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Democratic Party and Republican Party are big tent parties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_tent

The members of each party are loosely ideological associated with each other instead of everyone closely believing in the same ideology like in a normal political party.

It’s basically the result of the first past the post voting system where the winner takes all instead of proportional representation. Like every election for every seat eventually ends up being a race between the two biggest parties. Hence why people who want to run for office join one of the two biggest parties. And why you get politicians who are opposites of each other in the same party.

Why does there seem to be such disparity in the views of candidates from the same party?

Because we only have two viable parties

In the US, we have Primary Elections and then General Elections.

Primary Elections are intra-party. The allow multiple candidates to run against each other under each party's banner. For instance, in Illinois this year in one of the House of Representatives races, we had something like 15 Democrats running in the Primary. One 1 Democrat made it out, as well as 1 Republican who had to go up against their other Primary challengers. Voters see all those candidates on whichever ballot they registered with: Democrat or Republican.

General Elections are inter-party. They allow the chosen Primary candidates from each party to run against each other. The result of this election is the person who wins gets the position in government they were running for. In the General, candidates need to get half or more votes (>= 50%) to win. On the ballot, voters can only choose the 1 candidate from the party they registered with to vote: Democrat or Republican.

This kind of system is called First Past The Post (FPTP) and is the default voting system in the US. New York, which is where these elections were held, has a different voting system called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV). RCV allows voters to rank candidates on the ballot rather than just choosing 1. Under RCV and in my Illinois example about, I could rank someone 1st, someone else 2nd, someone else 3rd, etc. Votes are counted by everyone's 1st choice to see if there's a winner. If no one takes >= 50%, the candidate with lowest votes is dropped and those people's ballots are counted by their 2nd choice. If still no one takes >= 50%, the bottommost candidate is dropped and you start looking at those people's 2nd or 3rd choices, etc. etc. etc.

There is such disparity between candidates of the same party, Democrats in this example, because of money basically. Many people describe the Democratic party as having "establishment" or "corporate" candidates backed by billionaires and corporations on one hand, and young, new candidates backed by working class, everyday people on the other hand. Because the Democratic party still in part answers to Big Money'ed interests, you have Democrats that want to defend the rich, but at the same time you have Democratic Socialists that defend the poor and working class who want to take the reigns of the Democratic party because of our FPTP system. We basically have rich politicians defending the rich, and working class politicians defending the working class in the Democratic party, and that difference breeds hostility.

the other person is giving you pretty biased information. there are two parties. primaries are elections to select who each party will support for a given election. there is one for each party. so the democratic primary for a senator would be an election between several people, usually democrats but they arent required to be, and the winner gets to run in the election for the position. the purpose of this is to prevent splitting the vote, which is a major flaw of first past the post elections.

who votes depends on the state due to differing election laws. usually you vote in the primaries of your party, so all democrats could vote in the democrat primary. some places you dont need to be affiliated and could even vote in both primaries, and some people actually do that.

there is disparity in views partly or maybe mostly because of us only having two major parties because of first past the post. you can be a democrat and rub shoulders with both socialists and corporate stooges, or you can be a republican and support fascism and worse fascism. being a democrat is the lesser evil for a lot of people, so you end up with basically everyone even a little left leaning in the democratic party or at least trying to work with them. the diversity in left leaning people in the democratic party causes lots of problems and infighting, usually with corporate democrats ultimately in control of the party working to make sure nothing actually happens that their corporate donors didnt tell them to do.

the significant thing here is that the democratic socialists, a group within the democratic party, has historically been heavily suppressed by the corporate democrats leading the party. stuff like them blocking bernie from getting the presidential nomination in favor of hilary even though bernie was much more popular. the fact that mamdani got elected at all was a minor miracle, and now 3 more democratic socialists got elected with his support. in theory it represents a shift in the party and voters, but time will tell if we can build on this momentum. given the state of the rest of the country its an uphill battle.

i hope this was helpful. im sure some people will come out of the woodwork to tell me im wrong and spew some propaganda or another. politics is kind of fucked up here right now...

Everyone else tackled primaries, I think... yes, it's where the parties select who will run in the general. Some parties have open primaries were any registered voter can vote in them, others have closed primaries where only registered party members may vote. In the past Democrats have usually been open and Republicans closed, but I'm not sure how that is today.

Why does there seem to be such disparity in the views of candidates from the same party?

True of most systems that use winner take all voting as it leads to two big parties. Parliamentary systems ease this somewhat, but even in England, for example, it's historically been common to have Corbyn-types and Blairites under the same roof, which is a pretty big disparity.

In the end, it isn't as big of a difference as some people make it out to be. The difference is that where a parliamentary system with ranked voting usually sees coalitions form between parties to govern, the same thing happens in systems like the American one within each party. So the Democrats might need to appease the Progressive Caucus, or the Black Caucus, or whatever... Republicans same thing with the Tea Party types vs the old school conservatives vs the alt right, etc. It's just whether these coalitions form within each party or between different ones.

(to be clear, I do think the parliamentary + ranked choice system is better for representation, I'm just pointing out the difference isn't quite as stark as some suggest... the idea is the same).

Primaries are for selecting who's going to stand in the election.

Theoretically, anyone in the party can vote in the primary (in most states) but normally, it's nerds and diehards that vote. Americans don't get time off to vote, and have been getting "your vote doesn't matter" propaganda for most of their lives.

America has a 2 party system. The far right party are the democrats, the fascist kill everyone if it makes a dollar party are the republicans. The democrat socialists of America are a center right offshoot of the democrat party that are branded by the 2 main parties as the radical left.

You vote in the primaries of the party you are registered to vote as. If you are Republican, you vote in Republican primaries, or Democrat if you are Democrat. Think of these as the party deciding who will run in the general election later this year, where everyone will vote.