Who decides my vote?

January 2, 2008 9:29 AM

Why do 2 or 3 states decide who I get to vote for in the United States general presidential election? What if, for example, I want to vote for Joe Biden, but a husk of Iowan corn farmers decide otherwise?
posted by plexi to law & government (21 comments total)

They don't. You can vote for whomever you want to.
posted by callmejay at 9:31 AM on January 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

They've had some great reports on POTUS'08 on XM Radio about why the primary is structured like it is. They mentioned how people who live in states other than Iowa, NH, etc. want an all-in-one Super Tuesday.

I wish I was in the car long enough to give you a better answer why it doesn't actually happen that way, though.
posted by timmins at 9:32 AM on January 2, 2008

Very in-depth wiki page on the system.
You may be particularly interested in the "criticisms" section and the "Reform proposals" section that follows it.
posted by Partial Law at 9:34 AM on January 2, 2008

From the Wikipedia article: "A revised system may take effect beginning in 2008; as of 2006, however, it has not received final approval." What happened to Wikipedia's up-to-the-minuteness?
posted by languagehat at 9:39 AM on January 2, 2008

The primaries are a party event, not a federal one. Most political parties don't offer more than one candidate for office. It would be bad for the Democrats if they ran (for example) both Edwards and Senator Biden. If you're really unhappy with how the Democrats run their nominating convention, perhaps you should chose a different party.

But in the federal election you can vote for whomever you want. They just might not be running on a Democratic ticket.
posted by sbutler at 9:43 AM on January 2, 2008

You can always write-in whoever you want.
posted by jeffamaphone at 9:51 AM on January 2, 2008

Bitch, bitch, bitch, you enfranchised Americans sure do bitch a lot about how terribly unfair the system is. Well, us folks in DC say shut the hell up! Just remember your primary actually means something.

If you don't like who your party chooses then start a write-in campaign or get organized and start a party of your own. Who knows, you may even form a third party with as much success as past third parties like the Prohibition Party or the Greenback Labor Party! Huzzah!
posted by Pollomacho at 9:53 AM on January 2, 2008

They don't automatically decide this early. Giuliani, for instance, is expected to poll below Ron Paul in Iowa, but is still a major contender elsewhere. Though the momentum is often enough to carry one candidate through right out of the gate, it's not an automatic given that whoever takes the early primaries takes the nomination.

Still, the party orgs take the primary/caucus schedule very seriously: my state is being penalized by both for having the audacity to move our primary up to January 15th.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 10:01 AM on January 2, 2008

In fact, delegates are awarded by proportional representation. If people were rational and did not change their votes based on what Iowa said, the order wouldn't matter. It's vastly cost-saving to have votes in some smaller states to see who can get their act together, and who's a bit appealing to voters.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 10:02 AM on January 2, 2008

I think a better question is why do the major parties care when the states hold their respective primaries? This year, the Dems and Repubs are withholding delegates from a number of states for choosing early primary dates.
posted by Afroblanco at 10:02 AM on January 2, 2008

Be disgruntled at the party and its primary voters, and not at the system. If "your" party doesn't give a real chance to the candidate that you prefer, then it is not really your party after all, and you should reassess whether you can fairly call yourself a Democrat. Obviously, that doesn't mean you should consider yourself a Republican, either. But realize that you can actually vote for anyone you want to, and that one of the reasons that the American presidential race is so full of terrible candidates is that people by and large think that they have no real choice but to vote for whatever candidate gets the stamp of approval of the party that they have decided is their "team."
posted by The World Famous at 10:18 AM on January 2, 2008

Hey, if we had it my way, people who don't use "who" and "whom" properly would only get a half-vote at best! Haha. I understand the primary process, as oddball as it can be, but I really have a tough time with the electoral college. Believe it or not, America isn't as politically polarized by region nearly as much as most of the rest of the world, so it's necessity seems a little weak these days. But as others have pointed out, you can vote for anyone.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 10:27 AM on January 2, 2008

as flawed as the current system is, it certainly beats -- if one is concerned about the democratic legitimacy of the choosing-who's-running-for-President system -- the oldskool (essentially, pre-1960) system. I mean, smoky room + a lot of machine mandarins does suck more than the primaries system.

of course, party machines (if you only want to discuss Democrats) chose first-class people like Wilson and FDR and -- for all his limitations -- Stevenson. primary voters chose second and third rate candidates like Dukakis and Kerry. but this is an entirely different topic.
posted by matteo at 10:38 AM on January 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

None of this is a defense of anything. I think primaries are stupid, that garden-variety voters have way too much influence in the selection process, and that we would be better served with a more UK/Canadian system where candidates for national head-of-government needed greater support from their relevant political elites in order to be selected.

There are two things going on here. One is why some states try to have early primaries. The reasoning on this part is simple: early states get disproportionate attention, for reasons I'll get into soon. The only puzzling thing here is why it took so long for larger, more realistically important states to start objecting to this in a functionally useful way.

The other thing is: why do early states matter more?

One answer has to do with information. Before the campaign starts, voters and donors often have a very poor sense of candidates and very little information about them. This isn't to say that the information isn't at least potentially obtainable if you sit down and read all of the Congressional Record for the past several years, or all of the papers of each of the governors who is running. It only means that voters and donors don't have the information at hand. Who is going to appeal to voters? People have at best rough guesses. Who is going to announce which policies as their campaigns develop and they start assembling a potential social coalition behind them? People have at best rough ideas.

If you want, everyone is essentially a vaporware description of a product that hasn't been made yet. Is Duke Nukem Forever going to be good? Dunno. Should I invest in 3DRealms? Dunno. I might have a guess, but it's just a guess.

These rough ideas get put together into estimates of how well each candidate should do in, say, New Hampshire. These are just the current best guess about the strength of each candidate in terms of the intersection of their announced policies, their personality strengths, and their appeal to voters.

The first primaries start getting results instead of guesses. How well does one candidate appeal to voters? Well, now we have an actual real-world guess. Is Spore going to be good? Well, after a convention we have a demonstration of an alpha running, so we at least have some concrete information about it. It's this information, this first flow of hard data, that's important.

One important thing to note here is that winning and losing is not in itself tremendously important. When Giuliani does poorly in Iowa, that won't much hurt him. The more important thing is at least beating people's expectations for you. If you do much worse than people predicted, that's a hint that whatever faith they had in you was misplaced, and that if they want to see somebody they sort-of like take the White House, they should put their vote and dollar in someone else when their primary rolls around. It's entirely possible to get the most votes in New Hampshire and be the loser if you went all-out, worked really hard there, and people expected you to get 60\% but you got 35\%. It's also possible to come in third or fourth and be the winner if you did much better than people expected you to, indicating that you have greater appeal than people thought and that people who had been shying away from supporting you even though they liked you might feel better about sending you \$500.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:45 AM on January 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

You can write in whoever you want, but that ends up sometimes effectively casting a vote for the guy you don't want to win.
Americans, however, seem to be obsessed with voting "for someone who can win" due to the winner take all system we have.
Most of us end up voting more to keep someone out of office than to put someone in.

I'll vote for Kucinich in the primary. It doesn't matter to me what the east coast or Midwest do.
In the general election I'll vote for whoever I think will do the least damage tome and my friends' position in the world. That most likely means the Democratic candidate since Republicans tend to be more authoritarian in nature. (just look over the last 8 years of presidential train wreck for the example there)
posted by Dillenger69 at 10:49 AM on January 2, 2008

To directly answer your question The primaries are held at Iowa and new Hampshire because they are small. The two states have a combined population of about 4.3 million--majority white. They are viewed as a microcosm of total population the United States, a giant focus group if you will- which is why they are kick off states.

But really, it doesn't matter which states start the ball rolling, so long as they are small. Also Ad blitzes are not needed so much as in large states many of the population of Iowa and NH will experience them up close and personal. So when the results are tallied up and disseminated it sets the example for those maybe not so much in politics or the undecided. It's the "first impression effect" ifor lack of a better word.

Nonetheless, you have agency and don't need to let first impressions or corn farmers reactions decide for you. They have no bearing on your vote and your vote it still counts.

I tried...
posted by Student of Man at 10:52 AM on January 2, 2008

Well it's not necessarily farmers who are calling the shots in Iowa, here's the first item in this month's Harper's Index (Jan 2008)

Ratio of the number of Latinos in Iowa to the number of full-time farmers: 7:4

The second fun fact:

Percentage change since 2000 in the estimated number of Hispanic voters in the United States: +122

The US should get comfortable with the idea that it might be seeing the last generation of politicians who are not fluent in Spanish.
posted by mullingitover at 10:56 AM on January 2, 2008

Ratio of the number of Latinos in Iowa to the number of full-time farmers: 7:4

I'd bet a good deal of those Latinos are farm workers, who aren't legal, or aren't planning to vote - so while perhaps culturally interesting, the point is null.
posted by dkleinst at 11:34 AM on January 2, 2008

Pollomacho: DC gets to vote for President like any other state. (since 1961 when the 23rd Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, allowing District residents to vote for President and Vice President)

DC just doesn't receive voting Congressional representation. (which I agree sucks, since they pay federal taxes)
posted by dcjd at 12:07 PM on January 2, 2008

ROU_Xenophobe's pretty on the mark as far as this goes, with Student of Man not far behind. The current system creates a system of early caucuses and primaries that narrow the field and indicate how a small portion of the general public responds to candidates who opt to campaign heavily in a handful of states.

What if, for example, I want to vote for Joe Biden, but a husk of Iowan corn farmers decide otherwise?

Well, first you'd try to convince Biden to actually spend campaign money in Iowa instead of blowing it off since he has a limited budget. The focus-group style system seems to mean something to you, so you'd do well to give money or time to a candidate to help his (or her) participation in it.

Second, you'd recognize that even though Iowa is responsible for a large percentage of the corn production in the US, blowing it off as a "husk of corn farmers" is fairly inaccurate. I'm not sure how the breakdown goes as to how many people make it to caucuses, but the state has more people in urban areas than rural ones (roughly 1.6 million to 1.3 million, according to this page) with a large portion of the urban population working in the insurance and financial sectors. While not an exact breakdown of the country, this is more representative than states like New York (or even Iowa's neighbor, Illinois) where the runaway majority of the population is in a large urban center.

I'm not sure why dkleinst is assuming that the Iowan hispanic population is necessarily based in farm work. Although I'd guess that the statistics are skewed to the legal immigrant population, the majority of hispanic workers are in factory-style jobs, not farm ones. A fair bet doesn't necessarily mean the statistics will correlate, nor does it nullify the point that the hispanic population isn't primarily working in the farm industry and may have a significant voting bloc.
posted by mikeh at 1:00 PM on January 2, 2008

The primaries are held at Iowa and new Hampshire because they are small. The two states have a combined population of about 4.3 million--majority white. They are viewed as a microcosm of total population the United States, a giant focus group if you will- which is why they are kick off states.

This is untrue.

Iowa and New Hampshire come first because Iowa and New Hampshire work harder to keep themselves first than other states do to usurp their firstness. No better reason than that.

There is certainly not any consensus among anybody that they come first because they are small or serve as useful samples of the country or anything like that.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 8:02 PM on January 2, 2008