Could a short campaign be exactly what Kamala Harris needs?

Vice President Kamala Harris has 103 days to convince the American public to vote for her for president. It’s not a lot of 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 of its peer countries partly because we operate on a presidential system. We have fixed terms of leadership, and we know there will be elections every four years, so it’s easy to start early (especially given all the procedural hurdles to running for president). 

“That’s different from most other democracies, which are parliamentary systems and which have irregularly scheduled elections where you can have — as in Israel —  five elections in a very brief period of time,” Peverill Squire, professor of political science at the University of Missouri, told Vox. “Or you can call a snap election, as happened in France or the election in Great Britain.”

So how do other countries with shorter campaign periods manage their leadership elections — and can that tell us anything about what the next three months could look like for Harris’s campaign?

The US system has unique factors that make comparison difficult

Comparing US presidential campaigns to those in other countries — even our allies and peers — is kind of like comparing apples and oranges for many reasons. 

A parliamentary system’s uneven cycles force campaign apparatuses — from how debates are run to deadlines for printing ballots — to be a lot more flexible than they are in the US. Plus, many of these systems are highly centralized, rather than federalized like in the US. In parliamentary systems, candidates run on relatively narrow party manifestos; there’s less individual variance between candidates of the same party. That means in a case like Harris’s, where one candidate is substituted for another late in the race, voters don’t really have to figure out how the new candidate differs from the old. 

One major challenge Democrats may face is the role that money plays in the US election system. The 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission essentially qualified political donations as free speech. It determined that corporations have the rights of individuals when it comes to campaign donations and can in some cases donate unlimited amounts. That’s caused astronomical increases in campaign fundraising, which alters the course of American politics in critical ways that just don’t apply in European countries like France.

Harris has raised more than $100 million since gaining President Joe Biden’s endorsement on Sunday, but will need to keep the money flowing; Trump’s second-quarter haul was more than $60 million more than Biden’s. Campaigns run through money quickly as they fund ad buys and ground operations, and their outside partners do too. In an era of unlimited political spending, there’s a race to have the largest war chest — a competition that just isn’t an issue in European politics, Patrick Chamorel, senior resident scholar at the Stanford Center in Washington, told Vox. 

“It’s parties that receive the money” in European elections, “and this money is public money.” Plus, Chamorel said, “in Europe, you have spending limits, which would in the US be considered an encroachment on freedom of expression.” There’s always a ceiling on how much the parties can spend in European elections — and there are very strict limits on corporate donations, which is meant to maintain the independence of the candidates and to ensure a pluralistic political system by keeping a relatively even playing field. 

And in most European countries, “you don’t have money spent on advertisement in the media,” Chamorel said. Media organizations are required to give equal airtime to official candidates — “even the small candidates from the tiny parties, they have equal time.”

That’s not the case in the US. And in the absence of spending caps or media rules, Democrats — who have emphasized getting the support of small donors in recent years — will need to continue to find ways to keep Harris’s fundraising numbers high, particularly as they work to ward off the large individual donors who have promised sizable donations to outside groups allied with Trump.

One other key difference Democrats will have to contend with is the idea that voters need to be introduced to candidates. Harris, though vice president for the last four years, remains something of a blank slate, leading to a lot of speculation about what her policy positions are. 

She has just over three months for voters to get to know her, but her European counterparts don’t face the same struggle in their short election cycles. Party leaders are usually a known quantity already, having worked their way up through leadership over many years after holding different positions in government. Plus Europeans tend to pay much more attention to politics than Americans, Chamorel said — so voters are likely to know candidates and what their parties actually stand for in a way American voters don’t.

But there is a way that circumstances could play to Democrats’ advantage

There is one way Harris could really benefit from the European-style campaign cycle she faces. 

Normally, America’s campaign cycles are so long that candidates run the risk of voters becoming disengaged by the time Election Day rolls around. That certainly appeared to be the case this cycle, with voters regularly telling pollsters they wished they had choices other than Trump and Biden.

“One of the problems of having candidates running for years in advance of an election is the public can become tired of them and their message,” Squire said. “[Harris will] reap the benefits of having an organization in place; she can just take over the Biden-Harris organization,” while still being relatively fresh to voters. “She can run as not really the incumbent, and as somebody who is known a little bit, but not that well by many Americans.”

Harris may, to an extent, have the best of both worlds: She already has the benefit of being in national leadership positions. She has the Democratic machinery behind her, including Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and she will have access to Biden’s fundraising dollars. But voters haven’t been seeing her campaigning everywhere for months now, which means she’ll seem new.

In a two-party system in which the Democrats have a broad mix of ideologies — think of centrist Democrats like Biden versus more left-wing politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (who is an independent, but is broadly part of the Democratic coalition) — Harris will need to clarify and explain her positions. She’ll have to maintain a balance of staying close enough to Biden’s policies while offering the change that voters have expressed they want, which could prove to be a challenging needle to thread in a short period of time.

However, the shorter campaign cycle may mean less opportunity for errors like the debate performance that ultimately caused Biden to step down. And there will be less time for Trump and the Republican Party to create damaging narratives about Harris that overshadow her policy and performance — provided she creates a narrative about herself first.

Harris has clinched the support of all the major Democratic players — now she’ll have to concentrate on what’s most important, which is broadcasting her policy and building a coalition of voters who think she can be the next president.