Let every state have its primary on the same day – in June of election year. That allows enough time for summer conventions and post-convention campaigning.
And it means no one without a national recognition will ever win the nomination. The current process, while flawed, allows less well known candidates time to build up a base.
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I’m not proposing any limit on the length of the primary campaign season. That said, it is rather disturbing that we’re already well into it, 14 months before the general election.
Without the ability to win or place well in small states (like NH and Iowa) where an underfunded campaign can cover the media market, those unknown candidates will never do anything in a nationwide primary day. You can’t campaign for 14 month with no money and no name recognition. You need primary showings to gather national attention and money, which allows you to campaign in the bigger states and Super Tuesday.
I’m not necessarily paying attention to things now and a lot of money is being spent, but I don’t see any tangible issue with it. Why does the long campaign season disturb you?
Og, aren’t you sick of it already?!
14 Months? Trump started running for re-election before he was even sworn in! US elections are ridiculously over-long, and have been for decades. Trump has just taken it to its logical, absurd limit.
This cycle is actually a compressed primary cycle. It starts at the same time but something like two thirds of Democratic delegates will be decided in Feb and March. The effect was to start the campaigning earlier. Instead of spring to summer being when candidates declared they started declarations this cycle right after New Years.
I’m not sure your fix would help your concern. Candidates get the challenge and exense of running a national race in a nation of 329 million that covers most of the populated area of a continent. They seem to have responded to the issues a tight cycle causes, and Telemark brought up, and responded by starting earlier. Even if it’s all in one month or on one day I don’t see how that will help your real issue. Candidates will still be campaigning, and making you sick of it, a long time before that primary.
In the summer of 1975 I heard someone say he wouldn’t support Scoop Jackson because he announced his campaign too early. Things have changed.
I would favor four or five regional primaries with the order changing each election.
Not really, no.
And even if I was that’s not a reason to change the primary system.
The difficulty is that it isn’t for the most part the primary system causing the now-continuous running for office; it’s that the candidates announce and start campaigning way ahead of the primaries – sometimes, as has been pointed out, within a few weeks or even less after the previous election. They didn’t use to, and I wish they didn’t now; but I don’t see how to write laws to prevent it. I suppose the parties could refuse to nominate anybody who announced early, but even if they were willing to do that it would only prevent formal announcing, not informal campaigning; and if it had the effect of preventing formal fundraising early, that would only further tilt the playing field towards those who had a lot of money to start with.
The reason I think it’s a problem is that people running for office are taking that time and attention from whatever they’d be doing otherwise – and all too often that’s doing the work of the office they’re running for, or of some other public office they were previously elected to (in the case of those running for POTUS, often federal senator or representative, or state governor.) I was going to say that it also takes news attention off other things that are going on, but that’s only partially true – while reporting on early polls and time spent going on about just how a candidate phrased something and what they did in, say, 1992 certainly does that, in some cases attention may actually be drawn to issues that matter and that which might otherwise be ignored.