The Take Bakery: A three-day presidential election

It's time to purge our civic engagement

Welcome to The Take Bakery! A weekly Saturday column from editorial assistant Ben that will present one big, possibly impractical idea that isn’t fully baked. We’re not necessarily trying to talk you into it — think of this as an exercise in challenging our preconceived notions and imagining a better world, one big, half-baked idea at a time.

Going forward, the Saturday email will only go to paid subscribers, though the column will be free to read.

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On Wednesday morning, Donald Trump and Joe Biden clinched their respective party nominations and will now embark upon the least anticipated sequel since Superbabies 2.

Now, imagine if instead of suffering through the upcoming nine month slog, the election finished yesterday, and you could begin your weekend free from the incessant circus that is the US presidential election. I’m talking about a campaign that lasts just three days.

The United States has the longest and most expensive presidential campaign season in the world. And a question we should be asking ourselves is whether this multi-year multi-billion dollar boondoggle of a political process is worth it. Do the seemingly endless ad buys and media prognostication actually boost voter participation and ensure the electorate casts an informed ballot? Do two years of primaries actually produce candidates that the majority of voters are happy to vote for? Or, is it all political theater that fails to shift the intractable coalitions that regularly flock to the same party regardless of the name on the ticket?

Very few have definitive answers to those questions. So I say we trim the fat on the beast that is the American presidential campaign machine. Let’s trim it down to the bone.

The three-day presidential campaign

Enter, the three-day presidential campaign. The most drastic reform in U.S. election history. Here’s the plan:

• All election campaign activity (that means debates, ad buys, billboards, anything that can be construed as official presidential election campaign activity) will start 6 AM Saturday morning on the first weekend of November, and the election will be held on the following Monday. While the President and the opposing party will be allowed to respectively promote and refute the incumbent’s political record outside this timeframe, they won’t be allowed to discuss the race itself. Which is possible because…

• Party primaries will be abolished and the nominated candidate from qualified major parties will be decided in secret by whatever means the party deems necessary. The nominees will then be announced to the country at the beginning of the campaign.

• Mail-in voting will be a universal right for every voting eligible citizen. Voters will have one week to cast their ballots by mail, while states will have two weeks to process the ballots and announce a winner after Election Day.

• Since it’s essentially impossible to ask voters to make educated decisions about every candidate on the ballot over a three-day period, these limits on campaign activity will be restricted to the presidential race. Down ballot campaigns will proceed as normal.

So, where’d this extreme and possibly ludicrous idea come from? It’s inspired, in part, by the exceedingly short parliamentary elections in the UK, Japan, and basically every other country. But more importantly, it’s influenced by the Purge movie¹ penology.

Now, I’m not necessarily equating political ad buys with murder.

But the grounding principle remains the same: All campaign activity will be purged over a three-day period. We’ll eliminate the horse race headache that is the presidential election and save billions of dollars in the process. Over the course of one weekend, American voters will have the opportunity to watch candidates debate and give speeches highlighting real policies and real policy differences. As a result, presidential politics will no longer seem like a tired bloated affair, but rather a three-day civic extravaganza that demands their engagement.

Wait, there’s even more benefits! The closed-door “smoke-filled room” approach will allow party elites to select the most electable candidate, rather than cater to the small, most-engaged (and at times, more extreme) minority of Americans that vote in primaries. The weekend campaign will also prompt presidential candidates to prioritize clear, issue-focused messaging over negative attacks, reflecting a more positive vision of political discourse. And there’s even a chance that our political media coverage improves, too, as the condensed election weekend forces more focused coverage on the issues and stakes of the election, rather than typical horse-race analysis.

Really, it’s an ironclad idea. It’s the reform the United States needs to rejuvenate our political spirit and restore the soul of our country. Except, well, maybe…

It could be a bad idea

Putting aside the constitutional questions, my leading concern here involves a man with fake hair and a choppy golf swing. A three-day election campaign could’ve guaranteed Trump’s re-election in 2020 because it provides a massive advantage to the incumbent president. While actual campaigning is illegal, the president has 24/7 access to the bully pulpit and can use it to communicate their agenda without necessarily breaking campaign law. Members of the opposing party would be allowed to respond, but without revealing their candidate, it’d be hard to match the power of the pulpit. That’s a huge advantage for the incumbent, an especially scary proposition when that person is Donald Trump.

Which leads us to another problem: How do we enforce a three-day campaign period? The advantage of breaking the law, announcing a candidate and beginning the campaign process early is so large that there needs to be a sizable penalty for violating the rule. A major deterrent could be the candidate's removal from the ballot. But imagine if that happened to Trump — it could launch a complete constitutional crisis.

With an idea this drastic, there are always nits to be picked. There’s the question of whether three days is enough time to make an informed decision, and whether the one week mail in window is sufficient. There’s the risk that the short election window would be a sitting duck for foreign election interference. And we haven’t really engaged with the argument that eliminating presidential primaries would disenfranchise party base voters, and eliminate the chance of a generational political talent like Barack Obama taking the establishment by storm.

There are many fair arguments, counterarguments, and questions to be raised. But the question I’m coming back to is this…

Is it better than our current system?

Imagine a world with the three-day presidential cycle, one in which our toxic presidential campaign politics are cleansed over one single weekend at the beginning of November. While there is an incumbency advantage, it’s not an abnormal advantage compared to other developed democracies, and unpopular incumbents are regularly voted out. Occasionally, there’s some discussion about giving voters more time to understand and compare the candidates, but the three-day cycle is a fixture of our political system and those complaints are generally dismissed.

In that world, if someone proposed the possibility of limitless campaigning and ad spending, people would probably call that idea extreme and unworkable.

And in a way, that is how people in some other countries view the US presidential election — as a pointless and bloated affair that does nothing to improve turnout or policy discourse. That’s why it’s time to start questioning the whole process, to imagine how we can streamline our presidential politics in the shortest way possible. It’s time for a three-day election.

1. If you are somehow unfamiliar with this masterful franchise, the movie considers a dystopian future where Americans are allowed to purge all their violent instincts over the course of one terrible day.