Politics of the United States: a president chosen by the states

Where American political ideas come from

American political culture grew out of the colonies, which were unusual in the European world for how widely they allowed men to vote. The franchise went to white male property owners, and the assemblies they elected handled land grants, taxes, roads, poor relief and schools. Courts, busy with private lawsuits, gave merchants, farmers and artisans experience of law and public affairs that in Britain belonged to the royal court, the aristocracy and the established church. Two sets of ideas shaped the new state: republicanism, which prized equal rights and civic virtue and distrusted corruption, luxury and aristocracy, and classical liberalism. The texts Americans still cite are the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Constitution of 1787, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, the Bill of Rights of 1791 and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address of 1863. The principle running through them is the consent of the governed: a government's authority rests on the assent of the people, expressed in free elections.

That principle is applied at every level. Americans elect officials at the federal, state and local levels, from the president and Congress to governors, state legislators, county boards and city councils, and in many Western states they can vote on laws themselves.

How the Electoral College chooses a president

The framers of the Constitution designed the Electoral College as a compromise between having Congress choose the president and having the qualified citizens elect one by popular vote. Each state receives as many electors as it has members of Congress, one for each seat in the House of Representatives plus its two senators, and under the Twenty-third Amendment the District of Columbia is treated as a state with three electors. That makes 538, and a majority of 270 wins. Voters cast their ballots on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, every four years, but formally they choose a slate of electors pledged to a candidate. All states except Maine and Nebraska give every elector to whoever wins the state's popular vote; those two divide theirs. The electors meet in their own states on the first Tuesday after the second Wednesday in December, Congress counts their votes in a joint session on 6 January, and the new president is sworn in on 20 January.

Electors are pledged, not bound by nature. A faithless elector votes for someone other than the candidate of the party that chose them, and thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have laws against it, first enforced after the 2016 election, when ten electors voted or tried to vote against their pledges. Since 1800 more than 700 proposals to reform or abolish the system have been introduced in Congress, and none has passed.

The arithmetic produces results a national count would not. In four elections, 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016, the candidate with the most popular votes nationwide did not win the Electoral College. Critics call the system incompatible with one person, one vote. Its supporters answer that a national popular vote would change how campaigns are fought, so the national totals recorded under the Electoral College do not show what a direct election would have produced.

What each branch can do to the others

The Constitution divides federal power three ways and gives each branch a way to check the other two. The president is head of state, head of government and commander in chief of the armed forces, serves four years and may be elected only twice under the Twenty-second Amendment. The president can veto a bill, and Congress can override the veto with two thirds of both chambers.

The Senate confirms or rejects the president's nominees for the cabinet, the federal agencies and the courts, and Congress can remove a president from office through impeachment. The vice president presides over the Senate and breaks tied votes, and takes over if the president dies, resigns or is removed; under the Twenty-fifth Amendment the vice president can also act as president when the president is declared unable to serve. The cabinet, the heads of the executive departments and other senior officials, advises the president, and each member must be approved by the Senate. The Supreme Court decides cases by majority and can strike down laws that violate the Constitution, a power it first claimed in Marbury v. Madison in 1803. Federal judges hold office during good behaviour, which in practice means for life.

How Congress represents people and states

The House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each elected for two years by a single district. Seats are divided among the states after every ten-year census. The number was set at 433 in 1911, reached 435 with the Congress that sat from 1913, and was fixed there by the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929. The Senate represents the states as equals: two senators each, elected for six years, with a third of the chamber up for election every two years. Until the Seventeenth Amendment, state legislatures chose senators; since then the voters of each state have elected them directly. A state with a small population therefore carries the same weight in the Senate, and in the Senate's share of the Electoral College, as the largest.

Not every American is represented equally. The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands each send a delegate or resident commissioner to the House who cannot vote on the floor. Residents of the territories cannot vote for president, although they are subject to federal law and register for the Selective Service. The legal basis is a series of Supreme Court rulings known as the Insular Cases, and some scholars describe the result as second-class citizenship.

What the states keep for themselves

The Tenth Amendment of 1791 leaves every power not granted to the federal government to the states or to the people. State governments therefore make most of the law that touches daily life: education, family law, contracts and most crimes. Each has its own constitution, generally longer and more detailed than the federal one, an elected governor, courts and a legislature. All the legislatures have two chambers except Nebraska's, which has one.

Many states, particularly in the West, let citizens make law directly. The initiative, the referendum, the recall election and the primary are reforms of the Progressive Era written into several state constitutions, with no equivalent at the federal level.

Below the states lies a dense layer of local government. The Census Bureau counted 90,837 local governments in 2022: 3,031 counties, 19,491 municipalities, 16,214 townships, 12,546 school districts and 39,555 special districts. Counties are called parishes in Louisiana and boroughs in Alaska, and Connecticut and Rhode Island have abolished county government altogether, while Philadelphia, Honolulu, San Francisco, Nashville and Denver are consolidated city-counties in which one government does both jobs. Local elections are usually nonpartisan.

Why two parties hold nearly every office

The Constitution does not mention political parties, and several of its authors opposed them, but two have dominated since shortly after the first president left office. The Democratic and Republican parties have won every presidential election since 1852 and have controlled Congress since at least 1856. Since the New Deal, and more sharply since the 1960s, the Democrats have stood on the centre left and the Republicans on the right. The electoral system favours two parties. Nearly every office is won by plurality in a single-member district, which rewards tactical voting and punishes splitting the vote, and state ballot-access laws, written by legislatures the two parties control, require new parties to gather large numbers of signatures in a short time. Third parties have appeared regularly, as vehicles for one candidate or one region or one cause, and seldom lasted more than a decade.

The parties themselves are loose. They have no central organisation that decides policy or expels dissenters; candidates are chosen in primaries open to registered supporters, and elected members who vote against their party have relatively little to fear from it.

How money shapes American campaigns

Federal campaigns cost a great deal. The average winning campaign in 2024 cost about $2.7 million for a House seat and $26.5 million for a Senate seat, and lobbying groups spent $4.4 billion that year on federal lawmakers. Political action committees can give only limited sums directly to candidates but may spend without limit on their own advocacy. Campaign finance law runs into the First Amendment. Opponents of spending limits argue that they restrict free speech, and the courts have required such laws to be drafted narrowly, which leaves American rules looser than those of the United Kingdom, France or Canada. A survey of the American Economic Association found most economists, whatever their politics, believed interest groups gain from the process at the expense of the public.

How the Constitution protects rights and changes

The first ten amendments, ratified together in 1791 as the Bill of Rights, guarantee freedom of speech and of religion and bar Congress from establishing a church. Later amendments widened the vote step by step. The Fifteenth, in 1870, forbade denying it on account of race; the Nineteenth, first used in 1920, on account of sex; the Twenty-fourth abolished the poll tax in federal elections; and the Twenty-sixth lowered the voting age to 18. Suffrage is now nearly universal for citizens of that age, though many states restrict the vote after a felony conviction.

Amending the Constitution is deliberately hard. An amendment must be ratified by three fourths of the states, and in more than two centuries only 27 have succeeded. The Equal Rights Amendment for women passed Congress in 1972 and failed in the states. Much constitutional change has come instead through the courts' reading of the text, from judicial review in 1803 to the desegregation of schools in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

Religion sits in an unusual place. The First Amendment forbids an established church, yet religious groups, mostly Christian, act as political pressure groups and join party coalitions, and conservative evangelicals have been particularly active within the Republican Party in recent decades. States with higher shares of conservative Christians tend to have stricter laws on alcohol and gambling.

Who the United States stands with

The United States built most of the postwar international order. After the Second World War it was among the Allied powers that formed the foundation of the United Nations Security Council, and in 1949 it formed NATO, breaking a long tradition of avoiding peacetime alliances. It sits in the G7, the G20, the OECD, APEC and the Organization of American States, belongs to the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, and runs the North American Aerospace Defense Command jointly with Canada.

Its trade with Canada and Mexico runs under the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, one of several free trade agreements it holds. Britannica describes the tie to the United Kingdom as the special relationship.