By Kenichi Serino, @KenichiSerino
Deputy News Editor, Digital
 
President Joe Biden has now been campaigning for reelection for a year, and former President Donald Trump has been running at least since he announced his new presidential campaign shortly after the 2022 midterms. 
 
Election Day, Nov. 5, is still more than six months away. Most Americans say the recent presidential campaigns have not focused on the right issues and have “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 other countries?
 
You can measure that in a few ways.
 
The calendar. While it’s difficult to compare the length of campaigns between democracies, some do have short, official election periods:

The fundraising factor. Official announcements are the start of public campaigns. But when you think about a U.S. presidential campaign, 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.”

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, he 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 since then have included lengthy primary campaigns that play out in public, rather than behind closed doors, Geer said.
 
Election load. The omnipresence of campaigning 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. 
 
This includes House and Senate races, presidential primaries and elections, as well as state and local offices, and ballot measures.
 
“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,” where elected officials never stop thinking about the next election, including during time 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.”


#POLITICSTRIVIA
By Joshua Barajas, @Josh_Barrage
Senior Editor, Digital
 
Beyond the U.S. presidential race, 2024 will be a record-breaking year for elections.
 
About half of the world’s population, more than 4 billion people, are expected to go to the polls this year for national and local races, in countries with varying degrees of free and fair elections — if at all.
 
The first election of the year occurred in Bangladesh in early January. The following month, Indonesia held the world's biggest single-day election. And India, considered the world’s largest democracy, started its six-week election earlier this month.
 
Our question: Which continent will hold the most elections this historic year?
 
Send your answers to [email protected] or tweet using #PoliticsTrivia. The first correct answers will earn a shout-out next week.
 
Last week, we asked: Who was the only person to serve both as House speaker and U.S. president?
 
The answer: James Polk. Before he became the 11th U.S. president, Polk served four years as speaker of the House, from 1835 to 1839.
 
Congratulations to our winners: Brenda Radford and Susan Springer!
 
Thank you all for reading and watching. We’ll drop into your inbox next week.