Current Events
Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
Updated, April 11, 2016 | Visit our Election 2016: Teaching and Learning Homepage to see all of our election resources.
Even if you’ve barely followed the news over the past several months, you know that Donald Trump is making waves in the Republican field, and that Bernie Sanders is posing a serious challenge to Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side. But really, what does all this have to do with the 2016 presidential election?
After all, what is a primary — or a caucus?
In this lesson, we provide a primer on the presidential nomination process by combining resources from The New York Times with videos and information from around the web, so students won’t just understand how candidates get nominated, but will also be challenged to think deeply about how the system works.
At the bottom of the post, we suggest a variety of ways to use these resources in the classroom, including a jigsaw strategy, a mock caucus and a debate.
How are you talking about the 2016 primary season in your classroom? Let us know.
Questions for Reading, Writing and Discussion
1. What is a primary? What is a caucus? How are they different?
Iowa kicked off the primary season with its caucus on Feb. 1, and New Hampshire followed with its primary on Feb. 9. After that, all the states will hold either caucuses or primaries (or, like Nebraska, both) by mid-June.
Both primaries and caucuses are run at the state level, though caucuses are actually controlled by state party organizations — Democrats and Republicans — while primaries are run by state governments. Some primaries and caucuses are “closed,” meaning that only registered party members can take part; others are “semi-closed” and open to unaffiliated voters; and still others are “open,” so any registered voter can participate.
For voters, primaries and caucuses mean two very different experiences. A primary is an official election, where voters cast their ballots for their preferred candidates in secret, as they would for any other election. But in caucuses, participants typically discuss the candidates in an open forum (picture a gymnasium, public library or even a living room). In the Iowa Democratic caucus, voting is public and participants try to sway others in the room to switch loyalties. In the state’s Republican caucus, voting is instead done by secret ballot.
Voting in a primary is generally a quick activity, and can take place at any point during scheduled voting hours. Participating in a caucus can literally take hours, and if you’re not available when it takes place (the Iowa caucus starts at 7 p.m.), then you can’t participate.
Given the time commitment required and the open nature of the format, caucus participants tend to be much more politically active than an average primary voter. But as a result, far fewer people end up taking part in the process.
Gilbert Cranberg, former editor of The Des Moines Register’s Editorial Page, described Iowa’s Democratic caucuses this way in 1987:
Democratic caucuses feature an arcane delegate-election procedure that requires wheeling and dealing, sometimes for hours. All in public. If you do not relish political wrangling with neighbors, or you cherish the secret ballot, the caucuses are not for you – as they are not for most Iowa Democrats.
But Walt Pregler, a county Democratic Party Chairman in Iowa, sees them differently. He told The Telegraph Herald:
This is grass-roots politics at its purist. It really starts at your kitchen table from discussions at dinner, and it goes right to the caucus where your voice can be heard. It’s not as humdrum as a voting machine.
Question for Students: Watch the above video produced by The Real News Network showing what happens inside an Iowa Democratic caucus, and then decide: What do you think about caucuses and primaries? Are caucuses an example of grass-roots democracy at its best, or are they archaic, exclusive and unrepresentative?
2. How does the party nominating process work? How do the primaries and caucuses lead to eventually choosing a party nomination?
After Iowa and New Hampshire, the South Carolina primary and Nevada caucuses followed. And then on March 1, so-called Super Tuesday, things really got rolling when 14 states (and one territory) held their primary or caucus all on the same day.
By mid-June, all the states will have held their primaries and caucuses. Each statewide contest earns delegates for winning candidates, and those delegates will formally choose the party nominee at the national party conventions to be held during the summer. Most of the delegates are “pledged” — or bound by the rules — to vote for the candidate selected by state voters. A minority of delegates, however, are “unpledged,” meaning they can vote for whomever they want at the nominating convention.
Since 1968, when the primary system was reformed, the presumptive party nominees have typically been declared even before the final primaries have been held because the front-runner candidates have garnered a majority of delegates.
But, there is always the unlikely possibility that by the start of a party convention, no single candidate has secured a majority of delegates from the primaries and caucuses. Then things can really get suspenseful. And already, many primary voters are getting frustrated as they learn that the “world’s foremost democracy is not so purely democratic.”
But is 2016 different from all other recent elections? The Times’s Upshot founding editor, David Leonhardt, writes:
The 2016 Republican primary began as many Republican presidential campaigns do, with a few unexpected names atop the polls. In recent cycles, the names have included Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Pat Buchanan. This year, they’ve been Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson.
What’s made 2016 different is that unexpected names have stayed atop the polls.
For the last five months, Mr. Trump, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Carson have combined for more than 50 percent of Republican voters’ preferences in national polls. And just to review: Mr. Trump and Mr. Carson have never held elective office, while Mr. Cruz is loathed by many of his fellow Republican senators. All three regularly tell untruths on the campaign trail.
By contrast, the poll leaders in the final weeks before voting in the last three competitive Republican races — 2012, 2008 and 2000 — were mostly traditional politicians: Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in 2012; John McCain and Mike Huckabee in 2008; George W. Bush in 2000.
One way or another, 2016 will be different. Either the nominee will be more stylistically radical than any recent predecessor, or an establishment figure like Marco Rubio will stage a much bigger comeback than any recent Republican nominee has.
Question for Students: What do you think? Will this year’s primary contest get messy or complicated in ways that haven’t been seen in decades? Why or why not?
3. Why doesn’t anyone run for president outside the two-party nomination system? When have there been so-called third-party candidates, and how have they affected elections?
The primary and caucus system that has been all over the news is definitely a two-party affair. After all, Democrats and Republicans have dominated presidential politics since the Civil War.
That said, third-party and independent candidates can have relevance. Theodore Roosevelt split from the Republican Party to run as a third-party candidate in 1912, beating the official Republican ticket, but losing to Woodrow Wilson. In more recent times, the independent candidate Ross Perot won almost 20 percent of the popular vote in 1992.
And even though the two parties tend to get all the attention, there are dozens of third-party and independent candidates who run for president every cycle, though collectively they generally get only a small sliver of the overall vote. Here is a list of the candidates who ran in 2012.
Both Donald Trump, the current front-runner in national Republican primary polls, and Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, have suggested they would consider running as third-party candidates in 2016 under certain circumstances.
Would our democracy be stronger if we added a third party and joined the long list of countries with a multiparty system? Mo Elleithee, the former communications director of the Democratic National Committee, answered this question for Room for Debate:
We’ve tried the whole third party approach. But throughout history, third parties have accomplished one of two things – either splitting the vote and weakening one party while strengthening the other; or further polarizing us by giving a structured voice to an extreme element of society. What they haven’t done is give voice to a large movement of Americans, or force the two major parties to be better. And at the end of the day, they almost always fade away, remain obscure, or get absorbed by one of the two major parties anyway.
Let’s face it – third parties just aren’t part of our political DNA.
But, Micah L. Sifry, the executive director of Civic Hall, writes:
Why is Donald Trump pledging his fealty to whomever the Republican Party nominates for president? And why is avowed “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders running for the nomination of a political party, the Democratic Party, that has embraced the free enterprise system for decades?
The answer is America’s two-party duopoly, a peculiar and long-lasting arrangement that has stifled political competition from other forces for more than a century. Thanks to laws passed by Democrats and Republicans and upheld by the courts, candidates of other parties face discriminatory ballot access and campaign financing hurdles, gerrymandering, exclusion from debates and media blackouts. It’s no wonder then that even maverick politicians like Trump and Sanders opt to run as Republicans or Democrats, even when much of what they believe is outside of those parties’ mainstreams.
The result leaves millions of voters frustrated by the lack of wider choices. Our politics is stagnating into an exquisite deadlock that only benefits major party incumbents, who relish blaming the other party for their inability to move the country forward even while they collude in keeping out newcomers.
Question for Students: What do you think? Does our traditional two-party system serve us best? Why or why not?
4. Is there a better way to choose presidential candidates than the current primary and caucus system?
The current nominating process, which grants Iowa and New Hampshire the gift of always going first, means that voters in those states have more power to decide who the presidential candidates will be than everyone else in the other 48 states. It also means that issues particular to those states, like ethanol subsidies (important to Iowa corn farmers), have outsize importance during the campaign.
Mr. Leonhardt wrote in 2011:
The two states have dominated the nominating process for so long that it’s easy to think of their role as natural.
But it is not natural. It’s undemocratic, in fact. It is unfair to voters in the other 48 states. And it distorts economic policy in several damaging ways.
Other states have tried to leapfrog to the front of the pack, only to be scolded by national party organizations trying to maintain order and predictability in the process. But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious proposals to change the system. Mr. Leonhardt continues:
A more democratic system would allow more voters to see the candidates up close for months at a time. The early states could rotate each year, so that all kinds — big states and small, younger and older, rural and urban — had a turn. In 2016, the first wave could include states that have voted near the end recently, like Indiana, North Carolina, Oregon and South Dakota.
A rotation along these lines would enliven the political debate. Investments in science and education, which are the lifeblood of future economic growth, might play a bigger role in the campaign. You could even imagine — optimistically, I know — that the deficit might prove easier to address if Medicare and Social Security recipients did not make up such a disproportionate share of early voters.
Even Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee, has suggested that the first-in-the-nation status could be up for grabs after 2016.
Question for Students: Are there better ways to choose our presidential candidates? NPR offers six alternatives. Do you recommend keeping the status quo or shaking up the system? Why?
5. Why Iowa and New Hampshire? Why did the media and the candidates spend so much time focusing on those two states?
If you were an alien just landing from outer space, you might easily come to the conclusion that two small, largely rural states — Iowa and New Hampshire — decide who the next president of the entire United States will be. After all, that’s where the candidates spent so much time chowing down at state fairs, politicking in diners and speaking in town halls since last summer. But that assumption would be wrong.
Then again, Iowa and New Hampshire do have outsize influence on the nomination process simply because they both go first. If a candidate wins in Iowa or New Hampshire, they prove their viability in the larger nomination contest and gain valuable momentum as they head into the rest of primary season. In fact, since 1980, all of the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees won in either Iowa, New Hampshire or both, with the exception of Bill Clinton in 1992.
Not only do these two statewide contests help to propel the winners, they also winnow the field. Candidates who perform poorly will face growing pressure to drop from the race. So the candidates, political parties, donors and media all pay close attention to what happens in Iowa and New Hampshire.
How did these two states earn the right to go first? Well, Iowa earned it by accident in 1972, but New Hampshire has held the title since the Progressive Era. Now both states have written their first-in-the-nation status into law, and the national parties have drafted rules protecting that status — at least for the time being.
So, should Iowa and New Hampshire be allowed to dominate the early going in the nomination process for every presidential election? This is the question a former Times national correspondent, B. Drummond Ayres Jr., asked in this article from the 2000 election. He writes:
Detractors of this early winnowing system contend that it is unfair and no way to begin picking the leader of the world’s most powerful nation. They argue that neither state is typically American, with Iowa being too rural and New Hampshire too small.
Iowans and New Hampshirites do not see it that way, of course. They say their states are ideal political laboratories because voters in both states still insist on “retail politicking” — getting to know and test candidates firsthand, at town-meeting style forums, in coffee shops and, indeed, in their own living rooms.
To do well in Iowa and New Hampshire, they argue, candidates must have a “ground game” of hand shaking, eye contact and one-on-one conversations because the “air game” of television sound bites and advertising blitzes so often used elsewhere just won’t cut it in Hawkeye and Granite country.
Is this a lot of political hokum?
Question for Students: What do you think? Should Iowa and New Hampshire continue to be first in the nation in perpetuity?
Student Activities
1. Jigsaw Learning: Divide students into small groups, and assign each group one of the five questions above to read and investigate using the linked resources. Groups can discuss the critical thinking questions embedded in each section and have each student individually write a response.
Next, you can have students report back to their jigsaw group (a new group formed with at least one member from each of the original groups) to share what they learned. Alternatively, the original small groups can report back to the rest of the class.
2. Research Candidates and Hold a Mock Caucus: Using this Times interactive, students can research the different candidates vying for the party nominations to find out where they stand on the issues.
Then, the class can simulate a caucus, where students discuss their favorite candidates and what they like about them. Finally, students can walk around the classroom to form groups based on the candidates they like most (similar to the Iowa Democratic caucus) or they can use a secret ballot to vote (similar to the Iowa Republican caucus).
3. Investigate Alternatives to the Nominating Process and Hold a Debate: Today’s system of primaries and caucuses is much more democratic than the old nominating system controlled by party bosses. Still, is there a better way to choose our presidential candidates?
Working individually or in pairs, students can research alternatives to the current system, including a national primary and a rotating regional primary — or letting a large, diverse state like California go first.
Then the class can hold a discussion or debate about which alternative system would work best, or if we should stick with the status quo. Afterward, students can write an argumentative essay advocating one of the proposals.
4. Make Your Voice Matter: Whether you are of voting age or not, you should speak up about what you believe. All students can share their opinion with the public about which candidates they support most on our Student Opinion question.
And if you are 18, or even 17, in some cases, you can vote in your state’s primary or caucus. The privilege and responsibility of living in a democracy is to be civically engaged and make sure your vote counts. If you are eligible, and haven’t done so already, be sure to register to vote.
(And in case you’re interested in arguments about lowering the voting age, you might read what winners of a Learning Network/Room for Debate challenge in 2012 said about what would change if younger people could vote.)
Additional Resources
Find all Learning Network resources about the 2016 presidential race here, tagged “Election 2016”
C-Span Classroom | Lesson Idea: Primaries and Caucuses
Vote Smart | Government 101: United States Presidential Primary
PBS | Primaries and Caucuses: How Do Parties Choose a Candidate?
iCivics | The Electoral Process