Today is Oct. 23, 2015. As of this moment, 20 candidates have announced they will be running for president of the United States, two had already decided to and subsequently suspended their campaigns, and one has recently opted against entering the fray after it seemed too late to become a serious contender. Three primary debates have been held and analyzed, and millions of dollars have been sunk to run television advertisements, make hats and t-shirts and otherwise prepare for the road ahead.
Today is also more than a year before election day for the 2016 presidency, and nearly 15 months shy of when the next president will be inaugurated. While it has been months since the start of the business as usual operation of numerous campaigns, months still remain before a single voter will cast a meaningful vote.
This is the reality of the political process in America today. Presidential races that used to be decided in November now depend just as much on what happens in January of the year before. Even though essentially no platforms change during this process and few novel pieces of information are introduced, the social conception of an informed American requires keeping up with the run-up like it’s a two-year broadcast of Neil Armstrong first setting foot on the moon.
It is hard to imagine this is a hugely beneficial thing for our country as a whole. A year of insults and attack ads from supposedly distinguished leaders does not set a fantastic example for future generations, nor does it particularly inspire U.S. citizens to learn more about the issues facing their country. It should say something that taxi drivers I met in Jordan last summer seemed to know more about American foreign policy than a number of my friends at Stanford do after numerous domestic campaign efforts tried to bring focus to the subject.
Proponents of these long campaigns attempt to justify their opinion by saying that they make the process more democratic. This is true in the sense that elongated primaries theoretically trump their historical predecessors, in which deals behind closed doors decided which politicians got to represent each party. But recent elections have become so lengthy that a politician needs to accrue a huge amount of money just to put his or her name in the hat for their party’s nomination. This gives major donors a sizable influence on who gets to run, begging the question of whether these modifications have opened up the process or just changed who gets to sit in the back room.
The budget of campaigns these days is one of the more troubling things about the length of the electoral process, but it’s hardly the only reason to take issue with it. The nine elections following the movement of Iowa caucuses to January all have ranked among the 13 lowest in history in the percentage of the voting age population who cast a vote, and not a single race since that procedural modification has eclipsed the rate of the election the year before it was implemented. While there is certainly no guarantee that the length of elections exclusively caused of the trend, it doesn’t take a giant stretch of the imagination to suspect that the act of becoming a responsible citizen has simply become too burdensome for a large percentage of America’s population.
Those who continue to participate may simply be the most partisan and opinionated, those who gain the most enjoyment from the coverage, potentially explaining modern electoral phenomena like the “silent majority” of apparent moderates who don’t ever reach their local polling precinct.
There seems to be very little incentive within the system to do anything but continue to lengthen the electoral process. News agencies profit from having popular stories that can be pursued at little cost, and the most endowed donors can continue to increase their influence the longer that campaign periods are drawn out as the financial requirements for mounting a serious challenge skyrocket. That’s all to say nothing about the legitimate problems our nation faces that seem to get tabled the first time a replacement candidate’s name is uttered, something that surely must entice those who don’t feel their ideas are integrated with the current regime.
Yet it seems like a modification would be a good idea for the long-term health of our country. There has to be a line in which the costs of extending the length of an election exceed the benefits, and I think it’s very likely we’ve passed that mark already.
So whatever party you identify with, I ask you to consider delaying your appetite for political opinion and putting a hold on your active campaigning. Only by serving as examples can we actually change the norms regarding elections, and if we do so successfully, the potential downsides might just be made up for in terms of increased direct democracy and greater national political participation.
Otherwise, it may be those of us who care most about our nation’s leadership who ironically do it the most harm.
Contact Andrew Mather at amather ‘at’ stanford.edu.