Why are U.S. elections so long?
Seth Masket has a fascinating column
answering that question, and explaining some of the advantages and disadvantages of the way the U.S. elects its officials. One thing I’d emphasize is that nominating presidential candidates takes so long partly because of the nature of American political parties.
In some countries, parties are membership groups. In others, they’re formal organizations. In the U.S., they’re composed of both informal networks and very decentralized formal organizations. There are therefore thousands and thousands of party actors – politicians, campaign and governing professionals, formal party officials and staff, activists and donors, party-aligned interest groups, and the partisan media. They’re not organized into any particular hierarchy. Nor are they conveniently located in Washington. Instead, they’re spread out in every state and in every decent-sized county across the country.
One result is that neither party’s presidential-nomination process imposes any kind of top-down structure; in fact, it’s hard to even imagine what one might look like at this point.
Another quirk of this system is that there’s no formal ladder of opportunity for candidates. Sure, most serious contenders and all nominees in recent years – with the exception of Donald Trump – have had similar conventional credentials. They’re current and recent governors, senators, and vice presidents. But that’s already a huge number of potential contenders, and if we add mayors, members of the House, and the occasional cabinet officer or former general? That’s far too many people for even political professionals to have real opinions about before the campaign begins.
All of which means that, to the extent that the expanded parties – all those thousands and thousands of actors – manage to control the nomination process at all, it simply takes a lot of time.
I’m not sure if the huge supply of candidates is a good thing. But I do think the way U.S. parties are (very loosely) organized is, overall, a positive. What the system loses in terms of organization it gains in permeability. It’s easy for anyone to move from being just-a-plain-voter to becoming an active participant in either party. And while no single citizen can walk in and start calling the shots, it’s amazingly easy to gain influence within the parties in some way, whether by claiming one of the often-vacant positions in the local formal party, volunteering in down-ballot primary campaigns, donating to candidates, participating in interest groups, or finding one of the many other mostly unguarded access points to the system.
The further good news? If you don’t want to get involved at that level – as Masket points out, the unusual length of U.S. campaigns is largely due to the elongated nomination process – you can just ignore it, as many people do.
1. Henry Farrell at the Monkey Cage on
Trump and North Korea sanctions.
2. Quinta Jurecic on Attorney General William Barr’s letter to Congress and the
questions that won’t be answered until we’ve seen Robert Mueller’s report. Just to be clear about this: There’s almost no chance that Barr entirely mischaracterized the report.
3. Heather Hurlburt on
world reaction to the Barr letter. One nation seems to stand out from the rest.
4. Kevin Drum on
when we’ll actually see the Mueller report. I’m convinced that it’s going to be very, very difficult for the administration to keep it secret, and very, very costly if they try. This is the kind of thing that brings out the media’s strong bias in favor of openness and full disclosure, and that preference tends to be reflected in public-opinion polling. This is not a fight most presidents would want to wage.
5. Philip Klein argues that liberals will likely be
disappointed by the full report. Plausible! But I agree with him that it should be given to Congress and made as public as possible.
6. Maxwell Tani and Will Sommer on
conspiracy-minded Trump opponents and the Mueller report. Overall, I think the claim that the Democratic Party has been overly focused on the Trump-Russia scandal and has made irresponsible claims about it just isn’t backed up by the facts – but there are exceptions.
7. Dahlia Lithwick on
Mueller’s investigation.
8. Bloomberg’s Saleha Mohsin reports that U.S. sanctions are in trouble because
staff are leaving the agency that handles them.
9. And Tim Fernholz on
NASA and the U.S. return to the moon.
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