Welcome to March 5, 2024. It is the first Tuesday in March in a quadrennial year, which makes it Super Tuesday. Voters in 16 states and one US territory will have their first opportunity to vote for their preferred presidential candidate. About a third of each party’s delegates are awarded as a result of today’s elections.

But I want to throw a little extra uncertainty seasoning on your expectations for today. Maybe you’ve seen some national public polling over the last few days and have developed a strong POV on how the elections will pan out. Maybe you think the whole thing is already over. But in case you are looking for a reason to feel less certain, remember two very important structural facts about United States Presidential Elections:

1. There is no national election – there are only state elections (and if we’re being pedantic, actually like thousands of county elections).
2. There is no standard way for states to hold elections. In fact, as you’ll see below, not all of the elections today are being held by the states.

State Run v. Party Run

There are state-run primaries, and then there are party-run votes and caucuses. In most of the states tomorrow, the states run the primary elections for each party. The Democrats have 14 state-run primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. The Republicans hold state-run primaries in each of the same states, except Utah where the GOP holds party-run caucuses. In Iowa and American Samoa, Democrats hold party-run caucuses; in Utah and Alaska, Republicans will do the same.

Why are some primaries run by the states, and some run by the parties? Some states, like Alaska, did not adopt laws that spread in the 1960s and 70s to ensure more direct participation in the selection of presidential candidates. In states that hold these caucuses or other party-run delegate selections, the state governments provide no funding, regulation or oversight of these elections. The parties make the rules – including setting requirements for voter ID, party registration status, and so on. On Tuesday, three states and American Samoa will choose their preferred candidates using a party-run method. Party v. state may not add any uncertainty to the mix, but it certainly can add drama, as Haley supporters in Missouri found out on Saturday.

Open and Shut Primaries

Most of today’s primaries are held by states, but states get to determine the method of running these elections. As a result, we have a variety of styles of primaries in the US, which include:

• Open Primaries (15 states): voters generally do not register as a member of any party, and may vote using either party’s ballot.
  • On Super Tuesday, Alabama, Arkansas, Minnesota, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and Virginia will hold open primaries.
• Closed primaries (10 states): voters must be a registered member of a party to participate in a primary and must vote in that party’s primary.
  • On Super Tuesday, Alaska’s party-run caucus for the GOP is closed to anyone who is not registered as a Republican; likewise Iowa’s Democratic Party caucus is closed to registered Democrats only.
• Partially closed (9 states): parties may choose whether to allow unaffiliated or cross affiliated voters (9 states).
  • On Super Tuesday, California’s presidential primaries are divided. The GOP allows only registered voters to participate in their primary; Democrats allow registered Democrats and unaffiliated voters to participate in theirs. The same appears to be true for Utah and Oklahoma.
• Open to Unaffiliated Voters (7 states): If voters do not register with a party they may still vote in the primaries, and choose which party’s ballot to use.
  • On Super Tuesday, unaffiliated voters will get to choose from among one party’s candidates in Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts and North Carolina.
• Multi-Party Primaries (5 states): all candidates are listed on a single ballot; typically the top two vote getters go on to a run off in the general election. In some cases, the candidate’s party may not even be identified.
  • On Super Tuesday, California will use this method for selecting all candidates other than the Presidential nominee.
• Partially open (4 states): Voters register with a party when they register to vote, but they can vote on any party’s ballot.

So far, in the GOP contest, Nikki Haley has performed better in open primaries. There are 11 states that allow voters to select a Republican ballot, even if they are not registered as Republicans. This might be good for her – I imagine people are talking about the “over-under” on how she performs compared to past performance in open primaries in those 11 states today. But folks… no wagering.

Emergent Methods

While some states have held elections entirely by mail for decades at this point, recent years, especially because of Covid, have adopted vote by mail, early voting, and same day voter registration as ways to increase voter participation by increasing ballot access. This is great for voters, but makes pollsters and modelers a little nuts.

Early Voting

All but three states have some degree of early voting (Mississippi, Alabama and New Hampshire); six states and DC allow voting 3-7 days prior to election day; 23 states offer early voting 8-14 days ahead of election day; 5 states make early voting available 15-20 days early; 7 states allow voting 21-30 days prior; and 6 states make early voting available more than 30 days prior to the election (Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, Minnesota an South Dakota). On Super Tuesday, all of the states participating offer early voting, which means some significant portion of voters will have cast their ballots at least a few days ago.

Vote By Mail

Eight states (California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington) and DC allow elections to be held entirely by mail – in these states registered voters are sent ballots automatically. Two states allow counties to opt in to holding elections by mail (Nebraska and North Dakota). 13 other states allow specific elections or jurisdictions to choose mostly-mail elections. On Super Tuesday, four states will have conducted their elections entirely by mail.

Same Day Registration

Allowing voters to register to vote on the day they are voting has become extremely popular in the last couple of election cycles. Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia allow same-day voter registration. 18 of those allow voters to register at any point in the early voting period; four allow you to register only on Election Day. On Super Tuesday, nine states offer the opportunity for new voters to register. California, Colorado, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina (during the early voting period but not on Election Day), Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. Not all of these states extend this privilege to primary elections, however.

Modeling Election Day voters v. early voters v. mail-in voters can be complex. National public polls typically ask voters, “if the election were held today” – the election is not being held today, it’s being held on many days. Contextualizing those polls to headlines is becoming harder to do with any confidence – predicting any particular wave of voter behavior based on the results of an election held a few days ago might also prove difficult. When I first started studying political polling research there was one central difference between it and the kind of surveys and research I do for a living: everybody makes a choice between two candidates on one day in political polling, but the grocery aisle offers a dozen different detergents and you can buy as many as you like as often as you want. With more voting days, more third party candidates – voting is starting to look a lot more like other choices people make.

The Uncommitteds

In five states – Alabama, Arkansas, Iowa, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Tennessee – both parties offer their voters the option of “uncommitted” or “no preference”. In Minnesota, Democrats offer this option but the GOP does not. In Texas, the opposite is true. We’ve already seen a lot of headlines about the uncommitted vote in Michigan – in fact “Uncommitted” secured two delegates to the convention this year.

For context, in 2012, the last time a Democrat incumbent sought reelection, almost 11% of the vote in Michigan selected “uncommitted”; at the time the primaries were advisory, meaning the party could decide whether to allocate any delegates on behalf of candidates other than the winner. Back then, they allocated 20 delegates for the uncommitted vote; however, in the floor vote, all delegates went for Obama.

This year in Michigan, about 13% of the Democratic primary vote went to “uncommitted”, but the primary is now proportional – so 2 delegates have been soft pledged to “uncommitted” (there are currently 22 unallocated soft pledge delegates). Those soft pledges mean they can change their mind about who to support at the convention if things don’t go quite to plan.

It’s not that these “uncommitted” showings are going to necessarily affect the outcome in terms of who wins the primaries today, or who wins the delegate counts and becomes the presumptive nominee in the next few weeks. It’s that if there is a consistent showing of 10-15% of the Democratic electorate choosing “uncommitted”, we won’t hear the end of it in news coverage – it will be an anti-Biden wave, or something like it. If nothing else, it throws yet another wrinkle in the ongoing challenge of polling.

(A great online resource for all things related to delegate selection and convention voting, I recently found The Green Papers. If you’ve read this far, you’ll love it.)

I’m going to write more about the actual structure and rules of primaries, delegate selection and conventions over the next few newsletters. Send me your questions about how they work, how they interact with polling, how campaigns model or game out these variables, or anything else about polling in 2024.

Sources:

• https://apnews.com/article/what-is-super-tuesday-80f71138b69691fc8edbeb07fd1c7774
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/your-guide-to-every-state-voting-on-super-tuesday
• https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/state-primary-election-types
• https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/the-differences-between-presidential-primaries-and-caucuses/
• https://tracker.votingrightslab.org/issues
• https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-18-states-with-all-mail-elections
• https://ballotpedia.org/All-mail_voting
• https://www.rockthevote.org/how-to-vote/same-day-voter-registration/