There are many political parties in the United States, but the two largest ones, the Republicans and Democrats, are so powerful that the U.S. is generally considered to have a two-party system. Many of those who wrote the Constitution hoped that political parties would never develop in America, but almost from the beginning there were Federalists and Anti-Federalists and by the middle of the 19th century the Republican and Democratic parties were well established. Despite the fears of our founding fathers, political parties serve an important role in the election process.

THE IMPORTANCE OF POLITICAL PARTIES
Political parties are crucially important throughout the election process. They offer choices and clarify issues. They play the key role in the selection of candidates for the presidency. They help to administer the state conventions, caucuses, and primaries. Parties run the national conventions from which the presidential and vice presidential candidates eventually emerge. At the conventions, the nominees and influential party members create a platform that reconciles the elements of the party that competed in the primaries. Parties are also very active in the November general elections. They raise money for their candidates, mobilize volunteers, encourage voter registration and participation, provide poll watchers, and create campaign materials. Once a party wins an election, it is expected to develop policies and to govern, while the party out of power is expected to provide constructive criticism of the party in power.

SUMMARY OF THE ROLE OF POLITICAL PARTIES:

1. Recruit and nominate candidates
2. Simplify choice of candidates through primaries
3. Raise funds for political campaigns
4. Serve as the "loyal opposition" and oppose the policies of the other party
5. Register voters and help run elections
6. Describe and clarify issues and disseminate information
7. Mobilize voters
8. Find commonality for diverse interests

THE ORGANIZATION OF POLITICAL PARTIES
Each party has a national committee headed by a chairperson and a vice chairperson. In addition, there are state party organizations and local organizations. In addition, each candidate also selects a campaign chairperson, treasurer, media expert, etc. There are party leaders and campaign organizations for each candidate in the different states as well.

THE FUNDING OF POLITICAL PARTIES
It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to conduct a nationwide campaign. Money is needed for travel, advertisements, office rental, accommodations, etc. Candidates who receive a certain percentage of primary votes and caucus support are eligible to receive financial assistance from the government, which matches money the candidates receive from private sources. This government support is made possible when citizens agree to contribute $3 when filing yearly federal income tax returns. This method was initiated following the Watergate campaign incident. In addition, nominees of the two major parties receive financial support from their parties following the conventions. Candidates receive contributions from citizens provided the amounts do not exceed the legal limits and are reported properly.

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS
In recent years, special interest groups have founded PACs (Political Action Committees) to help elect candidates that favor their interests. The amount of money that the PACs give to federal candidates is limited, but some claim that regulation and enforcement is weak and that PACs exert too much influence. Some PACs give funds to candidates of both parties so that whoever is elected will be more willing to listen to their problems.

CONVENTIONS
Delegates chosen at the primaries, caucuses, and state conventions attend the national convention of their party during the summer of the election year. The number of delegates from each state is approximately proportional to the population of the state. Thus, in both the Democratic and Republican conventions, California (which has the largest population of any state in the union) has the most delegate votes, and New York has the second most.

PARTY NOMINEE
At the convention, the candidate who receives a majority of the delegate votes becomes the
nominee of the party. In recent years, as a result of the primaries and caucuses, the nominees of the two major parties have a majority of the delegates committed to their candidates before the opening gavel. In 1988, however, some political analysts thought the sheer number of Democratic candidates would prevent any of them from collecting a majority of delegate votes by convention time. Thus the nomination of a "dark horse" (someone who had not been a candidate until the convention) was considered a possibility. According to convention rules, if no candidate receives a majority of votes on the first ballot, subsequent ballots are held until someone wins. When this happens, candidates with little support are expected to release their votes to another candidate. No convention, however, has gone over the first ballot since 1952.

PARTY PLATFORMS
Drafting a party platform is one of the major functions of a national convention. A platform is not only a written declaration of party principles and policy positions, it is also a campaign statement aimed at winning broad voter support. Usually, the drafters of a platform try to avoid taking positions that might anger a major voting bloc. A party's platform will take a specific stance on a controversial issue only when certain issues are of particular importance to a large group that the party is trying to win over. In the past, controversial platform planks have included prohibition, social security, the Taft-Hartley law, and opposition to the Vietnam War. A major party might incorporate certain planks of minor parties in the hope of attracting new voters into its coalition. Because they are created to have broad appeal, platforms have been criticized as evasive, ambiguous, and in the words of 1964 presidential nominee Barry Goldwater, "Like Jello...there is usually little substance and nothing you can get your teeth into."

PREPARATION OF THE PLATFORM
Each major party has a Committee on Resolutions, composed of two people from each state and territorial delegation. This group assigns a platform committee to prepare the platform weeks before the convention begins. This is to ensure that as many views as possible are expressed at pre-convention hearings by interested groups, state and local organizations, and the presidential candidates. These hearings are crucial in identifying areas of agreement and disagreement among the party's factions. Compromises and accommodations are made, and major provisions are agreed upon before the resolutions in the platform go to the floor of the convention. The presidential nominee exerts considerable influence on the content of the platform. At the convention, the platform is usually adopted overwhelmingly.

ROLE OF THE PLATFORM
In addition to praising the principles and candidates of the party, platforms criticize those of the opposing party. The record of an incumbent administration is especially open to attack by the writers of the opposition platform. The platform can be taken as an outline of what a party hopes to accomplish in office. Despite the criticism that platforms do not bind candidates and are basically designed to attract votes, many party pledges have been carried out as policy or have been turned into legislation.

CHOOSING A VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
The considerations of building harmony and voter appeal that go into shaping the platform also go into shaping the selection of the vice president. This is called "balancing the ticket." A vice presidential candidate is chosen by the presidential nominee on the basis of how likely he or she is to help the party achieve the presidency. One of the factors considered is regional appeal: where does the presidential candidate need the most voter support? In recent elections, most successful Democratic tickets have established a north-south balance, while winning Republican slates have largely comprised candidates from the east and west. In 1952, on the winning Republican ticket, Dwight D. Eisenhower was president of Columbia University in New York and chose California Senator Richard M. Nixon as his running mate. Nixon, in turn, chose Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew. Two winning Democratic tickets in the last 40 years were John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts with Lyndon B Johnson from Texas, and Jimmy Carter from Georgia with Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota. Political philosophy, ethnicity, congressional relationships and, more recently, gender have also been factors in choosing the vice presidential candidate. In 1968 the liberal Hubert Humphrey balanced his ticket by choosing Senator Edmund Muskie, a Polish American moderate, to gain votes on the Eastern Seaboard and to balance his own Midwestern liberal background. In 1984 Walter Mondale chose a woman, Geraldine Ferraro, for his running mate. And in 1992, Bill Clinton chose fellow Southerner Albert Gore on the basis of political philosophy. In conclusion, if a major party wishes to make a successful bid for the presidency, it must develop both a platform and a ticket that appeal to a broad popular coalition.

PRIMARY ELECTIONS
The primary is a tool of the political parties to let them determine who their candidate will be in the general elections in case there are several persons who would like to run for the same office.

Primaries did not become a dominant factor in presidential nominations until the 1960s. Until then candidates were typically selected by party activists who attended the national conventions. The party then presented the candidates to the electorate. The rise of primaries involved voters more directly in the selection process, and in so doing it diminished the power of the major parties. Around the turn of the century, the reformers interested in making the nominating process more democratic began to press the state governments to provide more direct voter participation. The primary was the technique most of them favored. In 1901 Florida enacted the first presidential primary law. This gave party officials the option of holding a primary to choose delegates to the national presidential convention. Within a few years, a number of states took the next important step by establishing the "preferential" presidential primary. Oregon pioneered this new system, by which voters would cast a ballot for their preferred candidate and the delegates would be legally bound to that candidate at the national convention.

In 1912 preferential primaries were held in one-quarter of the states. The former President Theodore Roosevelt won the Republican vote in most of them. However, the Republican National Convention nominated the incumbent William Howard Taft. Indeed, until 1968, party leaders remained firmly in control of the nominating process.

In 1960 John Kennedy concentrated on two primaries—Wisconsin and West Virginia—and by winning them, convinced party leaders to support him at the convention. In 1964 and 1968 there were dramatic primary competitions among the major candidates. Barry Goldwater's victory over Nelson Rockefeller in the California Republican primary in 1964 assured him the nomination, and the emotional Democratic primaries of 1968 pitted Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey against each other. Robert Kennedy's death at the hand of an assassin, following his dramatic victory in the California primary, clouded the primary vote that year. Humphrey went on to win the nomination at the strife-torn national convention in Chicago.

Before the 1972 convention, some Democrats (led by South Dakota Senator George McGovern) began to exert pressure aimed at changing the complex nominating rules to allow broader voter participation. The first beneficiary of the changed rules was McGovern himself, who used the primary process to win the nomination. In 1976 the little-known Jimmy Carter won the nomination by pursuing a skillful primary campaign, and in 1980 Carter and Ronald Reagan earned their parties' nominations by winning majority votes in more than 35 primaries. This was the high water mark for primaries.

After the defeat in the 1980 election, the Democrats began to wonder at the wisdom of the system that absorbed so much time (candidates beginning to run the year before the election and campaigning in primaries from March through June) and seemed to discourage members of the party from running. By 1984 the number of primaries was reduced to 27. In 1988 the number was 25 for the Democrats and 28 for the Republicans, and nearly half of these were scheduled on the same date, March 8, "Super Tuesday."

Even so, the primary has remained the most important method of determining the major candidates for president. One of the consequences has been to diminish the role and influence of the political party in such matters. As a rule, party leaders interested in winning general elections seek moderate candidates who will appeal to coalitions of diverse voters. The primary process often demands that a candidate commit to groups with very specific political goals—the advocates, women's rights organizations, gay activists, ethnic minority groups—before these groups will grant their vote in a primary. By the time of the general election, these candidates may be seen as tools of special interests. Finally, the primary system is so cumbersome and so long that some major candidates simply cannot find the time, energy, or money to run. Some scholars now argue that reforms that would strengthen the primary system—shorten the campaign, diminish the influence of special interest groups, and control the spiraling expenditures necessary to run for the presidency—would benefit the country. But we should keep in mind that the expansion of the primary method was also intended to benefit the country.

THIRD PARTIES IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Third parties have never captured the presidency nor had more than a minimal influence in the U.S. Congress. However, they have had an impact at the state and local level. Most importantly, they serve as a forum for new ideas which have in some cases been adopted by the two main parties.