senator, governor and a congressman. (U.S 2020 presidential election race)

First, you must understand the organization of the “United States”.

Point One: United “States” is a collection or 50 sovereign governments each of whom has their own government, The “federal” government has very specific authorities.

Point two: Each State is like a mini-USA, with its own government. Except that each state gets to define their own. Some don’t even call themselves “states” - they are “commonwealths”. But they are all similar, and democratic.

OK… Point three… the “common” structure has three parts- an “executive”, a ”legislature” , and a “judiciary”.

• At the federal level, the “executive” is the president and all the Departments that make up the government, the legislature actually has two parts (House or Representatives and the Senate) and the “judiciary” has a whole system of fedaral courts topped by the Supreme Court.
• At the state level, its pretty much the same, except the “executive” is called the governor, and the legislature is just one body, but there is also a whole hierarchy of state courts.

So, you can see that a “governor” is like the president of one state. A Governor has no standing at the federal level.

A “senator” is most likely referring to someone elected to the federal Senate, but could actually be a “state senator”.

A Congressman/woman is most likely someone elected to the federal House of Representatives, but once again could be someone elected to a similar position at the state level.

Finally, let’s examine the difference between a federal Senator and a Congressmen:

When the U.S. Constitution was written, the premise that people should govern themselves was a radical new idea. They did know that even then, it would be impractical to have everyone participate in a huge meeting. So they needed to choose (“elect”) representatives. But how? If they just said “one per ### number of people”, then the big states would easily outvote the small states on every issue. But it wasn’t fair to give each state the same number of representatives either, since that meant a person in a small state would have much more influence than someone in a large state.

So, they did both: The House of Representatives has one “Congressman” for each ### people in the state’s population. The Senate has 2 representatives from each State. To keep the numbers accurate, a census is required every 10 years.

And that’s why the US Government has two bodies in the legislature. For any law to be passed, both the House and the Senate must agree And then the President has to sign it - but if he doesn’t, the House and Senate *can* outvote his his “veto” with a big enough majority.

Added note: many towns, cities, and counties have their own government, and define their government with a structure similar to the state. In their case, the “executive” is usually called the Mayor. the legislature is usually a “council”, and they have their own court system.

Most people are likely to notice these different levels of government when they are driving. Local government have police which only have jurisdiction in their town, on their roads. State police have jurisdiction within their state to enforce state laws. Federal police have jurisdiction everywhere, but only to enforce federal laws. Often, when federal police go to arrest big crooks, they need state or local police to assist because the federal police are not allowed to “exceed their authority” in a local jurisdiction. Conversely, small town police only have authority within their town limits.