That’s sort of the point - this hesitancy was all bullshit.
The fact that the convention is so late does mean we’ll have to really scramble after it, though (and the convention is so late because of Biden’s specific request).
To be blunt, American election seasons are completely asinine.
As an American myself, having election seasons that essentially last somewhere between 7 months and 3 years is absolutely sanity destroying. It’s completely awful and I hate it passionately. It obviously also has a strong negative influence on our more responsible politicians actually, you know, trying to do their jobs in a meaningful sense. It’s all because it’s a super profitable exercise for a LOT of people. I’d be simply ecstatic if we had a system closer to France or the UK in that regard (and don’t get me started on the clusterfuck that is the electoral college).
In theory the FEC could address this by limiting the advertising season and going after candidates or news outlets that violate that limitation.
In actuality, the media makes far too much money turning it into a horse race.
Yeah, but even if they tried to nowadays, the Tribunal of Six would declare it illegal because Thomas Jefferson himself didn’t have that specific idea back in the late 1700s, so it’s “clearly unconstitutional”. Or, they’d just refer to the recent case where they decided that specialist regulatory agencies aren’t supposed to regulate anything.
The UK had an entire vote in just 6 weeks.
Our information apparatus (print, TV, social media, etc al) is … Far superior to theirs, in terms of efficiency (not in terms of human dignity, relax, I am aware).
I feel like folks are forgetting just how addicted to information we all are, and how easy it is to get the whole fucking country talking about the same thing at the same time.
Trust me, the advertising budget for Squid Games ain’t shit next to the DNC war chest.