A little yes and mostly no. In the United States, both the Republican and Democratic Parties hold a general primary in order to choose among a field of candidates who their nominee will be for the top job come the general election after their conventions commence and close. What does that mean? Well, a little history first.I am British.
I live on an island that predominantly subsists on tea and misery.
As such, forgive my silly question: Can't both parties just railroad through a candidate at their national conventions?
Robert Kennedy's death altered the dynamics of the race, and threw the Democratic Party into disarray. Although Humphrey appeared the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, thanks to his support from the traditional power blocs of the party, he was an unpopular choice with many of the anti-war elements within the party, who identified him with Johnson's controversial position on the Vietnam War. However, Kennedy's delegates failed to unite behind a single candidate who could have prevented Humphrey from getting the nomination. Some of Kennedy's support went to McCarthy, but many of Kennedy's delegates, remembering their bitter primary battles with McCarthy, refused to vote for him. Instead, these delegates rallied around the late-starting candidacy of Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, a Kennedy supporter in the spring primaries, and who had presidential ambitions. However, by dividing the antiwar votes at the Democratic Convention, it made it easier for Humphrey to gather the delegates he needed to win the nomination.
When the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, thousands of young antiwar activists from around the nation gathered in the city to protest the Vietnam War. In a clash which was covered on live television, Americans were shocked to see Chicago police brutally beating anti-war protesters in the streets of Chicago. While the protesters chanted "the whole world is watching", the police used clubs and tear gas to beat back the protesters, leaving many of them bloody and dazed. The tear gas even wafted into numerous hotel suites; in one of them Vice President Humphrey was watching the proceedings on television. Meanwhile, the convention itself was marred by the strong-arm tactics of Chicago's mayor Richard J. Daley (who was seen on television angrily cursing Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, who made a speech at the convention denouncing the excesses of the Chicago police in the riots). In the end, the nomination itself was anticlimactic, with Vice President Humphrey handily beating McCarthy and McGovern on the first ballot. The convention then chose Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine as Humphrey's running mate. However, the tragedy of the antiwar riots crippled the Humphrey campaign from the start, and it never fully recovered.
After the 1968 fiasco, the Democratic National Committee created a commission charged with proposing reforms to the nominating process. (It was chaired initially by Sen. George McGovern and then by Rep. Donald Fraser.)
Its report brought state delegate allocations into line with the distribution of population and required state parties to adopt open procedures for selecting delegates rather than allowing state party leaders to pick them in secret.
In practice, states mostly implemented this by adopting presidential primaries — which generally induced Republicans to make the same change.
The new system kicked off a chaotic era in which mavericks and factional leaders could win over the objections of party leaders.
In 1972, McGovern took advantage of his own reforms to win the Democratic nomination, even with an ideology so unacceptable to major party factions that the AFL-CIO didn't support him over Richard Nixon.
Then in 1976, Jimmy Carter won the Democratic nomination despite a total lack of ties to the party establishment in Washington, and proceeded to win the White House and then not pursue the party's agenda.
Also in 1976, incumbent President Gerald Ford faced an extremely strong primary challenge from conservative leader Ronald Reagan and was forced to drop the incumbent vice president from the ticket in order to appease conservatives.
Four years later, incumbent President Carter was challenged from the left by Ted Kennedy, his renomination secured only by the rally-round-the-flag effect induced by the Iranian hostage crisis.
At around this time, it became fashionable to observe that American political parties were in decline. University of California Irvine political scientist Martin Wattenberg achieved the apogee of this literature with his 1985 classic The Decline of Political Parties in America (since updated in five subsequent editions), citing the waning influence of party professionals, the rise of single-issue pressure groups, and an attendant fall in voter turnout. After all, a party whose leaders can't even pick its own presidential nominee in a reliable way isn't much of a party at all.
The Republican Party presidential primaries and caucuses are indirect elections in which voters cast ballots for a slate of delegates to the 2016 Republican National Convention. These delegates in turn directly elect the Republican Party's presidential nominee. Depending on each state's law and each state's party rules, when voters cast ballots for a candidate, they may be voting to directly award delegates bound to vote for a particular candidate at the state or national convention (binding primary or caucus), or they may simply be expressing an opinion that the state party is not bound to follow in selecting delegates to the national convention (non-binding primary or caucus).
Under the party's delegate selection rules, the number of pledged delegates allocated to each of the 50 U.S. states is 10, plus three delegates for each congressional district. For the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands, fixed numbers of pledged delegates are allocated. Each state and U.S territory will be awarded bonus pledged delegates based on whether it has a Republican governor, it has Republican majorities in one or all chambers of its state legislature, and whether it has Republican majorities in its delegation to the U.S. Congress, among other factors. A state or territory may then either use a winner-take-all system, wherein the candidate that wins a plurality of votes wins all of that state's allocated pledged delegates; or use a proportional representation system, where the delegates are awarded proportionally to the election results. Many of the states using a proportional system require candidates to meet a certain threshold before receiving delegates; for example, a candidate receiving less than 20 percent of the vote in Texas would receive no delegates.[94][95]
Unpledged delegates will include three top party officials from each state and territory.[94]
The Republican National Committee has imposed strict new rules for states wishing to hold early contests in 2016.[96] Under these rules, no state will be permitted to hold a primary or caucus in January; and only Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada are entitled to February contests. States with early-March primaries or caucuses must award their delegates proportionally. Any state that violates these rules will have their delegation to the 2016 convention severely cut: states with more than 30 delegates will be deprived of all but nine, plus RNC members from that state; states with fewer than 30 will be reduced to six, plus RNC members.
After the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Democratic Party made changes in its delegate selection process, based on the work of the McGovern-Fraser Commission. The purpose of the changes was to make the composition of the convention less subject to control by party leaders and more responsive to the votes cast during the campaign for the nomination.
Some Democrats believed that these changes had unduly diminished the role of party leaders and elected officials, weakening the Democratic tickets of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. The party appointed a commission chaired by Jim Hunt, the then-Governor of North Carolina, to address this issue. In 1982, the Hunt Commission recommended and the Democratic National Committee adopted a rule that set aside some delegate slots for Democratic members of Congress and for state party chairs and vice chairs.[7] Under the original Hunt plan, superdelegates were 30% of all delegates, but when it was finally implemented for the 1984 election, they were 14%. The number has steadily increased, and today they are approximately 20%.[8]