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Hey there it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamar Keith. I cover the White House.

I'm Domenico Moncanoro, senior political editor and correspondent.

And I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent.

And as we get ever closer to the primaries and caucuses,

we wanted to take some time to just run through that whole process.

What's at stake, how they work,

how soon we should know when Republicans and

Democrats alike will have their presumptive nominees for the presidency?

But before we get into the calendar, let us just talk about nuts and bolts.

Mara, School House Rock Time, how does this work?

In most Republican states, they have a winner take all system

or a combination of proportional and winner take all. But the

prizes, the delegate prizes for winning Republican primaries are bigger. On

the Democratic side, it's really an accumulation of one delegate at a time,

and that's why it takes longer to see who's going to be the Democratic nominee usually.

And for the Democrats, you know, it's mostly proportional. You know, you go state by state and it can take a longer time as we saw in the past couple of elections to get a nominee to that magic number of winning a majority of the delegates.

Of course, there's no nominee who is actually picked until the conventions when, you know,

honestly, the open secret is that you can change at any time if you're a delegate.

...