Why I Hate Primaries: They Turn Us Into Children of the Corn

I’ve said this before, I’ve even written about this before, and I’ll say it again: OUR PRIMARIES ARE TOO LONG.

Way too long.

Much like those interminable family vacations that start off with loads of enthusiasm, good intentions, and hope for a rollicking — maybe even educational — time, but end up with kids pummeling each other in the hotel room, adults getting testy and argumentative, and the overall joy-factor lost in the stew of sheer boredom, redundancy, and that sticky “overstayed” feeling… our primaries are like that.

Why on earth do we need almost two years to make a decision about who we’ll vote for? We don’t. Most adults are capable of making life-altering decisions of astonishing variety — getting married, buying a house, moving to another state, removing wisdom teeth— in far less time and with far less analysis. Hell, having a baby only takes nine months and there can be nothing more life-altering than that!

This prolonged and tortuous process is uniquely American. Well, United Statesian; Canada and Mexico excel at shorter elections. In fact, many countries do. See below, from Fast Company’s “2020 already? What the U.S. can learn from election cycles in these 6 countries”:

• In France, the presidential campaign is generally only two weeks long.
• In Argentina, candidates are only allowed to advertise 60 days before the election, and the official campaign can’t get under way for 25 days after that.
• The longest election campaign in Canadian history lasted for just 11 weeks, and Canadians were already fed up.
• The longest campaign in Australian history lasted 94 days.
• In 2015, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt announced that national elections would be held three weeks later.
• In Mexico, a 2007 law limits the length of campaigns, kicking off with a 60-day “pre-campaign” season, in which candidates vie for the nomination, and then a 90-day campaign that stops three days before the actual election. If 150 days sounds like a lot, keep in mind that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) kicked off his failed campaign for the U.S. presidency 596 days before Election Day.

See! LOTS of big countries manage to get their officials elected without civically torturing their citizens for ridiculous periods of time. But we here in the States, particularly during presidential elections, are bombarded, tsunami’d, literally besieged by almost two years of endless ads, phone calls, debates, social media oversaturation, and cable news analysis, all of it costing the involved candidates excruciating amounts of money, unendurably long days and months trekking ’cross the country kissing babies and holding townhalls, while the efficiency of government is drained by the sheer attention grab of the election cycle.

It’s believed that “experts say it was built into the Constitution,” but I say it’s build into the uniquely American privilege of overabundance (ever see a teenager struggle with decision-making in an Apple store?), along with a generalized lack of faith in our fellow citizens… though that second one might have merit, given the utter folly of fellow citizens (well, and Russia) electing a corrupt gameshow host with a penchant for bankruptcy and grabbing women’s privates, but who needed almost two years to make that idiotic decision?

As we head into the second half of this life-sucking process, I’ve watched supporters of various candidates morph from being reasonably well-behaved, warmly enthusiastic, “I’ll push for my candidate without sliming yours” kind of people, to teeth-gnashing, poop-throwing, gutter-sniping trolls who leave messages of rancor — whether about the citizen they’re attacking or the candidate that citizen supports — everywhere and anywhere rancor can be left: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, private message boxes, email, you name it. Much like the kids on that too-long family vacation, they’ve lost their goodwill, their good manners, and have devolved into Children of the Corn.

I’ve come to the point where I will not state who I plan to vote for in the March 3rd primary, not because I have any shame or embarrassment about it, but because I refuse to be pummeled, mansplained, condescended to, or generally pilloried for my choice… all of which is happening every day to the more “candorous” folks expressing views on the topic. In fact, if you compiled the abundant and conflicting opinions/rants on Twitter, you‘d come to believe there is literally no one you should vote for.

Which is why I believe we should NOT begin a primary until the early months of the year in which the election will be held. Period. There’s no need for longer. With our ubiquitous, 24/7 media of every sort, there is no one anywhere who cannot access all (or at least most) of the information they need to make a choice. And, despite the bad behavior of many, we are grown people capable of that assignment. Shortening a primary might even discipline us to be better, more decisive, people, think of that.

Bottomline, and until November, be careful out there.

Original Photo by Allen Taylor on Unsplash

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