How does it work in details?
How is it different from other primaries?
I understood something didn’t work, what?
I understood it changed since the last elections. How?
In: Other
First off the primaries is not an official part of the presidential election but rather an internal voting within the political parties for which candidates they should support. So it does not have to be a secret, private or democratic election. Each states political party is free to hold the primaries as they want. The concept of a caucus is that you gather together your parties voters in a neighborhood into a caucus and then you discuss who should be president. These discussions means no votes are private and even allows open corruption to happen. In Iowa there is also the old system of voting for deligates that were in place before modern communications. So each caucus will send a number of deligates to the county who will then discuss again to decide which deligates they will send to the state who eventually will decide who they will send to the national congression. This means that it is fully possible to be the most popular candidate by the number of voters but still not get many deligates. What is different this year is that they will publish the results from each stage of the caucus. Iowa does not have much direct influence on the national level but because they are first they will have a big impact on the rest of the primary election campaign. Releasing the results from the initial votes is a better indicator of popularity then the final results. However there were some issues with the numbers so they have not been released yet. It can be technical issues or a deliberate attempt to manipulate the numbers.
An abomination against democratic republics everywhere. Basically the two major parties in America have conspired to make everyone think they are Constitutional entities. They have worked to gain immense control over the electoral process. The most shocking of which is the fact that a sub group of hyper enthusiastic Republicans and Democrats from Iowa get to play a major role in determining who gets to run for president. Despite the fact neither party’s caucus goers are at all representative of the US population at large.
Today is the first day of the primary, which will determine who will be the Democratic party nomination for President. There’s a Republican primary too, but it’s assumed that Trump will win that and nobody is running against him in most states.
States have the primary on different days. Iowa has the first primary.
A caucus is a special method of voting that only a few states do, and Iowa is one of them.
If you want to vote, you show up at your local caucus location at around 7:00 pm. You get in groups based on who you want to vote for.
The votes are counted. If your candidate gets less than 15% of the vote, you can either leave, or join a group that has more than 15%.
People can debate and convince each other to join other groups.
At the end, they count up the number of people for each candidate and report the totals.
The totals give each candidate delegates at the Democratic party nominating convention, which is used to decide the nominee.
Most states don’t do this. People just go to the polls and cast a vote.
Some people think it’s good that some states have a caucus because it helps measure voter enthusiasm and persuasion.
It’s basically the first state that really gauges how the candidates are doing. They do good here, they continue. They flunk here, they usually start dropping.
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