Does the New Zealand system have a restricted 3 month official campaign period the way the UK does? A lot of Kiwi government shares similar structure with the British system.
The US doesn’t, and normally campaigning spans a substantially longer period of time.
Four hundred and forty-four days prior to the 2024 presidential election, millions of Americans tuned into the first Republican primary debate. If this seems like a long time to contemplate the candidates, it is.
By comparison, Canadian election campaigns average just 50 days. In France, candidates have just two weeks to campaign, while Japanese law restricts campaigns to a meager 12 days.
You can argue whether the US should or shouldn’t restrict the campaigning period (though I’m almost certain that doing so would violate the First Amendment and thus require a new constitutional amendment permitting it to put into force).
But the thing is, Trump doesn’t have that restriction, the American system doesn’t normally expect it, and Harris is going to be trying to run a British-length campaign with no lead time for prep in the American system when her opponent has no such restrictions. She is gonna have to hit the ground running.
Also, American presidential campaign spending and fundraising is very large compared to the European levels I’ve seen. Dunno what things are like in New Zealand, but I remember that when Hillary ran against Trump in 2016, each campaign spent about a billion dollars.
EDIT: I don’t know if this is directly comparable, because it sounds like Kiwi rules don’t have parties declare donations under $1,500 (and I don’t know if these aggregate figures include individual contributions that don’t have to be reported individually). I think so, because this is measuring spending, not donations. The Kiwi system is parliamentary rather than presidential and so the race for the executive is the same as the race for the legislature, whereas the spending above is only for the executive race in the US, excludes all legislative campaign spending. And I’m not clear on whether this includes donations to individuals, which apparently can differ from party donations, though the Westminster system is more party-centric than the American one, where candidates need to do a lot more of their fundraising and spending thenselves. But without my digging much more, some Kiwi numbers:
Labour spent $1m more than National to lose the 2023 election
The ACT Party spent more than National, declaring $2.77m in expenses. NZ First spent $1.51m on a campaign which returned them to Government alongside National and ACT, whereas the Green Party spent $1.33m on a campaign that achieved wins in key electorate seats.
Also, those are Kiwibucks, not American dollars, so the USD numbers are only something like 60% of that. Accounting for that, if the numbers are comparable, that’d be the largest-spending Kiwi party doing $1.6 million USD across all of their seats compared to the US presidential campaigns alone doing about $1 billion.
Harris has got to raise some – or all, not sure whether she can get funds from the Biden-Harris campaign warchest – of that in the time remaining, which means that she’s gotta convince people that she is who they want to be president enough to pitch into the war chest so that she can spend that to sell herself to the public. She has to build a campaign, plan to spend the money, and do so to target voters. Not much time to iterate doing that.
And keep in mind that the first Republican presidential debate mentioned above, 444 days before the election, isn’t when those people started campaigning, and certainly isn’t when they started planning their campaign. It’s just an early milestone in the campaign. Harris is gonna have to pull all of this off in about three and a half months.
The US presidential election is an awfully large and expensive marketing fight for voter minds.
EDIT2: One positive sign for her: this person says that she believes that Harris most likely can get access to the funds that the Biden-Harris campaign has, so that’ll help get her some of the way there:
Harris can likely get immediate access to the Biden campaign’s roughly $96 million donation pot, according to Anna Massoglia, an investigations manager at the campaign finance research center, OpenSecrets.
“The general consensus among most people that I’ve spoken with is that she can use the funding,” Massoglia told CNBC in an interview.
And she picked up a little more after announcing:
But it wasn’t just the big donors who responded to Biden’s announcement: The progressive donation platform ActBlue initially said it raised $27.5 million from small-dollar donors in the five hours after Biden endorsed Harris. Later, the company announced it raised over $45 million.