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May 23, 2024 · A presidential campaign is a set of activities to achieve something such as social or political change. Learn the meaning, usage and collocations of this term with Collins Dictionary, and see sentences from various sources.
- Overview
- The Electoral College
- Review questions
A high-level overview of the presidential election process.
US presidential elections are held every four years, but the process is long and consists of several stages. It can take candidates more than a year of campaigning even to win the nomination of their party, let alone the presidency itself.
The president and vice president are formally elected at the Electoral College in December following the general election. Electors from each state plus the District of Columbia cast votes; most states require all their electors to vote for the statewide popular vote winner. This “winner-takes-all” approach to distributing electors raises questions over the extent to which the Electoral College facilitates or impedes democracy.
Critics of the Electoral College highlight the potential for a candidate to lose the nationwide popular vote but win the presidency, as in the elections of 2000 and 2016. The “winner-takes-all” allocation of most electors in the Electoral College also means that voters in “safe states” (those that have consistently voted for the same party in recent presidential elections, such as California and Texas) are often less engaged and less motivated to vote in a presidential election, compared to voters in more competitive “swing states” where both Democratic and Republican candidates have won recently, such as Florida and Ohio.
On the other hand, defenders of the Electoral College argue that it incentivizes candidates to campaign in states of different sizes, rather than just the largest states and cities, and that it keeps a prominent role for the states in a federal election.
[I'm still confused about the Electoral College . . . is there some other way you could explain it?]
What are the stages of a presidential election?
What are the arguments for the Electoral College facilitating democracy?
What are the arguments for the Electoral College impeding democracy?
[Notes and attributions]
The election of the president and the vice president of the United States is an indirect election in which citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in one of the fifty U.S. states or in Washington, D.C., cast ballots not directly for those offices, but instead for members of the Electoral College.
An election for president of the United States happens every four years on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. The next presidential election will be November 5, 2024. What is the typical presidential election cycle?
campaign. Donald Trump campaigning in 2016. Donald Trump at a rally in Akron, Ohio, August 2016. Although the traditional starting date of the general election campaign is Labor Day (the first Monday in September), in practice the campaign begins much earlier, because the nominees are known long before the national conventions.
People also ask
What is a political campaign?
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How the president is elected. Find out how a candidate becomes president of the United States. Learn about caucuses and primaries, political conventions, the general election, the Electoral College, and more. Overview of the presidential election process.
A political campaign is an organized effort which seeks to influence the decision making progress within a specific group. In democracies, political campaigns often refer to electoral campaigns, by which representatives are chosen or referendums are decided.
