The U.S. Election Cycle Is Too Damn Long

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While our weekly newsletters are exclusive to paid subscribers, we’ll also publish one non-paywalled post every month. To kick us off, November’s free-for-all post is today’s election dispatch from Katelyn Burns.

As the election has neared, I’ve often thought about the above quoted lines from the fellowship’s journey through Moria for a couple reasons. First, I’m that kind of nerd and no, I will not read another book. But secondly, experiencing this campaign season as a trans person in the U.S. has felt like a long, endless march to a dark precipice—with no idea whether we will avoid falling off a cliff or if we’ll be forced to take the plunge.

This election pits former President Donald Trump and his army of eager ultra-conservative prospective bureaucrats (who are ready to remake the entire federal government in order to attack their perceived political enemies and targets) against Vice President Kamala Harris, who openly stands for the status quo, for better or worse. The centerpiece of Trump’s campaign for months has been millions spent on endless TV ads demonizing people like me. On the other end, we got two mealy-mouthed statements from Harris noting she will “follow the law” on trans rights. Gee, thanks.

A Trump victory will fundamentally change my relationship to my own government, maybe for the rest of my life. It may also push Democrats to abandon trans rights as an issue worth defending.

My anxiety over how this election will turn out has built for months, with additional spikes for Biden’s debate and when a Democratic strategist said Trump’s anti-trans ad was “killer.” I’ve started chewing my fingernails again, a habit I thought I’d dumped a decade ago. I can barely get my brain to focus on writing. Typing these words is a struggle that has taken me a week longer than I anticipated.

According to an American Psychological Association survey released last week, I’m not alone in my ballot-flavored depression. Of 3,305 U.S. adults surveyed, 77% reported feeling some sort of stress over the future of the country. Sixty-nine percent said the presidential race is a cause of “significant stress,” up from 52% in 2016.

To put it plainly, our election cycle is too damn long. No one should have to deal with extended levels of anxiety and worsening mental health over politics. 

Yet here we are.

Of course, the sheer stakes of this election for many communities and the looming possibility of conservative violence in response to a potential Trump loss are significant drivers of electoral anxiety this year. But I also believe the length of time our presidential elections consume may contribute to these problems.

Compared to other western democracies, the U.S. has, by far, the longest election cycle. The U.K. holds snap elections. Former U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the most recent election on May 24 this year, with the election to take place on July 4. That’s just 42 days to elect over 650 new MPs to Parliament.

The 2021 German Bundestag elections were announced on Dec. 9, 2020 and held on Sept. 26, making a total election season of just nine and a half months.

By comparison, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley unofficially kicked off this year’s U.S. election cycle by announcing her candidacy for president in February 2023. The Republican Iowa caucuses were held 11 months ago on Jan. 15. Haley suspended her campaign on March 6, ensuring Trump’s primary victory.

There are many reasons for our extended primary season. Holding early primaries and caucuses in smaller states with cheaper television advertising markets makes it possible for stronger unknown candidates to compete early without having to raise vast sums of money.

There’s a seemingly natural cadence to the election cycle, at least because we’ve grown used to the system that’s already been in place for years. Candidates spend significant time in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina doing retail politics and meeting voters face to face while voters in other states can only watch along and follow the media coverage. Those who are successful ramp up their campaign fundraising for Super Tuesday, the first Tuesday in March when many states hold their primaries. It’s my opinion that we should simply hold these contests on later dates.

Primary campaigns rarely run past Super Tuesday. There have been outliers—most famously during the 2008 Democratic primary between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and again in 2016 between Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. Despite the exceptions, there’s no good reason not to significantly shorten the primary season in the U.S.

Looking beyond presidential politics, you have members of the U.S. House, who must defend their seats every two years. A year-long election cycle amounts to half the time these officials hold office. With many representatives hesitant to take any real political risks in an election year, the calendar significantly limits the policy-making abilities of our legislative branch. Our politicians are already fundraisers first and legislators second—and it’s no wonder when they’re campaigning almost half the time they're in office.

The House of Representatives desperately needs a shorter campaign season so that they can have a longer legislative window between elections.

This never-ending, almost total-war style of constant electioneering, to the detriment of policy and lawmaking, has also had a deleterious effect on our national political press. Coverage of proposed bills or spending changes or culture war issues are universally reported through the lenses of how they will shift the polls or how the electorate will respond. Rarely are high-level political reporters tasked with understanding how proposed bills, spending, or tax changes will affect real people and actual voters.

And why should they? There’s always a campaign season either in effect or right around the corner in the U.S. There’s no need to learn the details of a proposed policy when there’s not enough time to debate and implement it, and anyway all that really matters are polling numbers.

There are potential tradeoffs that would come with a shorter campaign season. At the outset, it would require bigger warchests for candidates, but spending on elections is already out of control. In 2008 Obama made history, raising over $770 million dollars during his run for the presidency. This year Harris has smashed that record, raising over a billion dollars in the first three months after announcing her candidacy.

But out of control election spending has been reined in before, though that would likely require significant changes to the composition of the 6-3 majority conservative Supreme Court. Nevertheless, serious campaign finance reform is desperately needed. Everyone is already sick of all the election related ads, especially if you live in a swing state. This is yet another reason we need shorter election seasons.

Start the early primaries in April and have them wrap up by August. Put the party conventions in late September, run debates in October, and vote by the first Tuesday in November. That would make for five months of voting, maybe seven months total of campaigning.

This year’s election could serve as a bulwark against the conventional wisdom that candidates for president need a long time to introduce themselves to the American public. Biden dropped out just a few months ago and Harris, who served as vice president for three and a half years, jumped in and outperformed early expectations. Though she no doubt benefited from the campaign infrastructure built by Biden’s team, she will have run the shortest campaign for president in modern history.

Her example can lead us into shorter campaign seasons. There’s simply no reason for anxiety and dread to slowly build for a year, only to start again in three years. We shouldn’t have five months of Trump ads demonizing trans people or a year of rallies full of conservatives chanting for mass deportations. We don’t need two years of horse race election coverage from empty-suit Washington, D.C. reporters.

Electing our nation’s leaders shouldn’t feel like a journey from the Shire to Mordor, which, by the way, took fewer days than this year’s presidential election. Our nerves simply cannot take the constant electioneering. Free us from this yawning abyss and shorten the cycle!

This piece was edited by Tina Vásquez and copy-edited by Chrissy Stroop.

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