People are always talking about low voter turnout and how it reflects badly about the state of democracy in America and if we are going to try to curb that problem we should at least understand why voters are so apparently uninterested in American politics.

Well to start, the presidential general election is still about 200 days away yet we have already been through about 300 days of a major campaign cycle with expenses of the candidates going to total into the billions. No other democratic nation on the planet goes through campaign cycles this long and no other country spends the amount of money that we end up spending on campaigns either, with costs of our campaigns about 40 times more than those in UK and a campaign cycle six times longer than Canada. This extremely long and taxing campaign puts a strain on the voter and ultimately by the time the election comes around may be so removed from the candidates that don’t bother to vote at all.

Well this long and expensive system of choosing a candidate actually used to be worse, where the average person didn’t get any say in a party candidate and had to choose between two choices decided by elites. In 1960, John F. Kennedy started the long campaign cycle announcing about a year before the election, and in theory a long campaign cycle helps the entire election process become more democratic although now that is not the case.

The amount of money that must be spent on elections limits the field even more than party elites would have and we have even subdivided the wealthy into a business and political class which under some further implications means that only a few are ruling of the many. The cost of elections and campaigns skyrocketing hurts both the candidates and the voters by turning the attention away from governing and more towards reelection, in the case of senators and Congressmen and women, or new office in the case of the Presidency. The amount of campaigning is exceeding the amount of governing to the point where the people currently running the country are not the best politicians or the best legislators but the best fundraisers or campaigners.

So besides the cost issue the other problem becoming a very clear and present reality of the 2016 election is that many people do not support any current candidate, which could lead to an even lower voter turnout than years past; especially among young voters if Hillary Clinton is indeed the Democratic candidate. On the Republican side Donald Trump is still not winning the majority in most states; he has only won enough to win the state so we do not even have a clear grasp on if he will win those states in a general election anyway. So we are left with two candidates who will be chosen by a slim portion of the entire voting population which makes this long campaign the least democratic of all.

In the midst of all this political chaos we still have three branches of government, the supreme court currently without a new justice. That seems to be receiving far less attention that presidential candidates who will not be decided on until November. The general public is mostly not even aware that the second largest country in our hemisphere, Brazil, is in the middle of the largest corruption scandal of any democratic nation in history with one fifth of its congressional representatives under investigation. Instead of focusing on larger global issues or even serious domestic issues being decided in Congress we are more enthralled by name-calling and pointless attacks on character that just help distance the public even more from voting.

The opportunity for this type of election has unfortunately been set up by the current political state and establishment. The country has not been growing economically and underemployment is skyrocketing even if unemployment is staying consistent, so there is an outcry among the general public for a dramatic change in the political culture of the United States towards either a Socialist country or even a Fascist country in the other extreme. Neither outcome is desirable and we have only the current legislators and executives to blame for putting the current presidential candidates in the position of having to distance themselves so much from political ideologies to try to gain aggressive and reactive voters. Those strategies are working and for the most part as candidates drop out the outcomes have been about the same, so at least for the foreseeable future no there will not be an end to this expensive political non-sense. Shortening the campaigns will help us focus on more productive and meaningful debate closer to the time of the election.

Taking a step back from the political takedowns and the radical policies and looking at the policies and candidates themselves makes for much more productive debate and political reasoning. Stopping the expensive and unnecessary campaigns in order to focus on more pressing issues is the best way to help the country advance. Until that happens the campaigns and the political non-sense will only increase and the process will continue to become even less democratic than it has already become.