The first Republican presidential primary debate is scheduled for Aug. 23. It is but one of 10 to 12 such events, in addition to at least eight other forums hosted by outside organizations, to say nothing of the array of town halls and one-on-one interviews which will inevitably appear on cable channels, network news, and any number of fringier online video outlets.
By the time the primary race officially begins with the Iowa caucuses in January, we’ll have had dozens of opportunities to see former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and the probable also-rans who populate the rest of the field deliver their finely-honed canned sniping and consultant-crafted one-liners.
And that’s exactly the problem: Our presidential elections are far too long and much too stupid.
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No one wants this. Certainly, no one needs this. Congress can and should cut down on the stupidity by limiting the length, and this is something our lawmakers could manage with ample bipartisan support.
Election law, particularly where campaign finance is concerned, is often a contentious subject. Who gets to donate and how much money they can give, how and when we can vote, where to draw district lines, who will count the votes and who will check their work—these are all questions easily drawn into partisan battles because of the politically disparate effects different answers can have.
But what I’m interested in here is time, and time passes equally for us all. It also happens to be clearly within congressional purview.
Parts of our election timeline are already determined by federal law and the Constitution. Congress fixed the general Election Day in 1845, a decision prompted by the rise of the telegram. National uniformity was needed, the thinking went, because if news could travel more quickly, early results might unfairly sway decisions in later voting states.
The Constitution also gives Congress the authority to “determine the time of choosing the electors, and the day on which they shall give their votes; which day shall be the same throughout the United States.” That part happens in mid-December, and the electors’ votes are counted in Washington, D.C. by Congress on—I’m guessing you know this one, given how it went last time—Jan. 6.
Finally, the 20th Amendment, adopted in 1933, finishes out the schedule with the president’s inauguration date, Jan. 20, moved up from Mar. 4 due to faster modes of travel.
So here’s my very simple proposal: If Congress can determine when our presidential elections end, it should also determine when they begin. And they should begin much later than they do.
Other, similar countries do not have elections this long. (The United Kingdom, for example, allows official campaigning for just 25 working days.) They’re spared months of televised inanities. They needn’t pretend to care about the nth “debate” which doesn’t deserve the name. They don’t have a six-month primary debacle in which later votes are not just unfairly swayed but rendered completely irrelevant.
We could be free of all that stuff too. Maybe it would take a constitutional amendment, just to be safe, but I don’t think so, given that 1845 precedent.
All Congress needs to do is add three dates to our campaign law: one for the earliest launch of campaign exploratory committees, one for the launch of campaigns proper, and one for a universal primary vote and caucus day.
The crucial question, of course, is what those dates should be. I’d suggest a pretty aggressive schedule of a month for exploration, a month for primaries, and a month to pick the winner. Working back from the election in early November, we wouldn’t be in election mode until—at the earliest—Aug. 1, 2024. I’m practically salivating at the thought.
We could reclaim about 18 (mostly useless) months out of every four years. We could ignore these people’s babbling and bickering, the personal spats and the howling vacuum where policy content ought to be. Candidates would be forced to strategize more carefully, to prune their content to just the most important stuff, just what they can fit in three short months. That’s a discipline they very obviously need.
And a tightly scheduled election wouldn’t mean no debates. My timeline would allow about three debates ahead of each vote, assuming a once-weekly schedule. Paying attention to six two-hour sessions over the course of two months is a reasonable proposition for normal, busy adults who have real things to do in our lives.
From the first primary debate in early September to Election Day, the whole thing would be roughly the length of a British TV series—or a class at your gym, or a book club you actually stick with, or half a semester of school, from the first day through midterms.
We could do this—and we might even be able to do it well. Or at least a little bit better.
The sheer length of our presidential elections isn’t only annoying and inconvenient. It’s a two-year simmer, cooking our bitterness at politicians and neighbors alike into a reductive concentrate. Maybe it’s unavoidable that we’ll hit a political boiling point by Election Day.
With so much power at stake, I suspect that’s true. But it could at least be a quick boil. We might then get burned less along the way.
