primaries vs election and why primaries matter or not.
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In an an FPTP election (Which is what the US uses), candidates run against each other, and the candidate with the most votes wins the election and is put in office. This is the end goal, win the election.
So, if you have 2 parties, and party A runs candidate A, and party B runs candidate B, the party with the most votes wins. Lets just say A got 51 votes and B got 49.
Now, if party A was dumb and ran multiple candidates A C and D, the votes that would have been cast for person A get partly spread across C and D as well. Even though both are less popular than A, if C gets 2 votes, and D gets 1 votes, A can only get 48 votes, and B got 49 votes, so B wins.
So to prevent this, parties run pre-elections where the party gets together and says “Ok, we can go with A, C, or D, Who do we ACTUALLY want to go with” and they do a primary, which is basically an unofficial election the party runs to decide who their actual candidate is going to be.
Then they just run that candidate instead of splitting the vote.
In the primary election, you vote for the candidates that a specific party will run for the general election for a given office (like governor, senator, president). In the general election, you vote for specific candidates for a given office.
In a primary in a lot of states you can only vote for one party’s candidates, whereas in the general election you can vote for whomever.
Primaries decide who runs for a party. Elections decide which of those win the whole thing.
Every election matters. The amount of people who chose who runs for president is sometimes less than 12% of the electorate because so few show up for primaries. If you want to have an impact, vote every time. There is no downside. Well, besides being uniformed and making bad choices.
Saying primaries don’t matter is like saying only the Superbowl matters, not the long string of wins the team needed to get there in the first place.
Primaries are one way in which a party can choose its nominees. There are others (local party committees caucus, state conventions), but ultimately so long as a party can meet the threshold (usually signatures) to get on the ballot it can choose its nominees in whatever way it wants to, including reading chicken entrails or holding a seance.
An interesting variation on primaries is the ranked choice jungle primary where all candidates run together and the top two (as in California) or four (as in Alaska which also has ranked choice voting) advance to the general election.
Primaries are where parties select their candidate for the general election, so you have multiple republicans or democrats running against each other to face candidates from other parties in general election.
There is only one election that matters in the end. The last one.
You can increase the odds of your candidate winning if you can get a bunch of people ahead of time before the election to pinkie swear to vote for the same candidate all in unison. Particularly if there’s, say, ten different candidates that are all vaguely similar. If you split your votes across all the options, none of the options will win.
If you can find a fair-ish way to get everyone to pick the same candidate to back, you stand the best chance to get someone most of you at least *kind of* agree with. That’s almost always better than letting someone *none* of you agree with take the win away. A primary is one of many fair-ish ways to make that decision.
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