Why U.S. election campaigns feel so long

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President Joe Biden has now been campaigning for reelection for a year, and former President Donald Trump has been running since he announced his new presidential campaign shortly after the 2022 midterms.

Election Day is a little more than six months away (we’ll hit that milestone on Sunday). Most Americans say the recent presidential campaigns have not focused on the right issues and “lasted too long,” according to a 2023 poll by Pew Research Center survey.

It can feel like U.S. presidential election cycles stretch on forever, but are they actually longer than in other countries?

You can measure that in a few ways.

Look at the calendar

While it’s difficult to compare the length of campaigns between democracies, some do have short, official election periods:

• The United Kingdom’s campaign lasts 25 days
• Mexico’s election season formally began March 1 and will end three months later (More on this below)
• Trump, in contrast, announced his second run for the White House a week after the 2022 midterms, about 720 days — just shy of two years — before the 2024 presidential election

The fundraising factor

Official announcements are the start of public campaigns. But when you think about a U.S. presidential race, there’s also a set of “sub-campaigns,” said John Geer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University.

“There’s the public campaign where you seek votes,” he said, “but any candidate is also going to engage in a fundraising campaign where they’re raising money, they’re going to try to campaign for support of party leaders and activists, and also, frankly, the support of journalists to get as favorable coverage as possible.”

Recent U.S. elections are also expensive. Election spending for the 2020 presidential election topped more than $14 billion, surpassing the record-breaking 2016 White House race. That included $5.7 billion for the presidential campaigns and another $8.7 billion spent on congressional races, according to U.S. nonprofit Open Secrets.

But vast amounts of election cash do not always correlate to longer elections.

READ MORE: Majority of Americans aren’t paying attention to Trump’s hush money trial, poll finds

Milan​​​​ Vaishnav, director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that while India’s general election, currently underway, will last 44 days, it may end up becoming the world’s most expensive in recent history. That election is estimated to cost around $8 billion.

“There is a lot of money being spent in a relatively short amount of time, and on all the high-tech aspects of campaigning,” like digital media buys, advertisements, and posters, he said.

Calling Indian elections a “contact sport,” Vaishnav said politicians work around the clock for support during the short, official election period and will spend funds in the final days on giveaways, such as alcohol, bricks for homes or even simply cash.

Was it always this way?

Geer said that in the early 19th century, travel made it difficult to campaign across the country and so local surrogates were more important. For President William McKinley, that meant running a “front-porch campaign” in 1896. As in, he sat on his front porch in Ohio and let surrogates speak for him, Geer said.

The main goal was getting the approval of party elites. Primaries were not as important, Geer added.

That began to change after World War II, most notoriously at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey was controversially selected as the nominee although he did not compete in the primaries and won a minority of the delegates.

Presidential campaigns in the U.S. since then have included lengthy primary campaigns that play out in public, rather than behind closed doors, Geer said.

In Mexico, while the official campaign is relatively short, behind-the-scenes efforts to secure party nominations can be extensive, said political consultant Salvador Vázquez del Mercado.

It’s the party elites who organize meetings with key constituencies, “and they’re just going out there to harvest their support and mobilize it more than actually get their vote for a primary process,” he said.

Election overload

The omnipresence of campaigning in American life isn’t only connected to the length of election seasons. It’s also due to the sheer volume of elections, said Pippa Norris, a Yale comparative politics lecturer.

Those include House and Senate races, state and local offices and ballot measures, in addition to presidential primaries and elections.

“In many countries the norm is that general elections are held every four years — sometimes longer, occasionally less,” she said. “But the frequency of elections in the U.S. is excessive, leading to constant campaigning and fundraising rather than governing, and exhaustion and low turnout among voters.”

This has led to something experts call “the permanent campaign”

This phenomenon is when elected officials don’t stop thinking about the next election, including during periods that might have been devoted to governance.

This casts everything in terms of the short-term win, said Darren Lilleker, Bournemouth University professor of political communication.

“Where does long-term planning come in, say, for things like the greener economy for those who think it’s a good idea?” he said. “That can’t happen overnight.”