"Americans talk about politics all the time"
I was talking to someone from the UK who commented that politics isn't a big deal over there, while Americans seem to be discussing it constantly. This may seem odd to anyone who doesn't live here. My understanding is that in the UK, campaigning is limited to six weeks before an election. That tends to limit discussion as there's nothing to discuss most of the time.
Here, campaigning is almost continuous as we are always in the leadup to an election. The presidential election was a little over a year ago, in November 2024, and now we're deep in midterm season. The midterms, which determine control of Congress, will be in November of this year, and campaigning has been underway for months as the first primaries were yesterday.
If you're wondering what a "primary" is, those are the elections where voters choose their party's nominees for the general election in November. This is normal for Americans, but sounds batshit crazy to everyone else. Most Americans aren't aware that in other countries where elections are held, they don't have primaries because voters trust their party leadership to pick the nominees. The US is one of the few, maybe the only country where voters don't trust their leaders to do that, so we have this interminable primary season. This requires candidates to first run against everyone in their own party who wants the job before they even face their opponent in the other party. This makes no sense in other countries where, if you're, say, Labor or Tory or whatever, you assume that whoever the party bigwigs pick as the nominee will at least represent the party's values, so whoever the specific person is doesn't really matter much.
The upshot of the American system is that after a bitter primary battle, half of a party's voters will hate their own party's nominee because they wanted the other guy. In 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were duking it out for the Democratic nomination, after Obama won the primaries, some Clinton supporters refused to support him, calling themselves PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass). The same thing happened in 2016 when embittered Bernie Sanders supporters refused to vote for Clinton and even voted for Trump.
In 2024 when Joe Biden dropped out after the first debate and Kamala Harris was nominated at the convention, many people complained that she hadn't won a single primary vote, without realizing that this would have been normal in most other countries, and was even normal in the US up through the 1960s when candidates were chosen at their party's conventions, with the voters only having a say in the general election.
So all year we will be subjected to campaigning, and traditionally, once the primaries are over, the 2028 presidential campaigns will begin. So of course we discuss politics a lot here since it's always campaign season.
Here, campaigning is almost continuous as we are always in the leadup to an election. The presidential election was a little over a year ago, in November 2024, and now we're deep in midterm season. The midterms, which determine control of Congress, will be in November of this year, and campaigning has been underway for months as the first primaries were yesterday.
If you're wondering what a "primary" is, those are the elections where voters choose their party's nominees for the general election in November. This is normal for Americans, but sounds batshit crazy to everyone else. Most Americans aren't aware that in other countries where elections are held, they don't have primaries because voters trust their party leadership to pick the nominees. The US is one of the few, maybe the only country where voters don't trust their leaders to do that, so we have this interminable primary season. This requires candidates to first run against everyone in their own party who wants the job before they even face their opponent in the other party. This makes no sense in other countries where, if you're, say, Labor or Tory or whatever, you assume that whoever the party bigwigs pick as the nominee will at least represent the party's values, so whoever the specific person is doesn't really matter much.
The upshot of the American system is that after a bitter primary battle, half of a party's voters will hate their own party's nominee because they wanted the other guy. In 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were duking it out for the Democratic nomination, after Obama won the primaries, some Clinton supporters refused to support him, calling themselves PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass). The same thing happened in 2016 when embittered Bernie Sanders supporters refused to vote for Clinton and even voted for Trump.
In 2024 when Joe Biden dropped out after the first debate and Kamala Harris was nominated at the convention, many people complained that she hadn't won a single primary vote, without realizing that this would have been normal in most other countries, and was even normal in the US up through the 1960s when candidates were chosen at their party's conventions, with the voters only having a say in the general election.
So all year we will be subjected to campaigning, and traditionally, once the primaries are over, the 2028 presidential campaigns will begin. So of course we discuss politics a lot here since it's always campaign season.
