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What is a Primary?

Primary Season

So what’s all the fuss about primaries? Isn’t the election in November?

Primaries (and Caucuses) are how we select our presidential candidates for the November race. While each state decides when and how they will vote, be it primary or caucus, the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee have rules that each state must follow in order to have their delegates seated at the convention. (Don’t worry, if some of these words are foreign to you, I will have blog posts and answers to your questions in the answers section of this site soon, or feel free to ask your question in the forums section.)

There are 6 types of Primaries:

OPEN: In this scenario, a registered voter can vote in either party’s primary.
Closed: In this scenario, a registered voter can only vote for the party for which they are registered.
Semi-Closed: This scenario is similar to the closed, but allows Independents to make a party choice on the day of election, either privately or publicly.
Semi-Open: Similar to the Semi-Closed, except that you must publicly declare your party before voting.
Blanket: This allows registered voters to vote for one candidate per office, regardless of the voter’s party affiliation.
Run-Off: This is just basically used if a candidate does not have a majority vote. They may do a run-off in order to push the top two candidates to the general election, regardless of party affiliation.

Hopefully this clears up what a Primary is for you just a little bit. There are many resources on the interwebs where you can find information on primaries, when they’re held, and how to register. I will have answers to those questions on this site in the coming months (may already have them by the time you’re reading this), but until that time, happy surfing!

Tags: Politics, Social Issues

This entry was posted on Monday, May 12th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.