User:CountMacula/sandbox

Keep the parties separate, and the primary/caucus articles should be generalized.

The states choose the president by choosing electors, but they are not supposed to be choosing party nominees. The processes involved in the state parties' choices of candidates should remain conceptually associated with the state parties, not with the states themselves. Merging the state primary/caucus articles into the state election articles would obscure the distinction between the state parties and the states themselves. It would permit a mistaken concept that choosing candidates is or should be a function of the states. The primary/caucus articles should remain separate from the state election articles for many of the same reasons that the state political parties are not housed in the state capitols.

There is often a lot of interesting detail in the state parties' processes of contributing to the choice of the corresponding national-party nominees (campaigns, caucuses, primaries, irregularities, state-party dynamics, platforms, conventions), and I think that too much of that would be lost or muddled by merging all (or should I say "both"?) descriptions of those processes into one article per state. The longer an article is, the more pressure there is to make it shorter. For instance, if parties other than Democratic and Republican participate in a state primary, those parties would tend to be forced out of the election article as being unimportant. And when somebody wants to know the by-county presidential-election results for their state, they probably do not expect to see much information about the nomination process. Under the existing scheme, the state-election articles can always have summaries of the state-party nomination processes and point to detailed articles.

It seems to me that not only should the state primary/caucus articles be retained, they should be generalized and expanded. I think the general process to be described is that of a state party and its members affecting the national party's presidential nomination and the subsequent election. We may be used to thinking of that process as being the same as holding state primary elections or state caucuses. But for a given state party, the process may also include: 1) county conventions, 2) party conventions for congressional districts within the state, and 3) state-wide conventions. There is also the state party's role in fund raising and organizing as those affect the national election. These processes and events are but rarely described on Wikipedia, and it is sometimes hard to understand the state-party rules that describe them. So there is a need. Coverage of these processes is relevant to---but goes beyond---describing primaries and caucuses, and I don't see a good place for covering them adequately. Documentation of the conventions is off-topic for both the election articles and the primary/caucus articles. So I think we should consider some kind of generalization and renaming of the primary/caucus articles to a form something like: "<state-party> in the U.S. presidential election, <year>", for example: "The Missouri Republican Party in the U.S. presidential election, 2012". Searches for primaries and caucuses would redirect to the general articles.