Brendan McDermid/Reuters
Democratic presidential candidates Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders pose together at the start of their fifth 2020 campaign debate at the Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta.
- The 2020 US presidential election season will have lasted 1,194 days by the time it's over.
- Unlike other developed countries, the US does not have any laws limiting the lengths of campaigns.
- The lengthy campaigns in the US exhaust voters and cause a slew of other issues, even as some might contend they offer voters sufficient time to educate themselves on the candidates.
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920 days.
That's the length of time between when the first Democrat declared their candidacy for the 2020 election and when voting actually began with the Iowa caucuses on February 3.
That first candidate, former Rep. John Delaney of Maryland, who declared on July 28, 2017, has already dropped out. Delaney entered the race more than 1,100 days before the election. His campaign lasted for roughly two and a half years.
American presidential elections are absurdly long and tend to wear out voters.
Proponents of a lengthy campaign season might contend that it offers voters ample time to learn about the candidates and make an educated choice. But voter turnout in the US is abysmal compared to much of the world, and this could be linked, in part, to the fatigue induced by long elections.
In the summer of 2016, months before Election Day, a Pew Research Center survey found six-in-10 Americans were exhausted by the amount of election coverage. The first candidate to jump into the presidential race in 2016, GOP Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, did so 596 days before Election Day.
Many countries have laws that dictate how long campaigns can be, and the US is not among them:
- Because of Delaney, the 2020 race will technically last 1,194 days. To put this into perspective, that's equivalent to roughly 99 election seasons in Japan, where campaigns can only last 12 days by law.
- In France, campaigning prior to the first round of voting can last no longer than two weeks.
- In Canada, the minimum length for a campaign is 36 days, but the longest ever was 74 days in 1926.
- In Australia, the campaign must be at least 33 days, and the longest ever was 11 weeks in 1910.
- In the UK, campaigning tends to last between five to six weeks.
With no specified campaign time limits in the US, voters are inundated with election-related news and campaign ads for well over a year. This can give a big advantage to wealthier candidates, who are more likely to be able to sustain the costs of a lengthy campaign season.
Total spending in the 2016 collectively amounted to $6.5 billion for the presidential and congressional elections, according to the campaign finance watchdog OpenSecrets.org, with $2.4 billion spent on the presidential contest alone.
The long presidential election seasons in the US also mean that first-term presidents spend much of their time campaigning rather than governing. President Donald Trump appears to enjoy that, however, and said that he will even continue to hold rallies if he's reelected in November, despite being constitutionally barred from running for a third term.
But foreign policy experts have also warned that a prolonged campaign season also raises the risk of foreign actors exploiting the fact the US is distracted by the election.
"The United States has the unappealing combination of a relatively short presidential term and an unusually long election process... The campaign invariably consumes a lot of the incumbent president's time, which is probably the single scarcest commodity in politics... A long electoral cycle also lengthens the period in which foreign actors can try to use our internal preoccupations to advance their own ends," Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard, wrote in Foreign Policy in 2012.
In 2016, Russia interfered in the US presidential election, and that has continued foment division in Washington and beyond. The US intelligence community has warned that Russia, among other countries like China, will continue to attempt to interfere in the US electoral process.