Welcome to On the Campaign Trail. I'm Bill Nigut.
Throughout 2016, we're going to be bringing you these occasional reports that I hope give you a better
sense of what's happening as we watch the presidential election play out.
We are about to enter a very exciting part of the campaign season.
On February 1st, the first voters begin to make their decisions about who they want to see as
president of the United States.
Throughout the year, mostly through the first half of the year, states across the country
will all have either primary elections or caucuses to select the candidates they want to be president.
Let's talk about the differences.
Iowa, which votes on February 1st, is a caucus state.
Here's what happens in a caucus.
Individuals from the community, people like you and me,
have to go to a location, a school gym, sometimes a person's home or other public locations as well,
and they have to spend three or four hours
meeting to talk about the campaign to talk about the various points of view of
the different candidates. And then at a certain point in the evening, the caucus
members divide themselves into various parts of the room.
The supporters of Candidate A go over to one corner, of Candidate B go to a different corner.
And at the end of the night, a head count is taken of all those people and that
result is fed back from the caucuses all over the state of Iowa to the
headquarters of the political parties.
And the votes are tallied and the candidate who wins emerges from that process.
Now we have our second election.
That happens in New Hampshire, and there they have the much more traditional primary election.
You know what that is basically.
It means that polling places around the state are opened,
and people go and cast a ballot for the candidate of their choice.
There are different kinds of primaries.
There's what they call a closed primary and there's an open primary.
Here's the difference.
In a state like Georgia, we have what is called an open primary.
When you become a registered voter here, you don't have to declare whether you're a Republican or a
Democrat or a Libertarian. You simply register your vote.
On primary day when you go into the voting place, you have the opportunity to take either a
Republican ballot, which has all the Republican presidential candidates who
are listed on it, or a Democratic ballot, with the Democratic candidates listed on it.
You're free to do either.
There are other states that are closed primary states.
In those states, when you register to vote you select the party that you
want to be affiliated with.
When you go in in one of those states to vote, you have to take either the Republican
or the Democratic or maybe the Libertarian ballot and are limited to being
able to vote only for the people who are running in the party in which you are registered.
In many ways, the open primary system is much more appealing
because it gives us so much more freedom to decide on
Election Day whether we want to vote in the Republican or in the Democratic primary.
The Georgia primary is going to be held on March 1st, which is going to
be a very important day in both the Republican and Democratic presidential process.
Here's why. On that day we're going to see a number of states
across the South casting ballots for president.
Those states have come together largely because Georgia's own Secretary of State Brian Kemp worked
very hard last year to get a number of southern states to agree to vote
together on the same day to give the South more power in the process of
nominating both the Democratic and the Republican candidates for president.
So get set, you're going to have a front-row seat for a very exciting campaign season.