Donald Trump didn’t declare he was running for president until June 2015. Bill Clinton waited until October of 1991 to announce his campaign. And Ronald Reagan didn’t make it official until November of 1979 — just 69 days before the Iowa caucuses.
But this year, the 2020 election campaign is already kicking into high gear with more than a year to go before the country’s first primary voters make their choice. Five Democrats, including Sen. Kamala Harris of California, have already declared their intention to run for president, with three more launching exploratory committees that make them all-but-certain contenders.
The hopefuls make up the biggest field out of the gate at this point of the campaign in decades — part of a long-term trend that’s transformed the presidential contest from a sprint to a marathon.
“It used to be that people would pretend they hadn’t quite made up their minds,” said Bob Shrum, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California and a strategist who’s worked on numerous Democratic presidential campaigns. “Now they aren’t pretending any more.”
Harris, 54, who holds her first rally at noon Sunday at Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, announced she was running on Good Morning America on Martin Luther King Jr. Day — 378 days before the Iowa caucuses. That’s the earliest official announcement by any top-tier candidate, excluding incumbents, since Jimmy Carter in 1976, according to a Bay Area News Group analysis.
Faced with the prospect of a massive field, candidates like Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York are betting that getting in early will guarantee them a moment in the spotlight and help them lock down key donors and supporters. And several other candidates are expected to jump in within the next few weeks.
“It becomes kind of a game of chicken,” said Bruce Schulman, a Boston University historian who studies the history of presidential campaigns. “As some people get in early, candidates who want to recruit staff or raise money need to follow suit, or else they’ll be left behind.”
But past races show that the early bird doesn’t always get the White House. And the permanent political campaign we’re living in — with presidential candidates declaring just weeks after the conclusion of the midterms — could be detrimental to the country’s political culture or even our mental health.
The country’s changing media landscape has encouraged the timing creep of candidates’ announcements. A few decades ago, hopefuls couldn’t expect much coverage of their campaigns until the primaries got started. But with 24/7 cable channels devoted to politics and social media users hungry for the latest tidbits of news, major candidates like Harris can expect their every statement to be covered breathlessly long before the first votes are cast.
More candidates, including Harris, are skipping the traditional exploratory committee phase of a campaign, which allows them to raise money and hire staff without having to actually declare themselves a candidate. In the 2004 cycle, for example, Democratic candidates John Kerry and John Edwards launched exploratory committees early in the race but waited months before they made their campaigns official, with both announcing in September 2003.
One benefit of that move — which Warren and Gillibrand are taking — is that hopefuls can gain two cycles of press attention instead of one: first when they launch the committee, a second when they join the race officially.
But in a crowded Democratic primary, candidates also need to convince voters that they have the fire in their belly to take on Trump. Hemming and hawing, or delaying an announcement too long, might suggest they aren’t 100 percent committed. By dispensing with exploratory committees, contenders can make a bigger splash.
Our stretched-out political process would be unrecognizable to the political pros of generations past. In 1968, for example, after President Lyndon Johnson quit his re-election bid, Vice President Hubert Humphrey joined the race in April of that year. He didn’t compete in any primary election, but was still chosen as the Democratic nominee by delegates to the party convention after frontrunner Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June.
Since then, both parties have opened up their nomination process and put more weight on caucus and primary results, encouraging candidates to get in sooner.
The winning candidate who announced earliest in modern political history was Carter, who joined the 1976 presidential campaign on Dec. 12, 1974 — 403 days before Iowa. That long runway allowed the largely unknown Georgia governor to introduce himself to voters around the country.
“It showed that someone who doesn’t have much name recognition and doesn’t seem to be a favorite can really build a base,” Schulman said. (Another Democratic hopeful, Arizona Rep. Mo Udall, announced a few weeks earlier than Carter in that race and came in second in the delegate count.)
In recent years, more and more candidates have followed Carter’s lead and pushed their announcements earlier. Both Barack Obama and John McCain were officially running for president by February 2007, nearly a year before the caucuses.
This timing is vastly different from most other Western democracies, especially parliamentary systems like Canada or the United Kingdom, where general election campaigns start just a few months before voters decide. In Japan, the official period for election campaigning lasts only 12 days.
Is our permanent state of politicking good for the country? It doesn’t seem to be doing much for the mechanics of government, encouraging elected officials to focus on the next election and reducing the incentive to compromise on divisive issues like the government shutdown, researchers say.
And it might not be great for our mental health, either. The latest edition of an annual survey by the American Psychological Association found that more than 6 in 10 Americans considered the country’s political climate to be “a significant stressor” in their lives. Another recent study concluded that college students were especially impacted by the 2016 election, with respondents of all political persuasions reporting higher levels of stress related to politics.
“To the extent that these campaigns are lasting longer, there’s going to be a correlation with more chronic stress,” said Fordham University psychologist Lindsay Hoyt, one of the study’s authors. That’s associated with downsides like poor sleep quality, anxiety, and depression, she said. “Now that the election is so much in everyone’s faces with social media… you can’t really escape it.”
So buckle up, America, and mark your calendars for Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the presidential election. But don’t forget: the midterms will be right around the corner.
