Sides Chapter Nine: Presidential Campaigns Flashcards
how does the candidate win their party’s nomination?
To win the nomination at the national party convention, a candidate has to accumulate delegates by winning an array of statewide elections. Each with distinct rules. Over a period of several months. This makes four different kinds of rules important: how states structure these elections, how delegates are allocated to candidates, how delegates are selected to attend the national convention, and the order in which states hold their elections.
what are the two goals for presidential candidates?
to secure their party’s nomination and to win a majority of electoral college votes.
what are caucuses?
relatively closed affairs in which registered partisans attend meetings at election precinct locations and vote to select delegates to the county or state party conventions.
what is a primary election?
Chooses their delegates to the national convention. The form of the primary election affects the kinds of voters who can participate. They can be closed, open, or semi-closed. In semi-closed both unaffiliated voters and those registered as members of the party can vote in that party’s primary.
what is front-loading in terms of primaries?
state legislatures have an incentive to schedule their primaries and caucuses earlier in the calendar so that they will exert greater influence on the nominating process
who are front runners? and what must they decide when campaigning in the primaries?
candidates who are well-known by the electorate, are in the leading in the polls, have substantial campaign war chests - must decide how much time and money to spend in the early states, since some of them are small and have fewer delegates than the large states who primaries fall on Super Tuesday and later in the calendar.
what is a convention bump?
Each party’s nominee appears to garner additional support from the public after the convention. It is defined as the candidate’s share of the two-party vote in trial-heat polls conducted one to seven days after the convention minus their share of the two-party in polls conducted one to seven days before the convention. The average bump has been 5 points.
