For all of the hubbub and jokes about the United States election filling social media and all over the internet, it’s somewhat expected that we too should discuss the recent political events going on with our neighbours to the south. Just a few weeks ago, we saw the passing of the so-called “Super Tuesday” of the election, which has some people worried for the poor United States’s options in the upcoming presidential election, as the options (for some) appear to be choosing between the lesser of two scary candidates.
For those unfamiliar with the American election system, all parties (in particular the two forerunners in the Democratic and Republican Parties) must have their presidential candidate chosen in so-called “Primary” elections in each state. Super Tuesday represents the date when the largest number of states hold their primary elections simultaneously, thus representing one of the most significant days for presidential candidates to secure their party’s nomination, as only one candidate gets support and funding from their respective party.
The Democratic Party (comparatively left-wing to the Republicans) currently has two candidates that are vying for the presidential candidacy, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, whereas the Republican Party has the options of Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and the nigh-on infamous Donald Trump. However, the relevancy of John Kasich and, to an extent, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders is dwindling each day, partially due to how the American system works.
In American politics, a “delegate” is the term used to refer to the persons in each of the National Conventions (Republican National Convention and Democratic National Convention) that vote upon their desired representative. They are voted for at a local or state level with the idea that they will support a given candidate at the time of the National Convention. However, they are not in fact bound to vote for this candidate at the time of the Convention, thus leading to some rather complicated interpretations of the numbers indicating the ‘delegates’ in support of each Presidential Candidate.
As of the writing of this article, of the 1237 Republican delegates needed for the Republican nomination, Trump currently has 678, while Ted Cruz has 423 and John Kasich sits at only 143. With 1049 delegates remaining to support a particular party member, it seems almost certain that Trump will be gaining the Republican candidacy unless there is some extremely incredible upsets and change of votes in the Republican delegatation. However, some political voices suggest that this is not as uncommon as one might think; the prospect of the wildly right-wing Trump could prove worrisome for the Republican Party come Presidential Election day, as he would not likely be winning over many of the swing-voters that they will need to persuade in order to win.
Even more of an upset would be if Clinton does not win the Democratic Candidacy, with 1614 delegates to Sanders’ 856. Of course, this does not account for the fact that 467 of these delegates are so-called “super-delegates”, not the traditional “pledged-delegates,” meaning that in reality they are not even required to indicate their preference for one of the delegates. So good luck interpreting the numbers in actuality because technically speaking the nominations could go completely differently than these delegate numbers suggest.
The entire idea of looking at ‘polls’ as predictors of delegate choice and election results is heavily flawed. Looking at the results of current Primary Elections heavily favours more right-wing party members (in this case, Clinton and Trump) as it is primarily the right-wing southern states that have already conducted their primary elections. In addition, it does not account for the difference in results based on voter turnout; while a 100% turnout is never expected, abnormally high or low turnouts can skew the results of elections greatly. This goes hand-in-hand with the effects of media portrayal of polls in regards to voter action—predicting a landslide victory for one side can lead to a sense of defeat in the opposing side’s supporters, thus resulting in low turnout rates for that side in what might have been a closer election than forecast.
With this in mind, while it seems very likely that Election Day 2016 will be Clinton vs Trump, it’s not entirely set in stone just yet. With the right (or wrong) influences, the results of the Primaries may turn out entirely differently than expected.
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