If the presidential race were a baby, it'd be old enough to walk


Do you struggle to remember a time before this presidential election? Does a non-campaign era seem like the distant past? If yes, your perception isn't too far off the mark, as both the Republican and Democratic primary races are now more than a year old — and we're still seven months away from Election Day!
In fact, as the Washington Post calculates, "If Ted Cruz makes it to election day, he will have been running for president for one out of every 147 days that the United States has been in existence."
Meanwhile, in countries like Mexico, Argentina, and France, elections can take as little as two months — or even two weeks. In Britain, the election is legally limited to 17 working days.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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