New answers tagged parties
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It isn't impossible for a third-party or independent candidate to win a Presidential election. However, it is very unlikely for several reasons.
First, a candidate needs lots of media attention in order to win. If the major news media organizations (Fox News, CNN, CNBC, NBC News, etc.) don't mention a candidate frequently, most voters won't know he exists. ...
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A party is different from the individuals that comprise it. And the platform of a party is often different from the platforms of the politicians that lead the party. A party allows a spectrum of opinion whilst subscribing to some basic essential principles.
It is part of politics to learn the art of compromise and the art of not compromising, this is part ...
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Nothing prevents this, other than the likelihood that the candidate will not get enough support, and ultimately votes, to win the primary & general elections. But it can happen, if the candidate can muster enough resources. We really don't have to look further than the election of Donald Trump, despite many of his positions being opposed to long-held ...
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Primaries. Each party (usually - exact election mechanics vary depending on election locality and office; the rest of this answer assumes Presidential election) has its own primary "election" in the lead-up to the actual election where they decide which candidate they will endorse in the upcoming election. Typically, they choose to back someone who ...
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What prevents them is voters, which is an imperfect mechanism and occasionally leads to embarrassing things like ultra-conservative Lyndon Larouche candidates winning the Democratic primaries for Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of State in 1986. In this instance, it was speculated that it was a consequence of low-information voters picking the simple-...
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Generally speaking there is nothing that physically or legally prevents this. However, the whole point of primaries and other nominating processes is, in part, to perform exactly this filtering.
Primary elections are frequently contested affairs with candidates campaigning directly against each other - including doing opposition research on each other. To ...
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The Australian system uses majority preference instant run-off voting and awards public funding via the number of first preference votes.
The amount payable is calculated by multiplying the number of first preference (i.e., primary) votes received by the rate of payment applicable at the time. The rate is indexed every six months in line with increases in ...
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As you note, in situations involving coalitions identifying which votes were for which party can be unclear. Not least because voters may not care. Voters may have an attitude of "I'm a centrist. I'll vote for either party, and now that they are in a formal coalition, I won't have to choose between them. It is therefore impossible to tell from the ...
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Roll-over votes. Even if everyone decides to preference-pick different people, there will almost certainly be votes left over for the party once all the counting is done. Those votes will go towards whomever is at the top of the list and not yet elected.
So if you'd need 500 votes for a seat, and candidate #2 get 900, candidate #3 gets 600 and candidate #4 ...
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More resources to the main candidates' campaigns.
In Brazil parties usually focus campaign resources on the main candidates they want to be elected and the lesser candidates are left with more limited resources for their campaigns, thus making harder for then to get votes. But that doesn't stop lesser candidates from getting more votes than main candidates ...
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They cannot guarantee that their leader will be the first person elected in their party. However, there are a few things they can do to improve those odds (though it's hard to quantify the effect these can have):
Placing them at the top of the list that appears on the ballot paper: people who are more interested in the party than the politician sometimes ...
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