The Presidential Campaign Cycle Is Too Long

The Wikipedia page for the timeline of this year’s presidential election begins in November of 2014 with the formation of exploratory committees; by next March, Ted Cruz is among the first to announce he’s running for president. Clinton announces her candidacy in April, and Trump follows in June. This means that if you consider the start of the campaign cycle to be the point when the news started to pick up, the whole campaign has been about 1.5 years.

The recent Canadian federal elections were, at 11 weeks, the longest in Canadian history. Why is our presidential election season so painfully long (and generally painful)?

Historically, the answer is that as the role of primaries have increased in number and importance over time, states have jockeyed for influence by fighting to be the first primary. The result is that we have a long, bitter, and spread-out primary season that makes what could be a one-time event into a protracted combination of war of attrition and constant media cycle.

Candidates must get access to enormous amounts of money if they even want to have a chance, and must also be able to take a lot of time off just to focus on staying on people’s minds. Sure, they’re getting their message out— but after the first primary, this shouldn’t take an additional several months. (The process runs from February to July.)

After that, there’s a whopping five months between the end of the primaries and the general election. In 2016, this space was filled with little substantive policy debate, and a lot of waiting for more and more embarrassing and shocking information to be leaked about the two candidates. Certainly, the recently-released comments that Clinton and Trump have made in private are not politically irrelevant — but do we need half of a year to figure out who are aspiring leaders are?

It’s pretty reasonable to think that the whole process could be compressed to about four months, with maybe another couple months of lead-up time. The primary season doesn’t need to be more than two months long, and the space between its end and the general could be another two months. Each of these two month spans would leave time for debates to happen, for outsiders to emerge, and for the public to make an informed choice.

A change like this would also have the useful effect of opening up some space for media coverage of and public attention to other important developments in the world, many of which get overshadowed by election season. Hopefully, then we could finally focus more of our energy on a constructive debate on the issues we’re facing, and less of it critiquing the personality flaws of our country’s elite representatives.