MANDEL NGAN/Getty Images
When Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she was running for president on July 21, she changed more than the dynamics of the race — she upended the entire timeline of presidential elections. Her relative mad-dash effort poses the question of how American elections got so long in the first place and whether it's time to end the era of the permanent campaign.
Harris launched her campaign just 107 days before Election Day. Former President Donald Trump launched his 720 days before November 5. By announcing his bid for the White House nearly two years before Election Day, Trump's timing is consistent with those of modern presidential candidates, experts told Business Insider.
"Given the system that we have now, people start running for president years before," Rachael Cobb, an associate professor of political science at Suffolk University, told Business Insider.
Cobb and other experts named length as a defining characteristic of American elections. Before any vote is cast, Cobb said that there's an approximately three-year period of an "invisible primary." And money is a crucial part of that hidden campaign.
"When it comes to what comes first, the candidacy or the money, they both are pretty much in tandem," W. Joseph Campbell, a professor emeritus at American University who studies polling, told Business Insider. "A candidate who really has any national aspirations does have to raise money and does have to have donors lined up. Otherwise, that candidate's prospects are pretty slim."
Though there are specific rules that trigger disclosure for campaign funding, candidates are free to quietly establish key relationships, build out email lists, and make strategic public appearances years before announcing a bid for the White House.
Tim Hogan, who was a spokesperson for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the communications director for Amy Klobuchar in 2020, described the effort as a "shadow" campaign.
"Rarely does anybody walk into these campaigns with no infrastructure. I think that's part of what contributes to the permanent campaign," he said. "Even when an ambitious politician is not explicitly running for something, they're probably thinking about it in some way and they're building an infrastructure that's likely flexible."
Michael Sistak, who served as Sen. Mitt Romney's political director in Michigan in 2012, described a presidential campaign as a "long slog through the mud."
"We are definitely in a nonstop, never-ending campaign cycle, at least at the presidential level," he said.
Hogan said that when a campaign does officially launch, staffers typically plan to dedicate a year and a half to the effort. Sistak didn't join Romney's team until the summer before the election, but estimated that core advisors and field organizers devote two years to a presidential bid.
It wasn't always this way.
Though silent campaigns have always partially figured into American elections — Campbell said that there's evidence they existed nearly 200 years ago — the advent of primaries completely restructured presidential election timelines.
The primary system emerged as a decisive force after World War II and solidified its place in the American presidential election process in 1968. That year, Sen. Eugene McCarthy had won the most primary votes but lost the delegate count to Sen. Hubert Humphrey. After Humphrey became the nominee, both parties instituted reforms to make sure that voters had a crucial say in determining the nominees.
Up until 1968, candidates established a reputation among party bosses and leaders to get their support at the convention, Charles Stewart, a political science professor at MIT, told Business Insider. The public election timeline mimicked European countries and only lasted a few months. In 1972, though, the parties enacted the reforms and the primaries emerged as a legitimate battleground.
"It changes who the candidates are," Stewart said. "You need to be able to develop a public persona that's attractive to a mass public as opposed to attractive to party bosses — inside the smoke-filled room versus outside the smoke-filled room."
And it also changed the timeline. Candidates now had to lock up advertisements, staff, and media appearances to get through a grueling primary campaign in addition to a general election, all of which Stewart said extended the election timeline.
Additional months of campaigning require more money. The price tag for presidential campaigns has ballooned in recent years, up from a combined $1.4 billion in 2000 to $5.7 billion in 2020, according to Open Secrets.
According to Sistak, Romney's political director in Michigan, a majority of the money goes toward communications efforts like digital advertising, television commercials, radio hits, and mail.
Hogan, the Clinton and Klobuchar staffer, called money "fuel" for a campaign.
"It's a never-ending arms race right now of who can raise the most money," he said.
The never-ending race, Hogan said, is one reason campaigns are "exhausting" for the public.
Cobb, the professor at Suffolk University, said that the length of American elections is one of various factors that contributes to political disengagement and burnout.
"It's a slog from January all the way to the convention," she said about presidential election years.
Stewart, however, doesn't attribute political burnout to the election timeline, because he said that most voters don't even pay attention until the final months of a campaign. But it's unclear if the years-long race actually results in better candidates.
"Does the new system give us candidates who are more likely to win elections for parties? There's a good argument that if they do, they do so by luck," Stewart said.
Daron Shaw, the Chair of State Politics at UT Austin and a veteran pollster, called our current system "suboptimal."
"It does a good job of identifying somebody who can put together a campaign and win primaries," he told Business Insider. "Is that correlated with being a good Commander-in-Chief or leading the nation? I think the jury is still out on that."
If Harris wins, Shaw said that party leaders may have to reassess the election timeline and value of dumping billions into candidates subjected to rigorous scrutiny for months, if not years.
But as much as the political class and electorate alike might want to make the permanent campaign temporary, America's election structure isn't set up for turning back the clock.
"I attribute it to the rules of the game," Cobb said. "We have to have a primary, we have to have the elected delegates who go to the convention, the convention has to have the day-long processes. The rules are set up so that it is what it is. We would have to change a lot of rules in order to make it snappier."
Stewart is among those excited by Harris' abbreviated campaign but said immediate change is unlikely.
"It really is irrational exuberance about possibilities because, even before we get to culture and expectation, we have the rules of the parties and the rules of the parties would have to be changed," he said. "I haven't heard anybody yet in the Democratic or the Republican party talk about, 'If she wins, is this evidence that we've been doing campaigns wrong?'"
Even if the rules don't change, a Harris victory would at the very least suggest that the permanent campaign as we know it is not the only way to win.
