New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani flexed his political muscle, getting a clean sweep as his three endorsed congressional candidates advanced to November’s general election

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani flexed his political muscle Tuesday, getting a clean sweep as his three endorsed congressional candidates advanced to November’s general election, ousting two incumbent Democratic congressmen.

  • Resonosity@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    9 hours ago

    In the US, we have Primary Elections and then General Elections.

    Primary Elections are intra-party. The allow multiple candidates to run against each other under each party’s banner. For instance, in Illinois this year in one of the House of Representatives races, we had something like 15 Democrats running in the Primary. One 1 Democrat made it out, as well as 1 Republican who had to go up against their other Primary challengers. Voters see all those candidates on whichever ballot they registered with: Democrat or Republican.

    General Elections are inter-party. They allow the chosen Primary candidates from each party to run against each other. The result of this election is the person who wins gets the position in government they were running for. In the General, candidates need to get half or more votes (>= 50%) to win. On the ballot, voters can only choose the 1 candidate from the party they registered with to vote: Democrat or Republican.

    This kind of system is called First Past The Post (FPTP) and is the default voting system in the US. New York, which is where these elections were held, has a different voting system called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV allows voters to rank candidates on the ballot rather than just choosing 1. Under RCV and in my Illinois example about, I could rank someone 1st, someone else 2nd, someone else 3rd, etc. Votes are counted by everyone’s 1st choice to see if there’s a winner. If no one takes >= 50%, the candidate with lowest votes is dropped and those people’s ballots are counted by their 2nd choice. If still no one takes >= 50%, the bottommost candidate is dropped and you start looking at those people’s 2nd or 3rd choices, etc. etc. etc.

    There is such disparity between candidates of the same party, Democrats in this example, because of money basically. Many people describe the Democratic party as having “establishment” or “corporate” candidates backed by billionaires and corporations on one hand, and young, new candidates backed by working class, everyday people on the other hand. Because the Democratic party still in part answers to Big Money’ed interests, you have Democrats that want to defend the rich, but at the same time you have Democratic Socialists that defend the poor and working class who want to take the reigns of the Democratic party because of our FPTP system. We basically have rich politicians defending the rich, and working class politicians defending the working class in the Democratic party, and that difference breeds hostility.