Forms of Presidential Primaries
Jason E. Wyatt
Grantham University

Instructor’s Name
American Government II
13 March 2012

In the presidential race there are several types of Primaries that can be held. Let’s first look what a primary is. According to Dictionary.com a primary in US politics is a preliminary election in which voters of each party nominate candidates for office. There are different ways that voters are able to vote for their candidate. There is a Closed Primary which is a type of primary in which voters are limited to choosing candidates from the party in which they are a member of (AG&PT,pg184). In a closed primary voters have to declare their party’s affiliation and has to vote according to their party. This prevents voters from voting for the candidate on the opposing party that they feel has the best chance of losing against their candidate.
Another Primary is an Open Primary which is a primary in which any registered voter can vote but must vote for candidates for one party (AG&PT,pg184). In an Open Primary voters pick a side in the privacy of the voter’s booth. This is also called voting a straight ticket.
Then there is the Blanket Primary where voters can vote for candidates of different parties regardless of their political affiliation. This practice was allowed until 2000 when the United Stated Supreme Court ruled that allowing voters to do this violated the parties First Amendment Right of association. This seems crazy to me that the Supreme Court would do this. This appears to go against the principles that the United States was founded on. I feel that you should be able to vote for the best candidate regardless of the party affiliation that you belong to.
There are times that no candidate receives the majority of the votes in the first primary they will run a second primary called a Run-Off Primary. A Run-Off Primary is where the top two candidates compete in another primary.
Primaries play a sometime pivotal role in the outcome of the election. Once political parties realized that the earlier the State primary was in the year the greater effect it had on the outcome of the election. So the States began Front-Loading the Primaries. Front-Loading is the practice of moving presidential primary elections to the early part of the campaign to maximize the impact of these primaries on the nomination (AG&PT,pg185).
It did not take long for there to be problems with Front-Loading. Some of the feared problems are that the voters are casting their vote without making a thorough assessment of the candidate. This also caused the fear that the front runner could wrap up the nomination early on in the process. Since front-loading was becoming such a problem and it was feared that the states would try have and earlier and earlier primary the Republican and Democrat parties got to gather and decided to set some rules. The parties agreed upon that no state could hold a primary before 5 February. In the last election this date became known as Super Tuesday due to the number of states that help their primaries on that day. This did pose a problem in that since there was so many states that held and early primary some of the states felt that they did not receive enough candidate exposure in their state. This is where front-loading has not become counterproductive. The candidate did not have enough time to get his message out and the voters did not know enough about the candidate to make a good informed decision.
I feel that this process could be avoided by giving the candidates a longer time to campaign. If you started the process a year earlier they would have a lot of time to campaign. Then you could hold a primary and the party front-runners would then have ample time to get their message out. I think that this would give the people of the United States ample time to make an educated decision

References American Government and Politics Today, Schmidt, Shelley, Bardes, 2010-2011