It is just starting for real and I am sick of this election. I could have put this in the pit or made up a GD question but I am instead going to ask a couple of factual questions.
Is there another country in the world that has an election cycle that is as long or longer than the U.S.
Is there something that can be done to shorten the process? Over two years of campaigning for a job that is four years long is ridiculous. Can congress pass a law which limits the length of the process or would that violate the 1st ammendment? Would a constitutional ammendment have to be passed to shorten the campaign time? I’ll put my name on the petition now
From what another poster said in another thread, Australia has a six-week campaign cycle. They think we’re crazy for this.
I’m not sure if more laws would solve the problem. Maybe just get the major parties to agree to something like 2-3 months of active campaigning only. Of course, I don’t know how to get them to agree on anything, let alone the other non-major parties plus independents.
The election cycle hasn’t begun yet. We’re still in the primary cycle. You’ve got to stand in a whole bunch of elections just to have a shot at the big one.
Most other democracies have parliamentary systems where elections are not held on a regular basis. When elections are called there’s generally a mercifully short amount of time for campaigning. Other countries have heads of state that are elected, but may wield little influence while the prime minister does most of the work. (The President of France being one notable exception.) So presidential campaigns in those countries typically don’t take a lot of time.
Yes. Iowa, New Hampshire, Wyoming, and the other insignificant urine stains on the map can STFU already and move their primary dates to a reasonable time in February.
Any attempt to shorten campaign time would be as fruitless as an attempt to “reform” campaign finance – you can’t reasonably put restrictions on political speech without making absurdly specific laws that everyone will just circumvent.
In parliamentary democracies the election season is necessarily short because no one knows when the election is going to be until it is called by the government. Most (all?) parliaments must call an election within a certain amount of time after the last one, but it’s rare that a ruling part will simply let the clock expire. Usually, the party in power will call for an election when their stock is riding particularly high, and will try to keep the campaign short so as to give the opposition as little time as possible to make their case for a change in governments.
Is this better than the never-ending US campaign season? Seems to me that it gives extraordinary advantages to the ruling party.
Part of the expansion of the election cycle is due to the news cycle. Nowadays, TV news begins talking about candidates for the next election the week after the election is over. You could see that when Bush won reelection in 2004: pundits were discussing who the Democrats would be looking to in 2008. The week after election day in 2008, you will see people getting on the air talking about the frontrunners by the losing party for 2012 (the winning party will assume to be running the winner again).
Since the networks get ratings for this sort of speculation, we will have a permanent election cycle until people just turn off cable news.
Is this actually a common practice in parliamentary democracies other than the United Kingdom? The German system is quite simple as far as elections are concerned, at least on the Federal level: we vote every four years on a Sunday, trying to stay as close to the date of four years earlier as possible. There is no “calling” of elections except in very rare, special circumstances.
In addition, for a fair comparison with a parliamentary system, one must count the parliamentary party leadership contests as part of the election campaign. These vary in length by nation and party, but can sometimes be quite protracted.
As for what can be done about this, the DNC and RNC have to step up and say “enough is enough”. Threatening to refuse to seat delegates from a state is one method of influencing their practices.
They are starting to do this. This year the DNC is refusing to recognize delegates from Michigan and Florida. The RNC has cut the number of delegates from Florida, New Hampshire, Michigan and Wyoming in half.
Not always. We’ve had several changes of ruling party in the UK in recent times (say since WW2). If the ruling party has messed up badly it doesn’t matter when they call the election. In the UK, the ruling Conservatives hung on in 1997 almost to the last possible moment before calling the election, in the vain hope that public opinion would change in their favour. It didn’t, and they lost big time.
Primary elections are an oddity in law. Primaries are run by private entities, mostly the Republican and Democratic parties, although a number of smaller parties also hold primaries in various states.
There is no good reason other than history and tradition that state governments get involved and offer public services to accommodate the primary voting process. The parties could remove the balloting from the state entirely and go to an all-caucus system as in Iowa.
This wouldn’t solve the time problem, even if it were to be acceptable to voters, which is extremely unlikely.
Nor would any legal interference by the states in mandating a later primary election day make a real difference. Congress has no real jurisdiction, because it is entirely a state function. A Constitutional amendment could change election dates, but would have zero effect on campaigning.
The issue is entirely the need for candidates to raise money and public awareness. That takes at least a year in modern America. It doesn’t really matter whether the first primary is in January or February or June, for that matter. Candidates respond to the process, not to the end date. The total process - getting known, nominated, and campaigning - requires two years. If not longer.
This year’s was especially protracted because it was the first one in over half a century in which their was no heir apparent or front runner. That’s unlikely to happen again soon. Even so, as long as there as more than one candidate for the presidential nomination, the process will take as long as it does now. Nothing will change it until the culture changes. And that’s unforeseeable.
Maneuvers like that might work for the parties, but they could result in ugly floor battles at the conventions. If a front-runner has a deciding lead by then, it won’t matter. If Florida and Michigan could tip the balance, though, the nominee’s speech could happen at 2:00 am. That amounts to lots of free air time down the drain. :smack:
I would like an ugly floor battle at the conventions. Then the convention would actually mean something – like the old-school conventions of decades past – rather than just being a four-day televised rubber-stamp.
Never happen. The candidates will be decided on February 5.
Think either party will let the other publicize its candidate for six months while it has a couple of idiots running around for six months taking potshots at one another?
Never happen. We’ll know who the candidates are in February, and the conventions will be infomercials as always. There’s no going back.
Apologies for a slight hijack, but on the ABC World News last night I could swear the guy said “tomorrow Iowans go to the polls to elect the next president.”
Is this a case of mis-speak or did I miss a big change in the rules? Maybe crafty Iowa has short-circuited the rest of us somehow?
As far as I know, this is only in the United Kingdom system. We Swedes have elections the third Sunday in November every four years, and we’re as parliamentary as all get out.
Lazily, I was using “parliamentary democracy” as shorthand for the Westminster System. While wide-spread in Commonwealth nations, there are of course numerous iterations on the theme and several nations do employ parliaments that either regularly schedule elections or constrain the ruling parties ability to call them at will.
No, it’s the case here in Australia too. Federal elections can be called by the Prime Minister as often as he likes, but at longest every 3 years. However some states (like my own, New South Wales) have moved to a fixed 4 year cycle.
The official campaign runs only a few weeks, between when the PM calls the election and it occurs. The actual-but-unofficial campaign takes up at least one year of the three year election cycle, not much different to the US situation.
