PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY TYPES
- DELEGATE SELECTION PRIMARY
- This is the oldest type of presidential primary - one going back to the 1904 election, at which time Florida became the first state to authorize the use of a so-called "direct primary" election to choose the state's delegates to the Democratic National Convention. (Up until the institution of this "direct primary" - that is, the choice of delegates directly by the voter in an election, the delegates to a party's National Convention were chosen through the so-called "indirect primary", in which the delegates were chosen by the procedure which today is known as the CAUCUS/CONVENTION) In the DELEGATE SELECTION type of direct presidential primary, the candidates for delegates are listed individually - either separately or as part of a slate of delegate candidates - on the ballot. In 1996, only one state - New York - still used this Delegate Selection type of primary and then only for choosing the state's district delegates to the Republican National Convention (the state GOP committee choosing the at-large delegates to the National Convention some time after the primary); New York was so old-fashioned in its use of this type that, as late as the 1980's, it still did not permit the presidential preferences of the delegate candidates to be indicated on the ballot: as a result, it was - until rather recently - nearly impossible for the voter to know just who his delegate selections would be supporting should there be an actual fight for the nomination on the floor of the National Convention!
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All the remaining Presidential Primary types used today involve an actual "Presidential Preference" vote - one in which the voter is confronted with a ballot (or a portion thereof) with only the names of the presidential candidates for each party listed from which the voter then must then choose one candidates. The differences among the various Presidential Preference primary types which follow are based primarily on just how the breakdown of this preference vote is to be used in determining the allocation of the state's delegates to the National Convention among the contenders for the Presidential Nomination appearing on a given direct primary ballot:
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ADVISORY PRIMARY
- In recent (post-1972) practice, there are really two types of "advisory" primaries (those in which the results of the presidential preference balloting has no effect on the allocation of a state's National Convention delegates to the presidential contenders) - the "purely ADVISORY" and the "LOOPHOLE" type (which is, in a sense, a special form of "advisory" primary): the LOOPHOLE type will be considered later; we will consider the "purely ADVISORY" type to be the only ADVISORY type of primary here. In a small number of states where the delegates are actually chosen through the old-fashioned CAUCUS/CONVENTION, a non-binding presidential preference primary is held which has come to be known derisively as the "beauty contest" because of its lack of effect upon the makeup of the state's National Convention delegation. The ADVISORY type has been used in relatively few states by both major parties in recent years. Democrats in Arizona and Michigan used it in 1996.
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WINNER-TAKE-ALL PRIMARY
- With the perceived early failures of what has since become the LOOPHOLE primary type (one in which a Presidential Preference "beauty contest" was combined with a DELEGATE SELECTION type, each type on separate ballots at the same primary election: early on in the development of the "direct primary", it was hoped that the elected delegates to the National Convention would naturally support the winner of the "beauty contest" but, much of the time, the "advice" of those who voted in the "beauty contest" presidential preference poll was ignored by the delegates chosen separately), there was an attempt made to require a state's delegates, still to be chosen separately, to support - and vote at the Convention as a unit for - the winner of the presidential preference vote; this became known as the "mandatory" primary and was, in its earliest form, first authorized by Maryland back in 1912 as a binding preference poll alone (without a separate DELEGATE SELECTION) in which the National Convention delegates, chosen separately by CAUCUS/CONVENTION, were, by state law, mandated (hence the name) to support the winner of the presidential preference vote, which was no longer merely a "beauty contest". Soon thereafter, many states had changed their preference voting (while still holding, at the same time, a separate DELEGATE SELECTION primary) to this newer "mandatory" type: this often, however, created an odd situation in which a majority of delegates, specifically elected as individuals or on a slate, backing a particular contender for the party's presidential nomination, might have to vote - at least during the 1st Ballot at the National Convention - for the winner of statewide presidential preference vote whom they did not, in fact, support! This anomaly led, by the early 1960's, to the evolution of the so-called "WINNER-TAKE-ALL" type of primary - essentially a return to the original type of "mandatory" primary in which a presidential preference vote alone would be held with an unlisted slate of delegates pledged to the winner of a state's preference vote automatically being elected as that state's delegation to the National Convention (something akin to the current practice - in the General Election - of a party's nominees for President and Vice President winning a plurality of a state's vote being given all that state's Electoral Votes). After the riotous Democratic National Convention of 1968 in Chicago, however, the Democratic Party began implementing a series of changes in party rules (the so-called "McGovern-Fraser reforms") that ultimately banned the WINNER-TAKE-ALL type as a method of choosing delegates to that party's National Convention; as a result, the WINNER-TAKE-ALL type has survived only in the Republican Party nominating process where it was still being used by the GOP in roughly half of the party's primaries in 1996. However, the current form of the WINNER-TAKE-ALL primary, in most cases, allocates district and at-large delegates separately so that a presidential contender might lose the statewide vote yet still, by winning a district or few, pick up all the delegates from those districts: as a result, the WINNER-TAKE-ALL type as currently used by Republicans in most states where it is found does not necessarily allocate ALL of a state's delegates to the statewide winner.
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WINNER-TAKE-MOST
- (In such cases, it has become the fashion- over recent Presidential Election cycles- to use the term 'WINNER-TAKE-MOST' [as it is likely the Statewide winner of the most votes in the Presidential Primary will not necessarily gain the pledges of all that State's delegates yet still pick up the lion's share of same]. In a sense, such a 'WINNER-TAKE-MOST' primary [which, again, has become the more prevalent on the Republican side] is but a variant of the LOOPHOLE PRIMARY [see below]- although, unlike in the LOOPHOLE type, the pledging of delegates to presidential contenders is here generally tied to the results of the voting in the Presidential [preference] Primary itself: obviously, however, were a Statewide winner to also win the popular vote in all sub-State units [more usually Congressional Districts] to which those delegates not at-large are assigned, such a 'WINNER-TAKE-MOST' Primary would then become, functionally, WINNER-TAKE-ALL [and, therefore, 'WINNER-TAKE-MOST' is no less banned from use within the Democratic Party nominating process than is pure WINNER-TAKE-ALL]).
- A principal difference between
WINNER-TAKE-ALL and WINNER-TAKE-MOST is
that, in WINNER-TAKE-ALL, the algorithm [that is: the
procedure through which the results of a Primary (or caucuses) are
transformed into National Convention delegates pledged to whom] is set
ahead of the voting taking place (for example, it is known- going into a
Primary [or caucuses]- that 'a candidate gaining at least the
plurality of the vote in a given jurisdiction gains the pledges of
all delegates in said jurisdiction') while, in
WINNER-TAKE-MOST, the algorithm becomes known only after the voting has
already taken place (because the algorithm itself is determined by the
voting itself: for example, 'a candidate gains the pledges of all
delegates in a given jurisdiction if and only if he/she has received at
least a majority of the vote in said jurisdiction; otherwise the delegates
in that same jurisdiction are shared with one or more other
candidates').
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PROPORTIONAL PRIMARY
- Seeing the WINNER-TAKE-ALL primary as unfairly reducing the input of significant minority factions within the party in the presidential nominating process, the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the early-to-mid 1970's successfully promoted the so-called "PROPORTIONAL" type of primary as an alternative to be used in the Democratic Party's nomination process. In the PROPORTIONAL type of presidential preference primary, the district delegates are apportioned among the top vote-getters in each (usually congressional, but occasionally state legislative) district while the at-large delegates are apportioned among the top vote-getters statewide by the percentage of the vote received above a certain threshold (most often 15 percent: a figure actually mandated by the rules of the Democratic Party since 1992). This is the system used by the vast majority of the states holding presidential primaries in the Democratic Party; the Republican party (where WINNER-TAKE-ALL primaries are still permitted) uses it in far fewer states than the Democrats and, in the vast majority of these, the GOP usually started using the PROPORTIONAL type only because Democrat-dominated State Legislatures of the mid-to-late 1970's passed laws forcing both parties to use this type of presidential preference primary. The major difference between the two parties' PROPORTIONAL primaries is in the thresholds used by the Republicans, which can vary from as much as 20 percent or more to as little as virtually 0 percent. (as noted below, the Democrats are currently required by party rules to use a 15 percent threshold in all their PROPORTIONAL primaries).
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THRESHOLD TO BE USED IN "PROPORTIONAL" PRIMARIES UNDER DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION RULES:
All PROPORTIONAL Primaries, used to allocate delegates to the Democratic National Convention in proportion to the primary vote received by each presidential contender, MUST use a 15 percent "threshold" (no more, no less) - that is, district delegates are to be allocated proportionally to a presidential contender based on the primary vote in a given district ONLY IF that candidate has received at least 15 percent of the primary vote in that district while at-large delegates and pledged PLEOs (a form of "superdelegate") are to be allocated proportionally to presidential contenders based on the primary vote statewide ONLY IF that candidate has received at least 15 percent of the statewide primary vote. However, should NO presidential candidate receive at least 15 percent of the primary vote in either a district or statewide, the threshold in such district or statewide shall be the percentage received by the top vote-getter minus 10 percent (for example: should there be, say, 15 contenders on the ballot of a PROPORTIONAL primary and the top vote-getter only receives 14 percent of the vote, say, statewide - the new threshold for allocating at-large delegates and pledged PLEOs would be 4 percent [14%-10] (not 15 percent because no candidate would have reached that original threshold in this example) and only candidates receiving at least 4 percent in this hypothetical instance would be allocated said delegates proportionally)... I can only hope all this "mumbo-jumbo" is clear enough (hey, at least I THINK I understand it!)... these "Threshold" rules are mandated for ALL Democratic PROPORTIONAL type primaries as I have indicated above.
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BONUS PRIMARY
- In the early 1980's, what would evolve into the moderate so-called "New Democrat" movement began its challenge to the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party which had been the force behind the McGovern-Fraser reforms of the 1970's; the second-wave Hunt "counter-reforms" of the Democratic Party's primary process in the early 1980's reflected this struggle between factions within the party. Several changes in the Democratic Party rules were introduced to put the brakes on the trend toward the splintering of the party seen somewhat during the 1976 pre-Convention period and then even more so in the 1980 nomination battle: one change which survives to the present day was the creation of the "superdelegate" - a party functionary (U.S. Senator, Governor, Member of Congress, State Legislative leader, Party leader, etc.) who would remain officially- if only nominally- Uncommitted until the Convention itself had convened, thereby theoretically bringing the perceived wisdom of the party leadership to the final choice of a nominee while still retaining the increased influence of the party's voting rank-and-file created by the large-scale adoption of the PROPORTIONAL primary among Democrats; this "superdelegate" survives nowadays in the form of the Unpledged PLEO. Yet another change made in the early 1980's was the adoption of the so-called "BONUS" type of primary. In the BONUS primary, a handful of at-large (and, sometimes, some district) delegates are not, at first, apportioned among the presidential contenders receiving more than the required threshold of the vote in what is otherwise a PROPORTIONAL primary; rather, these "held-aside" delegates are later allocated to the overall winner of the primary as a "bonus", hence the name. The proponents of this type of primary referred to it as "Enhanced Reward" while its opponents derisively called it "Winner-take-More", an obvious attempt to link it to the WINNER-TAKE-ALL type abandoned by the Democrats for 1976. It was used by several states in both 1984 and 1988 until a third wave of "re-reform" sweeping the Democratic Party banned the use of this BONUS type of primary as a method of allocating the party's delegates beginning in 1992; there is nothing, however, to prevent the Republicans in a given state from using a BONUS primary as the GOP does not operate its primaries under centralized, nationwide party rules as do the Democrats.
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LOOPHOLE PRIMARY
- The "LOOPHOLE" type of primary, in essence, is an updated version of what is the oldest form of the Presidential Preference (as opposed to DELEGATE SELECTION) primary - dating back to when Oregon enacted the very first statute authorizing just such a primary for the 1912 election. In this, what is really the original form of the ADVISORY primary, there was both a presidential preference "beauty contest" vote and a separate DELEGATE SELECTION primary held at the same time: the voter had the opportunity to indicate a preferred candidate from among the list of names of presidential contenders on the top ballot but actually elected the delegates to the National Convention as individuals or on slates listed on a separate ballot directly beneath the presidential preference one. Since the actual delegates were being elected through a separate voting procedure, the presidential preference results were merely "advisory" giving this type of primary its original sobriquet. In theory, the state's National Convention delegates were to throw their support behind - and give their votes on the Convention floor to - the winner of the presidential preference "beauty contest": however, the hopes of the early supporters of the Presidential Primary (the majority of which were of this type) were to be dashed in presidential election after presidential election as many a state's delegation often as not ignored the "advice" of the state party's rank-and-file as expressed in the preference balloting. This type of primary first got its name of "LOOPHOLE" in 1976 when many political observers and pundits realized that, in any state still using what was - in effect - the original advisory preference/delegate selection type of primary, it was theoretically possible for a candidate to win all that state's delegates despite the McGovern-Fraser reforms which had outlawed the more blatant WINNER-TAKE-ALL preference vote in favor of the PROPORTIONAL type for Democrats: all a presidential contender had to do was to elect his slates of district and at-large delegates in the bottom delegate selection balloting and it didn't much matter how he did in the top of the ballot presidential preference "beauty contest" , a convenient "loophole" for getting around the Democratic Party's ban on WINNER-TAKE-ALL primaries, hence the name - one which caught on, as it differentiated this type of "beauty contest" primary from the ADVISORY type. The LOOPHOLE type was banned in the Democratic primaries of 1980, but exemptions were made for Illinois and West Virginia - a tribute to both the Cook County, Ill. Democratic machine and West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, respectively, being powerful enough in national Democratic Party circles to keep their states' "beauty contest" preference vote in place for that year; the subsequent Hunt "counter-reforms" restored the LOOPHOLE type as legal under Democratic Party rules for 1984 and 1988 and, while the Democratic "re-reforms" effective in 1992 had sought to discourage the use of the LOOPHOLE primary, it nevertheless survived among the Democrats in West Virginia - again, largely due to the influence of that state's Sen. Byrd on the national party hierarchy. In 1996, however, no Democratic primary was of the LOOPHOLE type. The GOP, meanwhile, has no national party rules against the use of the LOOPHOLE type and a handful of states did use it for the choosing of delegates to the Republican National Convention in 1996.
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CAUCUS/CONVENTION
- The earliest form of delegate selection for the National
Conventions is the CAUCUS/CONVENTION system, which is still used in a
few states. In this system, the voter does not choose the party's
delegates to the National Convention through the ballot, as in a
Primary (where the delegates are chosen directly by the voter or there
is a presidential preference vote which determines the allocation of
delegates indirectly) but, instead, participates in a "caucus" or "mass
meeting" (a term more prevalent in the South) for the first "tier" (as
the levels of civil divisions up through the State level are usually
called in the application of this method) - a convocation of voters
from a given precinct, township, ward or other relatively small civil
division within a given state and one not very unlike the traditional
Town Meeting prevalent in New England. In the archetypal "caucus",
local supporters of the various presidential contenders are encouraged
to speak at the caucus about the merits of their particular candidate
and, after some discussion in the wake of these speeches, there is a
vote of some sort (whether by secret ballot or by show of hands or by
actually lining up behind supporters of a preferred presidential
contender in order to be counted as being for that candidate) which
determines who will go to the party meeting (usually a bona fide
Convention) for the next highest tier (the County or Congressional or
Legislative District) as a delegate from the civil division for which
the caucus was held and usually having a preference for a particular
presidential contender. Each tier chooses delegates to represent it at
the party meeting (again, usually a Convention) for next tier. No
matter how many tiers there are (usually three or four all told: local
civil division, County or equivalent [optional and most often skipped
in smaller states], some kind of sub-state District often larger than a
County and then the State as a whole), the last tier - the State party
Convention - usually chooses the at-large (that is, statewide)
delegates to the party's National Convention while the penultimate tier
- the Convention for the level next below the State (usually some kind
of sub-state District [Congressional, Legislative, multi-county
Judicial]) - chooses the state's district delegates to the National
Convention from that district. What is known today as the
CAUCUS/CONVENTION was actually originally referred to as the "primary",
but when the Primary as we have come to know it (an actual election by
ballot) first came into use in the early 20th century, the old system
came to be called the "indirect primary" to differentiate itself from
the newfangled "direct primary"; the term CAUCUS/CONVENTION, however,
came into vogue by the 1960's to eliminate any confusion between these
two very different methods of ultimately choosing a state's delegates
to a party's National Convention. Up through the 1976 election, which
accelerated the number of states holding Primaries, the
CAUCUS/CONVENTION method was the usual method for choosing delegates to
the National Convention: it was a system easily controlled - and, in
many cases, manipulated - by the party hierarchy. In the Democratic
Party of the early 1970's, the McGovern-Fraser reforms - seeking to
reduce the influence of "bossism" in the nominating process -
encouraged many states to change over from this method of choosing
National Convention delegates to the Primary and, since Primaries are
elections regulated by state law and the majority of statehouses in the
1970's came to be controlled by Democrats, the GOP was also forced - by
laws in the several states - to begin turning away from the
CAUCUS/CONVENTION. In 1960, there were only 16 presidential primaries:
by 1980, there were 35 and, in 2000, there will be 45 presidential
primaries - only 7 states will be using the CAUCUS/CONVENTION alone in
2000 and the 40-year trend toward states using some kind of
presidential primary is very clearly seen in the statistics.
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