Primary colours

The presidential primaries set the stage for a November rematch that most American voters don’t want, but seem unable to avert.

- JONATHAN KRONSTADT

If you set out to confuse an entire nation by designing an uber-complicated system of picking your national leaders, you could hardly do better than the current US presidential primary process.

The simplest way to pick presidential candidates would be a one-day national primary, where voters indicate their preferred presidential nominee from among candidates in the party they are aligned to.

The opposite of that is how the US does it.

Our national presidential election effectively an aggregation of 50 state elections thanks to the bizarre antiquity called the Electoral College (more on that later) - is preceded by a candidate selection process that's as convoluted as it is interminable. Consider this: Texas senator Ted Cruz announced his 2016 presidential candidacy 586 days before the November 8 general election. And when Connecticut senator Chris Dodd ran in 2008, he relocated his family to Iowa's capital city, Des Moines, three months before the Democratic presidential caucus, going so far as to enrol his daughter in a local kindergarten.

In comparison, the French national election, a two-round process, is staged over a fortnight.

The state primaries decide how many delegates go forward to vote for each candidate at their party's national convention, where the presidential nominee is chosen.

But it was not always this way, nor this crazy. For most of our pre-21st century history, presidential nominees were chosen by party leaders in proverbial smoke-filled rooms. There were some primary elections, but they were often won by local "favourite sons" party leaders and/or elected officials who then controlled all the delegates to their party's subsequent national conventions.

In 1960, a young Catholic senator named John F Kennedy wanted to be the Democratic