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U.S. Election (Day?) 2024 Megathread

With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.

If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.

If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.

Any other reasonably neutral election resources you'd like me to add to this notification, I'm happy to add.

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I think if anything that would be worse. As it stands now, I’d minimally double the terms of most offices. The trouble we have now is due to short terms. The house barely gets settled in and knowing where the bathrooms are before it’s time to run for office. And this kind of short term means that they really don’t have to do anything concrete to fix problems. Worse, if you can make it looks like you’ve fixed something but the consequences of your bad fix don’t show up within two years, you’ll be gone before the negatives hit. Even four years for president is pretty short. By the time the economic impact of your policies hit the mainstream, you’ll be packing up to move out.

The second thing is that really, the short terms mean politics is taking up an extraordinary amount of the collective bandwidth of the public imagination. Every two years we’re choosing new leaders, and that means 6+ months every two years of constant speculation, political ads, push polling, and punditry aimed at convincing the public to vote in a given way. Worse, because fear and anger are the most effective means of inducing people to care about politics, we spend those six months learning to hate those who disagree with us politically. You hate abortion? You’re killing women, you sexist. Oh, you’re pro abortion? Baby killer! And so on, through every major issue. This tends to create tensions between people that shouldn’t exist. And the wounds caused by this short cycle never completely heal.

In my opinion, politics, ideally would be such a minor part of life that they really don’t matter. The general public is not served by a system so broken that it’s near top of mind what a political figure said or did today or any other day. It’s not supposed to be that important, and frankly, if the government worked properly, you wouldn’t have to constantly baby sit it and change its nappies.

As it stands now, I’d minimally double the terms of most offices.

One interesting thing is that IIRC the Federalist Papers contemplated that Cabinet Secretaries would need Senate advice and consent to be replaced, and generally serve across administrations. That might be a reasonable blend of longevity in office but with rapid accountability for particular screwups.