without sufficient quorum to declare a second preference with more support.
It is precisely this quest for “viability” that generates all sorts of mathematical machinations and machinations on the fly. In the end, Republicans and Democrats apportion delegates at the county level but the results are seen as an indicator of voter sentiment and a test of each candidate’s organisational capacity. Historically, the margins of victory in Iowa are very small and it is not easy to recover from a bad result, but it is not impossible.
3. A compressed calendar. The notorious envy generated by Iowa and New Hampshire has resulted in an increasingly compressed primary calendar. The parties’ interest in not exhausting their favourite candidates and the desire for prominence in many states has also imposed itself on a system that should be fundamentally orderly, participatory and gradual. Since the 1980s, a number of states – especially in the South – have tried to gain greater influence in the candidate selection process by concentrating their primaries on a Super Tuesday in March. The Super Tuesday on 5 March will see more than a third of the delegates to the Republican national convention with voting in 16 states and territories, including California, Texas, and North Carolina.
This “sudden death” is really the closest thing to a national primary given the overwhelming percentages of delegates at stake, which in some years has amounted to almost half of the Republican and Democratic totals. In the absence of clear frontrunners, as was the case in the 2008 contest between Obama and Hillary, the contest may drag on into the summer. The current election cycle has the particularity of mixing the primary calendar with the judicial calendar generated by the four criminal cases against Donald Trump.
4. Showcases for democracy. The formalisation of presidential nominations will take place during the national conventions of each party. These political conclaves have in the past produced all sorts of rigged surprises, but since the 1960 campaign pitting Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy, they have become predictable television spectacles. In 2024, the Republicans go first by convening from 15 July in Milwaukee while the Democrats will meet in Chicago from 18 August.
The tradition of political conventions dates back to the first third of the 19th century and began with Andrew Jackson’s populist presidential race. It is at these forums, whose organisation and rules are up to each party, that the nomination is made official. In advance, each White House hopeful has had to choose a “number two”. From the moment the conventions end with an apotheosis of balloons and confetti, the presidential campaign becomes a constant battle until Election Day itself, with no day of reflection.
This marathon includes a final round of televised debates. With different formats and topics, as well as a strict ban on reading written materials on camera, three successive encounters have been organised for the presidential candidates and one face-to-face between the vice-presidential hopefuls. The dates and rules are agreed with the help of an independent, non-profit commission formed in 1987, which requires a minimum of 15% support in national polls of voting intentions to be invited to participate in these televised forums. The Republican National Committee voted unanimously in April 2022 to withdraw from these debates, citing a lack of fairness, and required candidates to sign a pledge to participate only in party-sanctioned debates. Trump, however, never signed that pledge.
5. The mathematics of the Electoral College. US presidents are neither the product of direct elections nor do they necessarily win the White House with a majority of the popular vote. Technically, what will be held on Tuesday 5 November 2024 (following the nineteenth-century American electoral tradition of holding elections on the Tuesday after the first Monday of that month) is not a single election. It is rather 51 consultations organised by each State of the Union and the District of Columbia to elect the members of the so-called Electoral College. An institution composed of 538 electors distributed among the States of the Union with a weighted formula that offers some advantage to jurisdictions with minimal population. For example, California has 54 electoral votes with approximately 12% of the national census while Wyoming, with 0.18% of the population, has three electoral votes.
This system – which legitimately allows for winning without necessarily winning a majority of the popular vote, as happened in George W. Bush’s first term and Donald Trump’s – dates back to the difficult compromises of national structuring that the pioneering Constitution drafted in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago entailed. The magic number that opens the door to the White House is a 270-vote majority in the Electoral College.
Since the pathetic scene of 2000 and 2021 – with the Florida recount and the storming of the Capitol – the United States has been making an effort to modernise the logistics and machinery of its voting. Although the federal Congress has approved multi-million dollar grants, the organisation remains county-by-county and problems persist, especially complicated by the generally applied ‘winner takes all’ formula, where the winner takes all even if the margin of victory is by a single vote.
6. Who and how much? Since George Washington’s time, the Constitution has established three qualifications for the presidency: “natural born” and not naturalised citizenship; 14 years of residence on US soil; and a minimum age of 35. Although in view of the foreseeable 77 and 81 year old candidates, there is no shortage of considerations that there should also be an upper limit on the permissible age to occupy the White House.
Another unchanging principle in US politics is that every election comes with a record amount of spending, the vast majority of which comes from private donations.
Elections are expensive and the 2024 presidential election will be no exception. A new report from AdImpact predicts that the 2023-24 election cycle will be the most expensive ever, with candidates expected to cumulatively spend more than $10 billion across a variety of platforms.
© This article was originally published in Diálogo Atlantico, by the Instituto Franklin-UAH
