The “election season” is too long.
Way too long.
We’re up to the point that presendential campaigns are major news for more than a year before the actual election day.
That is just too long.
Most of the other large democracies manage with 3-month campaigns, or less ; the U.K just did a parliamentary election on what, 2 weeks notice?
This is totally unneccessary.
150 years ago (before the continent was criss-crossed with railroads, then highways, then plane routes and now the Internet) you could totally make a case that a long campaign was necessary so that everyone could be involved; that’d make sense.
You’d be wrong, though: campaigns were shorter then than they are now.
Now, it’s totally possible for everyone to know within a few days of a candidate announcing whether they’d be willing to vote for that person.
Hell, most of us who who pay some attention to politics know that before most candidates announce.
(I was never gonna vote for Bloomberg, for example. Or Gabbard.)
The states can solve this problem on their own, mostly.
Each state is pretty much in control of when candidate registration happens and when voting does for every election except the presidency, so any state that wants to end this travesty for itself can do so pretty easily.
But the presidency is the only election we all participate in.
That one’s trickier.
To compress that election down would require that the primary election be held everywhere on the same day, which could be done in several ways which I discussed in Iowa: Don’t Learn The Wrong Lesson.
None of them are easy.
But wouldn’t it be nice to only have to think about it for a few months?
