When Lindsey Graham died last month, he was one of only five people to serve as a senator for South Carolina over the past 60 years.
So for some people in the state, it will feel a little weird to choose his Republican replacement on the November ballot next Tuesday, after a fast-forwarded campaign that played out over a little more than a month.
“Thirty-four days is not fair to the voting public,” said Katon Dawson, a former chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party. He argued that the curtailed primary, while in line with the law, hadn’t left voters with much time to scrutinize Republican candidates who would be heavily favored to win the seat this fall — and who could hold onto it for decades to come.
“You need to wash and dry these people,” he said.
America is having a summer of political speed dating. Sudden plot twists in South Carolina, Maine and Wisconsin have foisted lightning-fast primary campaigns upon all three states. The resulting sprints to the ballot box have felt more reminiscent of European-style snap campaigns than the marathons we’ve been accustomed to.
I don’t know about you, but this is the closest I’m getting to Europe this summer. So drop a couple of ice cubes in a glass of rosé and join me as I ask: What are we learning from the American snap campaigns of 2026?
The fast campaigns of yore
Long campaigns are such a fixture of American political life that stories of fast ones usually begin with a death, a scandal or another major problem.
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President Biden’s disastrous debate performance in 2024 set events in motion for Vice President Kamala Harris’s 107-day presidential campaign.
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In 2014, Senator John Walsh, a Montana Democrat, dropped his re-election bid at the last minute after he faced charges of plagiarism.
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In 2002, Senator Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat, died in a plane crash 11 days before Election Day.
For various reasons, the three candidates who stepped in late ended up losing the election.
When campaigns are quick — and messy
Voters might tire of endless campaign seasons — and the deluge of television ads and stuffed mailboxes that come with them — but political strategists I spoke to on both sides of the aisle told me that candidates, at least, often improve with time.
“You become stronger over a longer period of time as a campaigner,” said Jaime Harrison, who was the chair of the Democratic National Committee during Harris’s abbreviated 2024 campaign (and who spent nearly 18 months running against Lindsey Graham in 2019 and 2020). “You’re able to make errors and mistakes and adjust for those errors and mistakes.”
That might explain why this year’s short campaigns have seemed, well, messy.
In Maine, Democrats had a chaotic two-week stretch searching for a new Senate candidate after Graham Platner dropped out. Candidates had no time to recover from, say, a mistake on a debate stage. (AskShenna Bellows about that.) Ultimately, Troy Jackson easily prevailed; he is now racing to raise money and increase his name recognition over a 100-day race.
In South Carolina, Senator Darline Graham made her own debate blunder this week, when she whiffed on a question about Taiwan and admitted to knowing little about foreign policy. That happened exactly one week before the election — although she is hoping that a visit to the state tonight by President Trump will help get her over the line with voters who barely know her, except as Lindsey Graham’s sister.
The glory of a reset
You know how sometimes the best way to fix something is to turn it off and turn it back on?
That’s what happened this summer for David Crowley’s campaign for governor in Wisconsin, where he managed to turn a short runway to his advantage.
Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, dropped out of the race in early July. He re-entered 10 days later, a little over three weeks before Election Day, and narrowly beat the democratic socialist Francesca Hong.
In his case, the short window helped focus attention on him as other Democrats left the race and some voters began to worry about Hong’s electability.
“The reset when the stakes felt higher and the pressure was on certainly helped him,” said Joe Zepecki, a Democratic strategist in Wisconsin. “He benefited from the way it shook out, but I’m not sure that it was the three weeks of it that anybody would do over.”
The industry
Some campaign professionals told me this week that shorter campaigns — allowing for more focus on governing and less on politicking — would be better for democracy.
But, well aware that a longer campaign is better for job security, they declined to say this on the record.
Others said that short campaigns were just hard.
“It’s basically just getting dropped into the last two weeks of a regular campaign, but you don’t have any of the prep work done,” said Liam Ford, a Republican who worked on the short-lived Senate campaign in South Carolina of Mark Lynch, a businessman. “The chaos is the same.”
And sometimes, voters benefit from having a long time to assess a candidate, said David Axelrod, the Democratic strategist who helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 — nearly two years after Obama declared his candidacy in February 2007.
“Democracy is an imperfect instrument,” Axelrod said. “At the end of the day, the ability of voters to scrutinize the people who are running and make judgments about them is central to it. If your campaign is two weeks long, or three weeks long, it doesn’t lend itself to that.”
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