primaries vs election and why primaries matter or not.
In: Other
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.
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