Electoral Geography

Week Two Part One Electoral Geography

Electoral Geography is Political Geography with a focus on elections and the electoral process.

Studies both how geography affects elections but also the global variation in electoral systems.

What makes this unique from political science is that we take a more critical approach, as last week’s reading described.

In the United States, geography has major influence on elections and how politicians gain and control power. Presidential Elections

The first step to become President is to run in the presidential primaries, which is how political parties decide who represents the party to run for President.

Of course you can run without a party but it's almost impossible as it requires a massive amount of money and infrastructure to run, political parties provide those resources.

We will have another lecture on political parties in the US and their ideology.

Each political party controls their primary elections, there is no US law that dictates how these go. Primary Elections

Announcements:

Biden- Apr. 25, 2019

Sanders- Feb. 19, 2019

Warren- Feb. 9, 2019

Buttigieg- Apr. 15, 2019

First Vote- Feb. 3, 2020 Presidential Primaries At the start, campaigns focus on the first states of the primary and as states vote folks drop out and the campaigns continue until someone has a majority.

States do not use winner takes all, the delegate count is divided by popular vote percentage.

So while some states are more important, most states get some attention by top candidates.

Both parties hold a primary even if a current President is running again, their could be a challenger (but this is rare).

By the Summer of the election year the primaries are over and each party holds a convention to nominate the person and lay out a party platform.

Part Two Presidential Elections

In most democracies, we would see a national campaign for President and whoever wins the most votes wins, but the US is complicated!

In theory after the primary, the campaigns are in full swing but they don't focus on campaigns nationally, they actually focus on a small amount of states.

This is thanks to our electoral college system, as the constitution mandates, the President is elected by a group of electors that gather after the election.

Each state gets votes based on population (min of 3) and each state mandates that whoever wins the popular vote in the state gets all electoral votes (True in all but 2 states) Electoral College Electoral College

The root of the electoral college is racism and white political supremacy.

Initially Northern and Southern states had about the same population, expect that ⅓ of the South’s population were enslaved people. Slaves could not vote, so the North if the US used a popular vote had an “advantage”

This was also an issue with congressional representation, so the founders solved that issue by saying that that each slave was ⅗ of a white person, but that didn't solve the election issue.

So the compromise was the electoral college and in the first few elections Southerners and slave holding politicians won. Electoral College

So not only is the Electoral College rooted in racism it also undermines the idea of democracy. 2016 is a good example…

Popular Vote:

Clinton- 65,844,610

Trump’s- 62,979,636

5th time this happened

Voter Power:

CA: 1 = WY: 57 Presidential Geography

Part Three Congressional Election- Senate

Senators have a 6-year term and we have elections every two years with about a third being up for an election.

So in no one election is every senate seat up for reelection.

Each state gets two regardless of size or population.

Each state has different rules but in a very similar way as the President, parties nominate candidates and do a primary system.

Usually you have two candidates and they campaign in the state and one person wins based on the state popular vote. Senate- Current

Currently:

53 Republicans

47 Democrats (including 2 Independent that side with Democrats) Senate- 2020 Election

35 Seats are up election

Republicans are defending 23

Democrats are defending 12 Congressional Election- House

Representatives have a 2-year term and we have elections every two years with everyone up for an election.

Each state gets at least one but then more depending on population size.

Each state has different rules but in a very similar way as the President parties nominate candidates and do a primary system.

Those candidate then campaign in the district they represent, and one person wins by popular vote.

There are ways to cheat this system, see Gerrymandering. Congressional Geography- House House- Current