Congratulations, America: You’ve now survived 11 months of campaigning. Now you only have a little less than nine to go until the people finally vote for the next president.
But you’d never know we have nine months left from the non-stop coverage of the candidates. It’s even bled into Congress where the willingness to vote on tough issues, even Supreme Court justice confirmations, has ground from “approaching zero” to “zero.” Essentially, a president only gets two-thirds of a term before we turn to their potential replacements. Congressmen get even less time spent off the campaign trail.
It doesn’t have to work that way. In fact, we’re the only election that spends more than four months at a time on elections. I suppose, as a columnist, this makes my job easier. But it also gives me time to observe why long elections are a bad idea.
For one, they’re expensive. Dr. Ben Carson’s campaign and affiliated Super PACs have raised upward of $70 million. According to some reports, he’s almost broke less than a month into the voting phase of the primary. Part of Donald Trump’s appeal is that he could theoretically pay for his own campaign, unlike the other candidates who have to beg for the tens of millions of dollars they need to win an extended primary.
Less noted is the role it has on pushing discourse to the extremes. If primaries take a year or more from the first candidate announcing their candidacy to the last candidate standing, there is a lot of time for positions to switch and boundaries to be pushed. This is perhaps best embodied by Trump’s candidacy, which has discovered some new demographic to attack with every month in a big push to keep the campaign in the headlines for half a year. By now the field has been pulled so far right over the months, Marco Rubio, former crown prince of the Tea Party, is one of the great establishment hopes.
It also likely contributes to our culture of divisiveness. When the country spends almost half of its time watching some campaign or another, it sets the tone. If politicians spend as much of their time running against the other party or playing up their ideological extremeness, it kills the ability or desire to compromise.
So if we ended up with a legislature that’s more concerned with donors than voters and puts campaigns above compromise, you can blame our absurdly long elections.
The solution likely involves limiting the time involved in elections and primaries to three months each, maximum. Most voters don’t tune into the elections until about three months before the primaries and general races, anyway, so it will hardly give the voters any less information than they currently absorb.
And if you’re still skeptical, imagine a world where Trump’s campaign announcement was still weeks away.