Yvonne Lam: My understanding (*) is that one reason the US has these painfully long campaign cycles is fundraising. We should fix fundraising in any case, but especially if it means we don't have to have political campaigns that go on forever. (*) I don't remember where I learned this, so I may well be wrong.

My understanding (*) is that one reason the US has these painfully long campaign cycles is fundraising. We should fix fundraising in any case, but especially if it means we don't have to have political campaigns that go on forever. (*) I don't remember where I learned this, so I may well be wrong.

note how long it took the French from calling the election to holding not 1 but 2 votes? and organizing the shit out of the second one? LESS THAN ONE MONTH A national election does not have to be a painful 1.5-2 year process! the US election campaign should quite honestly not even have started yet!!

I tend to think that it would be easier to legally shorten campaigns as a way to cut some of the money out but whatever fucking works

That is my theory as well, but either way, I feel like less political campaigning could be a winning issue.

we also just don't have a law dictating the length of campaigns, which creates a negative cycle with the fundraising thing (it costs a hell of a lot more to run ads for 2 years)

and I think ultimately we have to factor in the size of the country a little (in terms of both mass and population) or it could be a little unfair to not-brand-name players, but yeah 2+ years is just absolutely bonkers and exhausting

Yes -- country size or not (and I agree we would need to account for that), no one is happy with political campaigns that run forever. Except maybe lobbyists and political consultants, and I'm not sure I care what they want.

i thought it was because the terms are fixed whereas in parliamentary systems they can happen $WHENEVER

sort of, I think -- that is, US political campaigns *can* go on forever because the terms are of fixed length, so they do because it's to their advantage in some ways.

yeah cause like even when there's a majority in a parliamentary system you can't assume it'll go the full term, whereas in the states the next campaign starts the day after the election

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