That’s correct. In the parliamentary systems, the leaders of the parties are normally selected internally years before the election, and then are expected to get to work in the Parliament.
Well yeah, that would be one way to reduce the length of campaigns, take away the right of voters to select the nominees.
Anyone who signs up with the party of their choice is entitled to vote in leadership contests.
Given that Presidential campaigns nowadays start at the beginning of the year before the year of the election, I’ve taken the position for the past two cycles that they should move the early caucuses and primaries into this year.
Iowa in June would be a hell of a lot nicer than Iowa next January. New Hampshire could have their primary in September, filling in the gap between the summer tourist season and the fall foliage season. Nevada and SC could decide how to split October and November. Then come January, the other states could jump in.
One big plus of a system like this is that there’d be a basis for dropping some of the candidates from the interminable cattle calls and debates that go on during this year. If a candidate can’t crack 1% in Iowa in June, then the rest of the cattle calls can ignore him during the summer, and after that as well unless he can get some support in New Hampshire come September. That would dispense with the vanity campaigns of Trump and Gilmore and Ehrlich and Fiorina and Bolton and so forth.
I’d rather just have a jungle primary in November 2016. All the candidates go on the ballot and the top two, assuming no one gets a majority, go to a runoff in December 2016. Then you’d probably only see candidates gearing up in 2016.
So you want a permanent lame duck President?
That’s what we have in California, it’s horrible.
‘Rather’ is really the wrong word here, because this is quite the opposite extreme from what I’m suggesting.
The point of my suggestion - starting the primaries and caucuses this year - is to start the winnowing process earlier (in 2015 in this cycle), and do it in a more gradual fashion.
A jungle primary of the sort you suggest would do no winnowing at all until November 2016. You’d still have John Bolton and Carly Fiorina and George Pataki and Jim Gilmore running until November of next year, because there would be no reality check until then.
To elaborate a bit, my goal is to give the Boltons and Patakis and Gilmores and Fiorinas an early put-up-or-shut-up moment, when they can either demonstrate some voter support, or be pushed off the stage.
If a party is going to have all of these debates and cattle calls, the object should be to gradually reduce the number of candidates involved, so that you get to a point where the primary electorate gets to see the principal candidates facing off against each other, rather than having to share the stage (and share a finite amount of speaking time) with a passel of also-rans.
Doing work to make your name inside the ranks of the party apparatus is a legitimate process to get to be a viable choice for standard-bearer. None of the recent presidents was a “walk-on” type right off of nonpolitical private life.
Lemme see if I understand – we’re speaking along the lines of giving some sort of official structure to something like the Republican 2011 season, so that by the time of the “real” primary season we get to a narrower field but one with strong viable candidates so it’s not at riskof being all over before 80% of the registered-voter citizenry has had a chance to have a real legally binding vote?
Because IMO part of the issue in the USA is that after all the shouting and positioning and cattle-calling and Royal Rumble debates the year before, then you run into the chance that very early in the actual, binding caucus/primary season the nomination becomes de facto uncontested by mere funding exhaustion, rather than by winning or losing voter support. The contenders become whoever still can afford to keep campaigning after South Carolina votes.
I think I’ve heard that in the U.K. each election season is limited to a few months. I wish we had that law in THIS country!
We have the 1st amendment here. So campaigning never actually ends.
It’s not a law. It’s an aspect of the parliamentary system. The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition are members of the Commons and have to be there, doing their jobs. If they were both on the road for a year, not in Parliament, they’d take political heat for not doing their jobs. They’d also be risking a caucus revolt, because their deputy leaders would be getting all the publicity from performing in the Commons, speaking for the Government or the Opposition, setting policy or critiquing it, and so on.
In a parliamentary system, you campaign by doing your job in Parliament, so you have a record to run on when Parliament is dissolved.
Nothing to do with First amendment. Canada and Britain both have constitutional protections for freedom of speech. It’s a structural difference between a parliamentary system and the presidential system.
If you think about it, a large part of the lengthy campaign in the US is to get the nomination. In a parliamentary system, the party leaders have been chosen well in advance of the general election, by the parties through votes of the membership.
For instance, in Canada, the leaders were chosen by their parties on this timeline:
Prime Minister Harper: leader of the Conservative Party, 2003
Thomas Mulcair, Leader of the Opposition and of the NDP: 2012
Justin Trudeau, leader of the Liberals: 2013
Elizabeth May, leader of the Green Party: 2006
Mario Beaulieu, leader of the Bloc Québécois, 2014
We’ll have a federal election this fall and I have yet to see any campaign ads, lawn signs, etc.
There have been a few billboards up with the candidates’ smiling mugs, but that’s about it.
Depends on how you define campaigning. Yes, we could change when primaries occur, or have none at all and just throw all the candidates on one ballot and then have a runoff. But the act of campaigning, having billboards, giving speeches, running ads, that’s constitutionally protected.
I think they’re really getting at the idea that we really have 2 elections (state primaries and the actual presidential election) and in a presidential election cycle, and for 1 of them, the candidates play toward the extreme party positions, and in the final one, they come back considerably toward the center.
Playing to the extremes works in the primaries, because primary voters are disproportionately ideological and party die-hards, and being centrist is more important in the general election because the population as a whole is less extreme.
To be honest it is nothing to do with that. I’d simplify it down to this:
If a party leader in the UK was to spend anywhere close to the amount of time campaigning that potential Presidents do they would be crucified in the press, in the news and in Parliament. It would be political suicide.
And a large part of that is the roll of the press. It appears to me that politicians in the US don’t get anything close to the sort of public questioning that UK politicians do. In the US if you ask difficult questions you won’t be allowed back into the press section of the White House. Interviews with sitting presidents, hell politicians full stop, seem to consist of nothing but softball questions. Regarding how it would go down in Parliament, does the US have an equivalent of Prime Minister’s Questions?
ETA:
A rather famous example of how UK Politicians have to deal with questioning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uwlsd8RAoqI
ETA2:
Or halfway through this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bddWaHuxTzc
As it is in Canada and Britain. The fact that campaigning is constitutionally protected is a complete red herring to the question of why the US presidential election goes on for so long, compared to Britain and Canada.
The answer is not in constitutional protections for free speech, but the structural differences between the two systems. In a parliamentary system, you campaign in Parliament, by doing your job and trying to show why the public should vote for you, based on your performance as PM or as Leader of the Opposition. If a PM or Leader of the Opposition was out of Parliament for the better part of a year, they wouldn’t be doing their job and they’d run into serious trouble with the press, the public and their own caucus.