It has taken more than a year, but we now know who the major contestants will be for the American presidency in 2012. That President Obama would seek reelection and be the Democratic Party nominee has long been expected. Incumbent presidents rarely face significant challenge within their own parties, and Obama has encountered none.



In the Republican Party, however, there has been a fierce contest with 8 candidates pursuing the party’s nomination.  These candidates raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars, traveled extensively across the country and appeared on national television in 17 debates. The last man standing, and the party’s presumed nominee, is Mitt Romney, a highly successful businessman and the former governor of the state of Massachusetts.  There will be much more to say about Romney in future columns.  Today let’s focus on the process by which the American political parties choose their candidates for president.

Keep in mind that there are many political parties in America, from the Constitution Party on the far right of the political spectrum to the Socialist Workers and the Communist Party on the far left.  Any of them may and many of them do nominate candidates for the presidency.  But since the middle of the 19th century, American politics has been dominated by the two “major” parties: the Republicans and the Democrats.  In the 2004 presidential election, the two major parties combined for 99 percent of the popular vote for president.  In 2008, they drew 98.6 percent of all the votes cast.  So the whole ball game, as Americans like to say, is really the contest between these two parties.

In most democracies the candidates for chief executive are chosen by a small group of active party members, often the party’s elected members of the legislature.  In the parliamentary systems, as in England, the leader of the majority party, always a member of the House of Commons, becomes the prime minister.

The American system is very different.  Members of Congress have no direct role in choosing their party’s presidential candidates.  That selection occurs in a complex process designed to permit popular participation.  Each of the 50 state parties holds an election—sometimes called a primary, sometimes a caucus—in which voters in that state get to indicate their preference for their party’s nominee by choosing delegates to a national party convention.  Most of the delegates are ”pledged” to support a particular candidate at the convention.  Candidates campaign in the various states seeking to build support for the selection of delegates pledged to them.

But it’s not that simple.  These state contests are held on different days over several months in the winter and spring of the election year.  No logic or rationale, except tradition and state competition for attention, governs the sequence in which they occur.  And they operate under different sets of rules determined by the state party or government.  Candidates must raise their own funds to compete in these nominating contests and success is often the product of effective fundraising.

Candidates who do well in the earliest nominating contests usually leap quickly to the front in the race for the nomination.  Candidates who do poorly in the early contests usually drop out of the contest before many states have voted.

So it was this year.  After the earliest votes in the small states of New Hampshire and Iowa, 3 of the original candidates abandoned their quests for the nomination.  Others soon followed as their vote totals and campaign funds dwindled.  By mid-March, even though more than half the states had yet to hold their elections, it was clear that Mitt Romney had an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates and the race was over.

Critics of the American nominating process—and there are many—point out several deficiencies. It lasts too long, exhausting candidates and voters.  It’s too expensive, and candidates have to spend too much time raising campaign funds.  It too often attracts only marginal candidates with little record of accomplishment in the national government.  And it encourages intra-party contests that feature brutal attacks on the competence and integrity of the candidates, thus weakening the eventual nominee for the general election campaign that follows.  The Republican nominating contest in 2012 displayed all of these problems.

But one candidate, Mitt Romney, survived.  He’s not well known by American voters, and he’s a stranger to most of the rest of the world. In the next column, we’ll take a closer look at this man, what he stands for, and how he might go about winning the presidency in 2012.

G. Calvin Mackenzie
(Mackenzie is the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of Government at Colby College in the USA and currently a Fulbright Scholar in Vietnam.)