The Democratic candidate, Kamala Harris, and the Republican and former president, Donald Trump, They face a crucial battle to ascend to the presidency of the United States for the next four years. As the polls progress, everything indicates that these elections will be the closest the country has seen so far this century, so expectations are high.
For this reason, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are taking advantage of the last days of the campaign to mobilize the electorate and fight for the last votes, especially in “visagra states” where the population is traditionally divided and there is no clear winning candidate, which is why they are essential for parties.
The United States elections have been marking the entire country’s calendar for months. And the machinery is activated almost two years before the elections are held. In the spring of the previous year, candidates generally already announce their intention to run and they even file their candidacy with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
Throughout the year when elections take place, political parties organize their primaries and celebrate their National Congresses to choose your candidate. At this time, the person chosen to run for President also announces who will accompany them to the Vice Presidency.
However, the National Conventions are only a simple formalism, since Kamala Harris and Donald Trump announced their candidacy before. In the Democrat’s case, she had already secured the necessary delegate votes to become her party’s nominee a few weeks earlier, while the Republican’s candidacy had been taken for granted for months.
Requirements to be President of the United States
Not everyone can run for president of the United States. To be president, the Constitution American establishes a series of requirements. Concretely, section 2 of Article I specifies that it is necessary:
- Be a citizen born in the United States: Only citizens born in the United States or those whose parents were born in the United States can be elected president.
- Be at least 35 years old: the candidate must have reached the age of 35 at the time of taking office. However, the average age of presidents is around 55 years old. The youngest president upon taking office was Theodore Roosevelt, aged 42, while the oldest president was Joe Biden, aged 78.
- Having lived in the United States for 14 years: The applicant must have resided in the country for at least 14 years, but these years do not need to be consecutive.
Anyone who meets these requirements can run for President of the United States, provided they are also raise or spend more than $5,000 (around 4,600 euros) for your campaign. Next, you must register with the Federal Election Commission and authorize a committee to collect and spend your campaign funds.
To be President of the United States, there are no specific restrictions regarding gender, race or religion. Nor about criminal recordso that a candidate can run for president even if he is under investigation or has even been convicted of one or more crimes, since the Constitution does not mention any specific prohibition against this subject.
In fact, there are examples in American history of candidates for the country’s presidency who came forward with accusations. For example, Eugene V. Debs, socialist presidential candidatefled prison in 1920 while serving time for criticizing the government during World War I and won more than 900,000 votes.
This point is also decisive in the face of Donald Trump’s candidacy in the November 5 elections. And the former president was convicted on 34 counts of improper payments to the porn actress. Stormy Daniels And yet he could be the next president of the United States.
