The Only Guide You’ll POLITICS Need to the US Elections
G
OP? Caucuses? Electoral College? No, me neither. But seeing as the Leader of the Free World, a.k.a. Trump, is running a second time, we may be in for another four years of staggering drama, so I decided it was time to catch up on what the USA elections are all about. As we all know, the fight is on between the Republican (GOP) Party’s candidate, Donald Trump (known as the incumbent as he is currently the president), and the Democratic Party’s candidate is Joe Biden, who was the Vice President during Obama’s presidency. Both men are in their Seventies. Donald Trump will be 74 years if he gets a second term in office, while Joe Biden will be the oldest first-term President in history at 78. America has fixed-term elections which take place every four years. A presidential candidate must meet the constitutional requirements; they must be a natural-born American citizen, at least 35 years old and must have been a resident in the US for at least 14 years. If you are a US citizen and over 18 years old, you should be eligible to vote in the US elections. However, many states have passed laws requiring voters to show identification documents to prove who they are before they can vote. These are often initiated by Republicans under the excuse of guarding against voter fraud, yet Democrats accuse them of using this as a form of voter suppression as it is often poorer, minority voters who are unable to provide ID like a driving licence.
The presidential candidates are elected through a series of primaries and caucuses which will take place in each state. A primary is just an election used to choose a party’s candidate for the presidency, whereas a caucus is much less common; it is more like a meeting where parties will try to persuade the electorate to vote for them
How the amount of votes in each state is allocated
or their party. States that use caucuses are usually those which are geographically large but thinly populated. Once the candidates have been chosen for each party, both candidates must compete for Electoral College votes. The Electoral College is made up of a number of representatives from each state, which is partly decided based on the state’s population. There are a total of 538 seats up for grabs, so the winner is the candidate that wins 270 or more. The use of the Electoral College means that voters must vote for state-level representatives, meaning that it is possible for a 6
