How Do Primaries Work? | Simple Civics?

Primaries are like a big race where people pick their favorite team captain to run for mayor or president.

Imagine you're part of a club, and you want to choose who will be the next leader. Instead of just voting right away, you first have a race, that's a primary. In this race, members of the club (like voters) pick their favorite person from each team (party) to be the captain.

In a primary, people vote for someone from their own team. If you're in the blue team, you can only pick one of the blue team members. If you like the red team better, you vote for them instead.

Sometimes, there are multiple rounds of voting if no one wins by a big margin. It's like when your class has to do several votes to decide who gets to be the class president, they keep going until someone gets more than half the votes.

After the primary, the person with the most votes from their team becomes the official candidate and runs in the final race (the general election). That’s how people pick who will be on the ballot.