Politics

Politics

‘Slick media events which lack any significance in the modern US nomination process.’ Assess this view of the national nomination conventions. (30)

National nomination conventions (NNC) are held by each major party. The delegates of the party attend them; the NNC’s are widely attended by all sorts of media who broadcast them to the whole country. NNC’s are broadcasted onto old media and new media so it is available to be seen by everyone in the country and world. Mass media are now the main channel of political communication enabling candidates to connect to voters. John Kennedy’s television image was seen as the key factor in his success over the less media friendly Richard Nixon. From then on NNC’s have become a huge media event for the election campaign, allowing the people of America see what the candidates are like and how they perform under the pressure of the audiences watching them live.

Primaries and caucuses have a lot of significance on the NNC’s; they determine the choice of candidate through delegate’s selection. Primaries and caucuses have been said to undermine NNC’s, they are now just for the media that wishes them to happen so they are able to broadcast them. The last time a nominee from a convention who actually won the general election was in 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt, since then the primaries and caucus system has produced the clear nominees for the first ballot victories. But even when the national convention had the power to choose its nominee, the process was anything but good. State parties have used the caucus system to choose delegates in the same way they have chosen the nominee for state and local offices; a scheme fuelled by corruption and still produces confusion. The primary system and the secret ballot provided much needed reform to the electoral process, and a full adoption of the primary system along with bound delegates would make the convention completely unnecessary in most cases, at least in terms of nomination...

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