Process
Both major political parties of the U.S.—the Democratic Party and the Republican Party—officially nominate their candidate for President at their respective national conventions. Each of these conventions is attended by a number of delegates selected in accordance with the given party's bylaws.
Both parties operate with two types of delegates: pledged and unpledged. The group of unpledged delegates, also known as superdelegates, generally comprising current and former elected officeholders and party leaders, are free to vote for any candidate they wish at the convention. The group of pledged delegates, comprising delegates representing the party committee of each state, are expected to vote in accordance with the rules of their state party.
Depending on state law and state party rules, when voters cast ballots for a candidate in a presidential caucus or primary, they may be voting to actually award delegates bound to vote for a particular candidate at the state or national convention, or they may simply be expressing an opinion that the state party is not bound to follow in selecting delegates to the national convention.
In recent elections, the eventual nominees were known well before the actual conventions took place. The last time a major party's nominee was not clear before the convention was in 1976, when incumbent president Gerald Ford narrowly defeated Ronald Reagan.
Read more about this topic: United States Presidential Primaries
Famous quotes containing the word process:
“A man had better starve at once than lose his innocence in the process of getting his bread.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be indulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the “higher life.””
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
—Jean Szarkowski (b. 1925)