Vice President Kamala Harris has 103 days to convince the American public to vote for her for president. It’s not much time – especially considering former President Donald Trump launched his campaign in November 2022 – but it’s a timeline not too different from that of other countries, many of which have short campaign cycles.
The US has the longest campaign cycle of any country, partly because we operate in a presidential system. We have fixed leadership terms and know there will be elections every four years, so it’s easy to start early (especially considering all the procedural hurdles to run for president);
“This is different from most other democracies, which are parliamentary systems and have irregularly scheduled elections, where you can have – as in Israel – five elections in a very short period of time,” said Peverill Squire, a political science professor at the University of Missouri, to Vox. “Or you can call a snap election, as happened in France or Britain.”
So, how do other countries with shorter campaign periods manage their leadership elections – and what can this tell us about what the next three months might be like for Harris’s campaign?
The US system has unique factors that make comparisons difficult
Comparing US presidential campaigns to those of other countries – even our allies and peers – is like comparing apples and oranges for several reasons.
The irregular cycles of a parliamentary system force campaign apparatuses – from how debates are conducted to ballot printing deadlines – to be much more flexible than in the US. Additionally, many of these systems are highly centralized, rather than federalized like in the US. In parliamentary systems, candidates run with relatively narrow party manifestos; there is less individual variation between candidates of the same party. This means that in a case like Harris’s, where one candidate is swapped for another late in the race, voters don’t really need to figure out how the new candidate differs from the old one.
A major challenge Democrats may face is the role money plays in the US electoral system. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission essentially qualified political donations as free speech. It determined that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to campaign contributions and can, in some cases, donate unlimited amounts. This has led to astronomical increases in campaign fundraising, altering the course of American politics in critical ways that simply don’t apply in European countries like France.
Harris has raised over $100 million since receiving President Joe Biden’s endorsement on Sunday, but will need to keep the money flowing; Trump’s fundraising in the second quarter was over $60 million more than Biden’s. Campaigns burn through money quickly as they fund ad purchases and field operations, and their outside partners do too. In an era of unlimited political spending, there’s a race to have the biggest war chest – a competition that simply isn’t a concern in European politics, said Patrick Chamorel, senior resident fellow at the Stanford Center in Washington, to Vox.
“It’s the parties that get the money” in European elections, “and that money is public.” Additionally, Chamorel said, “in Europe, you have spending limits, which in the US would be considered a violation of free speech.” There’s always a ceiling on how much parties can spend in European elections, and there are very strict limits on corporate donations, aiming to maintain candidates’ independence and ensure a pluralistic political system by keeping a relatively level playing field.
And in most European countries, “there’s no money spent on media advertising,” Chamorel said. Media organizations are required to give equal airtime to official candidates – “even small candidates from small parties have equal time.”
That’s not the case in the US. And in the absence of spending limits or media rules, Democrats – who have emphasized gaining support from small donors in recent years – will need to continue finding ways to keep Harris’s fundraising numbers high, especially as they work to fend off large individual donors who have pledged sizable donations to outside groups allied with Trump.
Another key difference Democrats will have to tackle is the idea that voters need to be introduced to the candidates. Harris, despite being vice president for the past four years, remains somewhat of a blank slate, leading to much speculation about her political positions;
She has a little over three months for voters to get to know her, but her European counterparts don’t face the same challenge in their short election cycles. Party leaders are generally already known, as they have risen in leadership over many years after holding different government positions. Additionally, Europeans tend to pay much more attention to politics than Americans, Chamorel said – so it’s likely that voters know the candidates and what their parties actually stand for in a way that American voters don’t.
But there’s a way the circumstances could work in favor of Democrats
There’s a way in which Harris could actually benefit from the European-style campaign cycle she’s facing;
Typically, campaign cycles in the US are so long that candidates risk voters becoming disengaged by election day. This certainly seems to have been the case in this cycle, with voters regularly telling researchers they wish they had other options besides Trump and Biden.
“One of the problems with having candidates running for years before an election is that the public can get tired of them and their message,” said Squire. “[Harris will] she can simply take over the Biden-Harris organization,” while still being relatively new to voters. “She can run as someone who’s not really the incumbent and as someone who is somewhat known, but not so well by many Americans.”
Harris may, to some extent, have the best of both worlds: she already has the benefit of being in national leadership positions. She has the backing of the Democratic machine, including Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and will have access to Biden’s fundraising dollars. But voters haven’t seen her campaigning everywhere for months, which means she appears new.
In a two-party system where Democrats have a wide mix of ideologies – think centrist Democrats like Biden versus more leftist politicians like Senator Bernie Sanders (who is independent but part of the Democratic coalition) – Harris will need to clarify and explain her positions. She will have to strike a balance between staying close enough to Biden’s policies and at the same time offering the change that voters have expressed wanting, which can be a tricky needle to thread in a short period of time.
However, the shorter campaign cycle can mean fewer opportunities for mistakes like the debate performance that ultimately led Biden to drop out. And there will be less time for Trump and the Republican Party to create damaging narratives about Harris that overshadow her policies and performance – as long as she crafts a narrative about herself first.
Harris has garnered support from all major Democratic players – now she will have to focus on what matters most, which is getting her policies out there and building a coalition of voters who believe she can be the next president.
