What? You want more detail? Okay, here goes....
The first thing to keep in mind is that unlike Prime Ministers in other countries, the President is completely independent of Congress. He (or she) is elected separately, serves separately, and may or may not be of the same political party that controls Congress.
His term of office, as you probably already know, is four years. That's written into the Constitution itself. If it helps in remembering, presidential elections are held in leap years. That's purely by coincidence; the Constitution was adopted in--and George Washington first elected in--1788, which just happened to be a leap year.
The campaign season is another story, however. Especially when you don't have a President running for re-election (the 22nd amendment, ratified in 1951, limits Presidents to two terms), you get a lot of people jockeying for position. A big part of that involves getting your name out in front of the public. Consequently, the sooner you start, the more people will have time to get to know your name and face. The downside of that is if you look like Dennis Kucinich, the more people get to know your face, the LESS popular you become.
Unfortunately, a big part of this name recognition process also involves fundraising. That raises the very real possibility that a particular candidate will become beholden to some interest group or another that made huge donations. By law there are limits to how much individual donors can give, but there are also ways around that. For example, that Swift Boaters for Truth group that helped torpedo John Kerry's campaign in 2004 weren't actually part of the Bush campaign organization. Consequently, they were exempt from fundraising limits.
The two major parties--Democrats and Republicans--select their eventual presidential nominees based on how many delegates they're accumulated. This selection process is done either by caucuses in which citizens meet locally, or through primary elections in which people vote in regular polling places as in an election. In some states those primaries are restricted by parties. In other words, only registered Republicans can vote in the Republican primary, and only Democrats in the Democratic primary. In other states it's an "open" primary, which means you can vote in either party's primary.
The rules vary state to state, and are set by the two political parties. The number of delegates selected by each state is dependent on the state's population.
This brings up an interesting question: Why do Iowa and New Hampshire-two very small states--so damn important in the selection of presidential candidates? Quite frankly, it's just tradition. And while the number of delegates supplied by each of these two states is tiny, their outcomes carry a lot of weight simply because they very quickly establish a candidate's momentum.
In the past the Iowa and New Hampshire contests used to take place in late February. This year, however, a number of other states moved up their primaries (or caucuses) because they wanted to get more attention from the candidates. And since both Iowa and New Hampshire wanted to maintain their early status, they kept moving their contest up just to stay ahead of everyone else. For example, California used to have its primary in June. Well, by that time the nominees had pretty much already been decided. Consequently, candidates rarely bothered to campaign there. This year, however, California will vote on February 5.
A childish pissing contest? Well, yes.
At any rate, the jockeying for position got so bad this time around that both national parties eventually stepped in and put a stop to it. They actually threatened to deny some states their delegates if they didn't behave.
Finally there's what's called the Electoral College. No football team, but they don't need one. Technically, it's the group that actually elects the President.
When we mere mortals vote on the first Tuesday of November, we're not really voting for an individual. We're actually voting for a slate of electors pledged to a particular candidate, be it Democrat, Republican, or whatever. These people are generally party loyalists like state legislators or other officials. Each state is allocated a number of electors equal to their total of congressional representatives and Senators (every state has two Senators; the number of representatives is based on a state's population). For example, Virginia has 11 representatives and two Senators, which translates to 13 electoral votes.
In almost all cases (one or two small states allocate by congressional district), it's a winner take all for a state's electors. Which ever candidate wins the popular vote, wins ALL the electoral votes for that state. Theoretically electors could vote for a different candidate than for whom they were pledged. On very rare occasions an elector has actually done so. However, it's never been enough to throw an election to a different candidate.
So why do we have the electoral college? The founding fathers created it and wrote it into the Constitution as a way of getting smaller states to ratify the document. The idea is that it limits how much influence a big state can have in selecting Presidents. It's also how Bush managed to win the presidency in 2000 even though Gore had more popular votes.
So is this a f*cked up system compared to how other countries do it? Is it wildly inefficient? Does it reduce presidential candidates to the level of American Idol contestants? The answer is a big fat YES to all those questions.
But we're also the guys who keep rescuing the rest of you from the Germans, so we must be doing something right.
See also 'Splaining the Electoral College
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