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I think this needs to be said for the sake of those living in the US bubble - the American electoral cycle is very, very unusual. Unusually long and unusually structured. Note that in the past month, both the UK and France have held national elections, had full campaigns, and are now ready to vote. The months and months and months of campaigning and rallying and debating and convening are just not necessary to anything. And I tell you that four months is actually plenty of time for the Democrats to pick a candidate and sell them to the American population, that having the Democrats actually discuss who might be a good President will work better for them than just expecting everyone to get in line for Biden because his turn isn't over yet.
An open convention isn't chaos. It's exciting. It's drama. It's the antithesis of the top down process that gave us Hillary and Biden. It's the antithesis of the control mentality that tried to hide Biden's incapacity until it was too late.
I would like to see quicker elections, but I think the difference is that in European countries it's almost always known who will be running at any time for a given party, whereas that's not usually the case in America. This American election is very rare (definitely the first one in my lifetime) in that both of the candidates have been known since basically the last election: we have, in effect, two incumbents. Biden's whole term has felt like one long campaign since everyone knew what was on the horizon. We haven't had real primaries for either party, so this one feels particularly long.
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I don't think these are valid comparisons. When the EU starts having elections for the head of the executive - a single person leading the entire Union - and will be able to crack it in a month, then we can start acting smug. I'm pretty sure that would turn into a massive clusterfuck if they tried right now, which is why they don't.
Well, the EU President is not elected at all, so that's kind of a bad comparison.
Size of the country doesn't have much to do with why US elections take so long. It's the system for selecting candidates. A series of 50+ state by state elections to select delegates to attend a convention to nominate a candidate is just always going to take longer than a small number of party insiders deciding internally who it's going to be.
Yes, that would be my point
I think it's a great comparison, precisely for the reason you outline later on. The American system is a leftover from an era when the country was a lot more disjointed. If the executive of the EU was elected, you'd end up with something similar, for very similar reasons. Superficially the EU is a union, but different countries have different cultures and sometimes different interests. If you try to run a union-wide campaign, it's going to end up being either full of completely empty platitudes in the best case, or stoking ethnic tensions in the worst.
Given the size differentials between countries, you'd also inevitably end up with something like the electoral college, because "one man, one vote" just gives you "do what the Germans tell you", and that's not a particularly enticing system for anyone. Maybe instead of delegates they'd just give a vote multiplier to certain countries, and that would simplify things relative to the USA, but it's pretty clear they'd come up with some analogue.
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How about India, then?
As I understand it, the Indian general election cycle takes around six months, and India is over four times the size of the US. Its elections are much quicker.
My point isn't about the raw population sizes, but the amount of competing interests ,and their geographic distribution. I don't know much about India, but if they're also heterogenous in that regard than yeah, that's a good example.
My impression is that the US system is a leftover from another era, and America probably could pull off a simplification of their system at this point, but the interests boiling down to "NY+California vs everyone else" is still a bit of a sticking point... which might be another way of saying, "they can't pull it off, and the system is still serving it's purpose".
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