USA: Nomination of Democratic candidate - full text

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In preparation for the presidential election due to be held November, the Democratic Party at its National Convention in Denver on Aug. 28 formally nominated Barack Obama as its presidential candidate. The candidate of the Republican Party (sometimes referred to as the Grand Old Party--GOP) of incumbent President George W. Bush, John McCain, had won a decisive victory in primary elections for the nomination in March, enabling him to spend the summer focusing on his election bid.

Immediate context

Obama, whose father was black, was the first African-American to be nominated as presidential candidate by a major political party. A charismatic orator, he had become a popular figure in the media, but following a tense and divisive campaign for the nomination against Hillary Clinton, Obama faced the challenge of re-unitng the Demomcratic Party as well as presenting a credible challenge to McCain, a war veteran with considerable political experience.

Obama's 42-minute long nomination acceptance speech on Aug. 28 was made in an unconventional setting - a sports stadium - before a crowd of over 70,000 people. He launched his election campaign by attacking the Republicans, using phrases such as the "failed presidency of George W. Bush" and claiming "John McCain doesn't get it".

On Aug. 23 Obama announced that Joseph Biden, Senator for Delaware since 1972, a distinguished politician with considerable experience in foreign affairs, would be his vice presidential running-mate. The choice of Biden was seen as countering accusations that Obama himself lacked experience in foreign affairs.

It was widely reported on Aug. 29 that Republican candidate McCain's vice presidential candidate would be staunchly conservative governor of Alaska Sarah Palin, who was described as a "surprise" choice. The Republican National Convention at which McCain would be formally nominated as presidential candidate, was scheduled for Sept. 1-4.

Reaction and outlook

Defeated Democratic nomination candidate Hillary Clinton, who had at first appeared to be the favourite in the contest, urged her supporters to back Obama, during a speech at the Democratic National Convention on Aug. 27. In what was widely seen as a conciliatory gesture to her rival, she called on her supporters to: "Ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for ... all the people in this country who feel invisible?"

McCain issued a statement of congratulation to Obama, but soon afterwards, a return to fierce campaigning was signalled when Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for McCain, described Obama's acceptance speech as "a misleading speech that was so fundamentally at odds with the meager record of Barack Obama".

Opinion polls reported just after Obama's nomination showed that support for the two candidates was evenly balanced, with many respondents indicating that they remained undecided. Most analysts appeared unwilling to speculate about who would be the USA's next president, suggesting only that the election campaign would be dramatic and closely fought.

Historical context

In order to select its candidate for the presidential election, the two main parties each held a series of state-by-state elections--either primary elections or caucuses--over the course of several months. Rather than accruing votes, the primaries or caucuses would effectively assign a number of delegates to each candidate. These delegates were committed to vote for their candidate at each party's national convention. The person who accrued the most delegates was therefore guaranteed to win the vote at the party convention. The conventions, usually held in the summer preceding the presidential election itself, had thus become essentially ceremonial.

There were no political parties in the USA until the early 19th century. The early parties had no formal structure for selecting presidential candidates, but by the 1840s the Democratic-Republican Party (the forerunner of the Democratic Party) had adopted a process of choosing candidates during its national party convention. In 1910, Oregon was the first state to hold a primary election and instruct its delegates to the national convention to support the candidate chosen in the primary. Other states subsequently also decided to hold primaries. By 2000 41 states had decided they would hold primary elections.

In 1968, following a Democratic national convention in which the candidate preferred at primary stage failed to win, the Democratic Party decided that primary votes should be binding and adopted a number of other electoral rules and procedures. This prompted many states that had previously not held primaries to start doing so, in order to make participation in the electoral process easier to manage. Republicans also started holding more primaries.

The Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary were traditionally held first by both parties. They often gave an early indication of who had the best chance of eventually winning the party nominations and so were disproportionately influential.

During the 1970s and 1980s, some states started to form geographic blocs to promote regional, rather than purely state interests. The first successful regional primary was Super Tuesday in 1988, in which nine Southern states united to support Democratic candidates perceived as sympathetic to Southern concerns.

Another emerging trend was the holding of primaries earlier in the year. The Republicans announced that in 2008 their Nevada caucus would be held on an earlier date than was traditional, with the Democrats planning to hold theirs on Jan. 19. In order to retain its tradition as the first primary in the country (and as required by New Hampshire law), New Hampshire consequently moved its primaries to Jan. 8. This prompted other states to change their primary election dates for 2008.

Independents and candidates nominated by smaller parties could also contest the presidential election. In recent years, Ralph Nader, originally a Democrat, stood twice as candidate for the Green Party (1996 and 2000) and once as an independent supported by the Reform Party (2004). Ross Perot stood in 1992 as an independent and in 1996 as the Reform Party candidate.

The presidential election itself was a vote by an electoral college of 538 presidential electors. On election day, the voters in each state voted for their members of the electoral college. The number of electoral college members was determined by the number of Representatives for that state in the House of Representatives (the lower house of Congress) plus two for the two Senators for each state. (The District of Columbia had three electoral college members.) As the number of Representatives for each state was determined by population, the larger states had more electoral college votes. The electoral college candidates directly represented particular candidates for the presidency and in most states, the vote was effectively a vote along party lines for a slate of presidential electors, so one party would hold all the votes of the state.

In the rare case of no candidate receiving more than 270 votes (a simple majority), the House of Representatives would elect the president from the three candidates who received the most votes.

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