American Presidential Elections are Too Long

Nothing good happens to the public psyche when the two political parties spend two years fighting it out for the presidency.

The Major League Baseball season is long—162 regular season games running from April until October followed by a month of postseason action. By the end of those regular season games, the best teams in both leagues are generally well known. They consistently grind out victories, wear down opponents, make solid roster moves, and avoid bad injuries. Good teams from the first half of the season sometimes fade, while others ride high following the July break. The playoff results don’t always reward the best regular season teams as relatively lackluster clubs or wild cards can go on late streaks. Baseball is tough that way. But at the conclusion of the entire season, the World Series winner usually reflects true strength, skill, and resilience—and fans know it.

U.S. presidential elections aren’t anything like Major League Baseball.

For starters, the presidential election “season” is longer—much, much longer. Although exact comparisons with other nations are difficult given various governmental structures, the United States essentially has the longest national election period of all advanced democracies. For example, just this year the United Kingdom announced elections on May 22 and voting was held on July 4 with the new Labour government taking charge the following day. In France, parliamentary elections were called in early June and two rounds of voting were completed by July 7 (although a new prime minister was not selected until just recently and the exact composition of the government remains unknown given coalition haggling following inconclusive results).

In contrast, by the time the U.S. presidential campaign is over in November (maybe), the U.S. will have been waging presidential warfare for 700 plus days. Donald Trump announced he was again running for president back in November 2022. Obviously, the 2024 election season “story” changed markedly with President Biden dropping out of contention and Vice President Harris taking over in July. Despite this unusual historical wrinkle, Americans have been fighting about whether Trump, Biden, or Harris should be president for nearly two years now.

On top of the length of the contest, U.S. elections increasingly end in confusion about the results and what they indicate for the country. With less than 50 days to go in the cycle, no one can say with any certainty who is going to win the presidency or whether the winning party will have any real potential to govern effectively. There’s a decent chance given our insanely dysfunctional vote counting systems—and probable legal challenges that will arise in the aftermath—that we won’t even know who won the presidential “World Series” for days or perhaps weeks after Election Day.

Furthermore, it’s quite possible that the eventual “winner” of the presidential election season will achieve an Electoral College mandate without amassing a majority of the national popular vote—for the third time since 2000. It’s also likely that one party may win the presidency this fall but fail to hold control of Congress making the following two years of governance difficult and highly contentious for the next president. And even after the eventual victor in the presidential race is determined, it’s a safe bet it will be a close election in many states and roughly half the country will absolutely hate the results—with some on the losing side contesting them or refusing to accept the outcome.

Two years of presidential battles. No satisfying conclusion. Nothing truly resolved or settled. Lingering questions about the legitimacy of the outcome among voters. Possible gridlocked government again lurching from crisis to crisis. The American election way.

The worst part of our country’s interminable presidential election season is the effect the drawn out and overly complex process has on the American people themselves. Nothing good happens to citizens when they fight about politics for two years without perceived resolution at the end—or, when there is no mutual acceptance of the results and belief that the rules were fair to both sides, no common understanding that political victories are never permanent in a democracy, and no shared agreement that we should look out for everyone in the country whether they voted for the “right party” or not.

Every presidential contest is now “the most important election of our lifetime” with two polarized political parties and their attendant media systems elevating the stakes to absurd levels: “If the other side wins, it’s the end of democracy as we know it,” with looming “communism” or “fascism” in our future and “people in camps,” “no more rights for Americans,” and “civil war in the streets.”

Election season means political hyperbole on every channel and social media feed. Heightened emotions and anxiety across the partisan spectrum. Total exhaustion among the electorate.

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U.S. politics is enough to drive decent people crazy—and crazy people even nuttier. Ideally, our better angels would take over in government and politics, and we would do something collectively to fix the election system and tone it all down several notches. But given vested interests in party politics and the media—and all the money to be made selling chaos, mutual loathing, and emotional anger to citizens—nothing much is likely to change.  

The only solution for civic-minded Americans then is to do their duty and vote, resist the temptation to turn politics into incessant emotional release, and tune out all the campaign noise.

Maybe watch some baseball—it’s America’s better pastime anyway with a season that will actually conclude before the presidential election!