How do primaries work?
The states control the primaries and/or caucuses, but the parties control the national conventions. What happened this year with the Democrats was that they tried to reform the schedule a bit. The way they did it was to declare four states as “early”, and then say that everyone else had to hold their primaries on Super Tuesday or later. The legislatures of Michigan and Florida refused to play by those rules. The Democratic Party can’t prevent them from holding their primaries whenever they want, but they can refuse to let the resulting delegates participate in the nationa convention, and that’s what they decided to do to Michigan and Florida.
Each state is different. Yours is different from mine. Here in Texas, the state government decides, period. The rules seem to change with each election. Some years we have a primary, some years we have a caucus. This year we have both, a sort of hybrid system. You can go to the polls during the day to vote to allocate some of the delegates, along with state and local candidates for the Fall elections. In addition, you can come back in the evening to participate in a caucus to select delegates to your County Convention, which in turn sends delegates to the State Convention, which in turn selects some more of the delegates to the National Convention. Here, I understand that state law provides that the state will hold a primary for a particular party if it had achieve some threshold percentage of the vote in the last General Election. This excludes minor parties, although there have been Libertarian and (possibly) Reform Party primaries here in the past.
A constitutional question. Eponysterical! This is at the least an interesting question. I think it helps to wind back the clock to the early years of the Constitution. First, every time you hear a politician invoke the Founders in favor of his party, remember this: the Founders did not believe in parties! They believed that nominees would come out of particular states or regions, and the system is set up in part to interfere with that. (They thought that parties were a pox on democracy, but regionalism even more so. Not surprising, as they had written the Constitution under the spectre of the Articles of Confederation, which failed in large part due to inability to solve conflicts arising from regionalism.) It’s also helpful to remember that the US is not a nation divided into provinces, but a confederation of nominally independent states — nations — who have sovereignty over all aspects of law that are not explicitly federalized.
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Most delegates to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in 2008 will be chosen via state primaries, held from January to June. Those delegates will pick the parties’ nominees for president and vice-president. A presidential primary is much like a regular election: Voters go to polling places or mail in ballots to choose among candidates in a government-run procedure. The voters actually are selecting national convention delegates, who are required to give their support at the convention to the candidate to whom they are pledged, but only the candidates’ names appear on the ballots. The Democrats will award delegates in proportion to the primary vote for a candidate in a state. For example, if 100 delegates are at stake in a state’s primary and Hillary Clinton wins 60 percent of the vote, with Barack Obama getting 25 percent and John Edwards 15 percent, Clinton will get 60 delegates, Obama 25 and Edwards 15. The Republicans don’t have that rule and favor winner-take-al
