ABSTRACT
The national election cycles of the United States and the United Kingdom appear on first glance to be fundamentally different. In the United States there is never a time when the whole of the national government is up for election at the same time. The authors of the constitution, strove, in their design, to counterbalance those elements of the new national political structure that some feared would present too many opportunities for rapid radical change. One such balance was to make U.S. Senators subject to rolling replacement, with only one-third of their number being selected each two years. So the nearest thing that the United States has to a national general election is when the office of all of the U.S. House of Representatives, one-third of the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. President and Vice President, appear on the ballot simultaneously. These U.S. Election Days are timetabled precisely, on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, at four-yearly intervals. Any young politician deciding to set her long-term ambitions on federal office up to and including the White House can calculate to the day when the opportunities to challenge for that position will arise, and can plan short-, medium-, and long-term political strategies accordingly. The drive to regulate campaign finance notwithstanding, American candidates and political parties still raise and spend considerable amounts of money. With all this foreknowledge, campaigns sometimes seem to go on for ever.
