What analogy best explains the narrowing down of presidential candidates for a general election?

Question

My understanding is that it's sort of like a football game with sixteen teams in each conference for a total of 32.

The Super Bowl is sort of of like the race for the presidency in which the two teams, one from each conference, try to play each other out to win.

In politics, my understanding is that people start to submit campaigns or start on-line platforms, and it's usually people who have lots of leadership and have a high reputation in their community.

Let's say that there are 20 people total, ten democrats and ten republicans. They start campaigning almost four years before the next election.

What I don't really understand, though, is how they narrow this group of 20 people down to two by the time the general election rolls around. I've heard about caucuses and primary elections, but I still don't know how this helps in narrowing down the list of candidates. Who gets to nominate them and actually take part in them?

Answer 1

What analogy best explains the narrowing down of presidential candidates for a general election?

The analogy I find most often used is "separate the wheat from the chaff"; for which the term winnow is used rather than the expression.

Literally, winnow (1a(1)) means "to remove (something, such as chaff) by a current of air".

Figuratively, in the political sense,, winnow (2c) means "NARROW, REDUCE", as in "winnowed the field to four contenders".

A Google search for "winnow" "democratic" shows "About 147,000 results". At least, in the first few search pages, the term "winnow" appears in the title, in the sense of narrowing the field of candidates by various means.

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What I don't really understand, though, is how they narrow this group of 20 people down to two by the time the general election rolls around. I've heard about caucuses and primary elections, but I still don't know how this helps in narrowing down the list of candidates. Who gets to nominate them and actually take part in them?

The initial "winnowing" (or narrowing) of the field is done through general lack of support for the individual candidates' campaigns. This lack of support is revealed through polling and campaign contributions. The lack of support may result from poor debate performance or "messaging"; that is, fewer people like what the candidate has to say.

During the "primaries" (See: United States presidential primary), the field is narrowed further by voters in the respective parties. It is during the "primaries" (or state caucuses) that delegates are selected to attend the nominating conventions for the respective political parties. Some state delegates are "pledged" to a particular candidate.

"Each party determines how many delegates it allocates to each state. Along with those "pledged" delegates chosen during the primaries and caucuses, state delegations to both the Democratic and Republican conventions also include "unpledged" delegates who have a vote."

Finally, at the United States presidential nominating convention, the field is narrowed to the two candidates representing the Democratic and Republican parties in the general election.

Generally, use of "presidential campaign nominating convention" refers to the two major parties' quadrennial events: the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. Some minor parties also select their nominees by convention, including the Green Party, the Socialist Party USA, the Libertarian Party, the Constitution Party, and the Reform Party USA.

Answer 2

It's like a broken garbage truck rumbling down the road towards Election. Since the truck is broken, all the lightweight trash gets jumbled around, and then flies off the back to be strewn in the wake of garbage truck, until, finally, at the end, only the most heavyweight of the garbage remains.

In the meantime, it stinks like hell and makes a mess of every place it visits, but no one wants to bother with cleaning up the mess, or fixing the garbage truck before its next scheduled trip.

Answer 3

Anyone can be a (presidential, senate, house, etc) candidate. The choice of who is the Republican or the Democrat candidate is up to those parties to decide. In the case of presidential races, both of those parties choose to run some form of national election.

Consider the Olympics: lots of 100m runners want to be their countries' 100m runner at the Olympics. Each country has a national 100m competition, and the winner gets to be the representative of that country in the Olympic race.