alright you know what, for the non-americans, I’ll give it a shot.
Ok so the federal government is divided into three branches, the Executive Branch, composed of the President and various underlings he appoints, the Legislative Branch, composed of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the Judicial Branch, composed of the Supreme Court and various federal courts. You need to have the approval of a majority of the members of the house, a majority of the members of the senate, and the president in order to pass a law, so controlling all three is extremely important. Supreme Court Justices (idk why judges are called “justices” when they’re on the supreme court) and Federal Judges are also very important, but those aren’t elected so we’re going to ignore them. So how about the assholes we do vote for?
First we have the House of Representatives. The house is composed of 435 members. Why 435? because some assholes in the 1920s got tired of adding more chairs and desks to the house chambers every 10 years and were like “yeah that’s a good number”. Why did I say every 10 years? Well every 10 years, the government conducts a census where they tally up how many people are in every state, and once they’ve got their final count, they divide the total population by 435, do some rounding here and there, and then assign each state a number of representatives roughly proportional to the size of the population. The end result is something like this:
the formula they use to apportion reps is kinda wonky so you can end up with situations like Rhode Island having 2 representatives for a population of 1 million and Montana having 1 representative for a population of 900,000 but whatever, it’s fine, it’s cool, it’s daijoubu, we gotta move on. Once this process is done, every state with more than one rep divides itself into districts (similar to ridings in Canada or constituencies in the UK) - one for each representative - which are roughly equal in population (lotta room for error here). That looks something like this:
And then each of those districts holds an election every two years to pick their representative (all 435 at the same time btw). So, for example, I live in California’s 34th District (it’s on that insert in the bottom left corner there). Let’s see how my local house race is going!
Unsurprisingly, the guy I voted for is losing.
Now this is where some of the state level elections come into play because those house districts are drawn by the state legislatures (every state has its own little mini version of the federal government with a governor instead of a president and, with a couple exceptions, a state house and a state senate) and the state legislatures like to get sillay with it
These goofy looking districts are the result of a process called gerrymandering. Basically, the districts have to be contiguous and they have to be roughly equal in population, but other than that, there are very few rules for how you’re allowed to draw districts. Why? Because some assholes in the 1920s thought it’d be fun if states could fuck around with the districts and the state legislatures like fucking around with the districts so no one wants to change it back. Now because the people who vote for any given party are in no way evenly distributed across the state (or a city for that matter) the party that controls the state legislature can create districts that are more favorable to them by manipulating the district borders. Here’s what that looks like in theory:
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
Basically, this means that controlling state legislatures is very important because they can have a lot of influence on who wins the house.
Reps are elected every 2 years.
Ok time for the Senate. The Senate is way more straightforward. Each of the 50 states gets 2 senators, which are elected every 6 years in state-wide elections. Unlike the house, which is elected all at once, the senate is divided into three groups, or Classes, and one Class goes up for election every two years. Those are divided like this:
For example, Here in California, our senators are Dianne “I am too old and should probably have retired years ago” Feinstein and Kamala “stop calling me a cop” Harris. Harris is a Class 3 Senator, so her election was in 2016, while Feinstein is a Class 1 Senator, so she was re-elected in 2018. This year was a Class 2 election, meaning here in California, we didn’t have a senate election, but all the states in blue and green held elections for one of their senators.
Now you might think the house should be able to do the job of representing the american people just fine on its own, so this raises the question: why have a second chamber of congress? Two reasons. One, when the country was first founded there was some debate over whether the US should be a loose confederation of states that are still mostly independent, or a nation with a strong federal government with broad sweeping authority over all the states. In the long run, the latter option won, but when the constitution was being written this was very much up in the air. So at the time, a lot of the smaller states argued that they were just as much a part of the union as the larger states, and they should therefore be given equal representation in congress, while the larger states wanted proportional representation. The solution to this disagreement was a shitty half-measure (a recurring theme in american history) where one house would be elected proportionally and the other would give all states equal representation.
The other reason was.... well I’ll let one of the guys who came up with it explain:
Basically, they wanted to have a House of Lords to act as a counterbalance to their equivalent of the House of Commons, but since America was founded by a bunch of people who jerked off to John Locke they couldn’t have like an actual landed gentry with peerages and knighthoods and shit so instead they just made a second chamber of congress where everyone serves longer terms and therefore is under less pressure from the masses.
If you think this sounds stupid and vestigial and gives an unfair advantage to smaller states, than you’d be correct! The senate is a terrible institution, but we can’t get rid of it because abolishing the senate would require the approval of (wait for it) the senate. Speaking of the senate, here’s a picture of senate majority leader Mitch “my opponent raised $43 million to beat me and lost lmao” McConnell, the man largely responsible for american politics being the special, unique kind of shitty it is today. Feel free to photoshop him into Emperor Palpatine or something for a sensible chuckle:
Now onto the one that gives everyone brain damage whether you live in america or not, the Presidency. Now in most countries, where the government isn’t bullshit and actually makes sense, the head of government (usually the Prime Minister) is elected by the legislature (usually the parliament) and is therefore the leader of whichever party has the most seats in said legislature. But noooooo not here in the US. Because the founding fathers ALSO jerked off to some asshole named Montesquieu who thought you could prevent a tyrannical government by having multiple branches with distinct powers which are constantly in conflict with each other. It turns out that in the long run this just turns into a government that does literally nothing, but in theory it was a good idea so I guess it was worth a shot. What I’m trying to say here is that we elect the president separate from everything else, so it’s not uncommon to have, say, a democratic president and a republican congress, or a republican president and senate but a democratic house.
Aaaaaanyway, the presidential election process begins with the primaries. The primaries are a fucking MESS because every state does them slightly differently but the condensed version is that they’re elections between a large pool of candidates from the same party to select that party’s nominee for president. So for example, this year, before he could take on Donald “all-consuming media black hole” Trump in the presidential election, Joe “where am I again?” Biden had to win a race against a pool of like 20 or so other democrats such as Bernie “here’s how he can still win” Sanders, Elizabeth “my campaign staffers are Fucking Idiots” Warren, and Pete “I’m gay but I wish I wasn’t” Buttigieg (that’s not a joke btw he actually said that).
The primaries are done state by state in a slow trickle throughout the first few months of the year starting in February and ending in July (though usually it’s obvious who’s gonna win by March or April). Every state gets a number of “delegates” which are roughly (again, running theme) proportional to the population of the state, each state holds an election with just their registered democrats or just their registered republicans (and sometimes people who registered as independent, again, it’s a mess), at the end of each election, the state gives out delegates to the candidates who got the most votes, proportional to how well they did, and whoever has the most delegates at the end of July moves on to the real deal in November.
The primaries are extremely confusing because they were basically hobbled together piece by piece over several years with not a lot of central direction on behalf of the national parties and now a lot of states like having these weird little traditions like Iowa and New Hampshire voting before everyone else or some states having caucuses instead of primaries (don’t even get me fucking started on caucuses) so we can’t get rid of them to make the process more efficient. What can ya do, c’est la vie c’est la guerre. (btw lots of other elections have primaries as well like senators and representatives and I think even governors in some places. these races are usually a lot more low-profile tho and don’t get a ton of attention unless there’s a crazy upset)
Anyway once the primaries are over it’s time to move on to the general! And this is where the nightmare known as the electoral college comes in.
Ok understanding what the fuck is going on here requires some history. This is going to go to a very dark place in terms of racism, so be warned.
When the founding fathers were designing the government, one of the most contentious topics was whether or not enslaved people should count towards a state’s population, since population determines a state’s representation in the house of representatives, but enslaved people weren’t able to vote so like.... whoever got elected in a district with a lot of enslaved people probably wouldn’t really be representing them in a meaningful way (note: I never said the founding fathers were good people. they were, in fact, huge assholes and almost all of them owned slaves). Basically, the southern states had so many slaves that having slaves not count as part of their population would have given them way fewer house seats, so they argued back and forth with the northern states until they eventually settled on a shitty half measure (I told you) where enslaved people were counted as 3/5ths of one person for the purposes of congressional apportionment (this is called “The 3/5ths Compromise” and it’s one of the most infamous examples of the united states government treating black people as if they were literally less than human).
The point is, when the founding fathers were trying to figure out how to elect the President, they couldn’t get the southern states to agree to a national popular vote because so much of the population of those states were enslaved that the southern states would have relatively little sway on the outcome of a national election, so they decided to assign each state a certain number of “electors” equal to the number of house reps from that state + 2 (for the two senators). That way the southern states could carry over their advantage in congress that the 3/5ths compromise gave them into the presidential election. This would also carry over the advantage small states had in the senate, albeit less so, so the electoral college truly was the shitty half-measure to end all shitty half-measures.
So what does this mean functionally? Basically, rather than a national election, every state holds an individual presidential election (thankfully all on the same day, at least they got that part right) and whoever wins that state’s election gets that state’s electors (the map above shows the electors each state gets). There are 538 electors in total (they gave 3 electors to the District of Columbia even though it’s not a state, long story don’t have time) and whoever gets 270 or more wins!
Now there are two main side effects of this system:
1) Sometimes the person who wins the national popular vote does not win the electoral college. Historically, this has been extremely rare, but it’s happened twice in the past 20 years, which suggests that the electoral college is only going to be more of a problem going forward. This happens because while it matters which states you win, it does not matter what margin you win them by. For example, here are the now infamous results of the 2016 election
Trump won several of these states by extremely thin margins. Pennsylvania by around 50,000 votes, Wisconsin by around 18,000, Michigan by around 10,000. Meanwhile, Clinton won the democratic bastion of California by a margin of over 4,300,000 votes. By winning by huge margins in states with big populations like California and New York, Clinton essentially “ran up the score” on the popular vote while Trump claimed narrow victories in the swing states. Oh and this leads nicely into
2) The Existence of “Swing States”. most states, for a variety of demographic reasons, have a very strong bias towards one party or the other. It doesn’t matter how much campaigning a candidate from the opposite party does in one of these states, or how much they eat into that big margin: barring a huge surprise, they’re not gonna win those electoral votes so it’s simply not worth it. What this means, again, functionally, is that in any given US election, only a small handful of states actually matter because the results in the rest of the states were more or less decided before the candidates were even chosen. Here, for example, is a map of the election landscape in 2020 from before any votes were cast:
Of the 50 US states, only 9 were considered swing states going into this election. which states are considered “safe” vs “swing” varies slightly from election to election. When I was a kid, Colorado and New Mexico were swing states, now they’re solidly democratic. When I was a kid, Georgia and Arizona were solidly republican, now they’re swing states (side note: Texas is not a swing state and anyone who tells you it is needs to stop sucking Beto O’Rourke’s cock and get over their bad case of Democratic Runner-Up Worship Syndrome). Basically, this means that the election is not decided by the american people at large, but by the people of whichever states have the right demographic proportions to make them competitive.
If you’re wondering why we haven’t gotten rid of this nonsense, like I said, historically it usually wasn’t a problem. In every election in the 20th century, the winner of the electoral college was the same as the winner of the popular vote, so getting rid of it just wasn’t something people talked about. But then, as I said before, we had a popular vote loser win the election twice in the past 20 years. The problem there is that both times it was a republican who won, which has created the impression that the electoral college is inherently beneficial to republicans, which means it’s now a partisan issue, which means there can never be enough of a consensus to get rid of it.
So there you have it, a brief explanation of american elections. I hope you’ve learned something from this, because if not, I spent a whole lot of time just.... mansplaining elections to no one.
sometimes I wonder what I’m going with my life.
gummygunk
theartofmadeline
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