It’s costly, long and exhausting: Welcome to America’s elections

“It was so nice to have an election that was so short," she said. “It made me realize how crazy our elections are in the U.S."

Americans have become accustomed to the idea that their presidential race lasts nearly two years, involves spending billions of dollars and bombards them with nonstop ads on TV, radio, billboards and smartphones. Not to mention the yard signs.

This U.S. election is likely to be the most expensive ever, with an estimated $15.9 billion in spending on all federal races, eclipsing the $15.1 billion in 2020, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign spending. If you adjust for inflation, this election is slightly cheaper than 2020. But both contests are nearly double what the 2016 race cost and triple what elections used to cost in the early 2000s, even adjusted for price hikes since then.

What many Americans may not realize is that U.S. elections are an outlier, especially compared to other industrialized democracies. Canada’s campaign typically lasts between 36 and 50 days. The total campaign bill for its 2021 election: $69 million in today’s dollars—about 1/27th the price tag per voter south of the border. U.S. elections cost about 40 times more per person than the U.K. or Germany.

All of Britain’s parties spent a total of $80 million, in today’s prices, on their campaigns during the 2019 election. Parties haven’t published their total outlay for this year’s election, but it won’t rise by much: parties raised a total $97 million during the first six months of the year, not all of which they spent on the campaign.

“This is one form of American exceptionalism that doesn’t reflect well on the U.S.," said Michael Waldman, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton who has spent the past 30 years pushing to change how campaigns are financed.

During the six-week British campaign this year, the fundraising numbers were almost laughably small: New Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his Labour Party raised $12.3 million while Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party, which lost power, mustered just $2.5 million.

By contrast, Kamala Harris raised $300 million in her first two weeks since replacing President Biden on the ticket and has since pulled in a total of $1 billion, compared with $800 million for Donald Trump, according to the campaigns. Harris’s campaign has raised about $9,000 a minute.

What is the record amount of money raised in a single year by a political party in Canada? The answer: $25.5 million, by the Conservative Party of Canada in 2023. That equals two days of Harris’s fundraising.

Even individual U.S. races further down the ticket can be more expensive than other countries’ entire elections. Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator from Georgia, spent $180.66 million in 2020—just shy of all campaign spending in the U.K., Germany and Canada’s last elections combined.

It is a process that leaves few people happy. Voters are fed up with hearing about politics for so long and getting bludgeoned by nonstop ads—most of them attack ads. Americans don’t agree on much these days, but more than eight in 10 say donors have too much influence on politicians on both sides of the aisle—according to a recent survey by Pew Research.

“It feels like our candidates just focus on raising money," says Van Kong, a doorman at a New York City hotel. “And the whole thing just lasts too long."

Increasingly, campaigns are financed by a small number of super wealthy people like Elon Musk.

In the 2004 election, 23 Americans donated more than $1 million—totaling $58.9 million, according to Open Secrets. This year, there are 408 who broke the million mark and have given a total of $2.3 billion. Topping the list: Billionaire Timothy Mellow has forked out $165 million for the Republicans.

Musk made headlines recently by saying he plans to award $1 million a day to a randomly chosen voter who has signed a petition pledging to support the right to free speech and to bear arms, two issues Republicans have campaigned on.

Some 72% of Americans say they want limits on campaign spending, versus 11% who don’t, according to Pew.

Chasing money also affects politicians themselves, who spend as much as half of their workweek raising money, including cold calling strangers to ask for donations.

“Our entire congressional schedules are arranged to make it easier for members to raise money throughout the day," said Dean Phillips, a Democrat from Minnesota who proposed a 2022 bill to limit the amount of time lawmakers use to raise money.

The Wild West

So why are U.S. elections so long and expensive?

Part of the answer is size: It is a big country and it costs money to reach voters in expensive media markets like New York. And many lower-ranking positions that are filled by parties in other democracies are elected in the U.S.

Another reason is primaries. In parliamentary systems, like most European countries, political parties pick their candidates rather than voters. That used to be the case in the U.S., too, where party bosses generally picked candidates during rowdy party conventions.

But that was seen as less democratic, so in the mid-1970s, primaries became the main path to nomination (Harris is a notable exception.) Politicians began to invest heavily in trying to win primaries and states made them earlier to gain prominence as a place that could make or break candidates (and get perks like farm subsidies in the case of Iowa).

“In a parliamentary system, you spend years in the trenches working for the party and you get rewarded by being put on a list of candidates. Here, any individual can try to capture the party label, but it takes a lot of money," says Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank.

Another big reason U.S. elections are so costly is less regulation. In Britain, each parliamentary candidate can only spend about $25,000 for their campaign. The party is allowed to spend about $40 million in total. They rarely spend that much.

In France, there is a hard cap for presidential candidates of 22.5 million euros, equivalent to $25 million—half of which is paid by the state. Corporations, and even French unions, are barred from making donations. Biden in 2020 spent 70 times more than France’s Emmanuel Macron did to win, even though the U.S. population is only five times bigger.

For decades, the U.S. campaign finance system was more like European countries. But U.S. courts have consistently ruled that campaign finance limits must not restrict freedom of speech. In other words, not being allowed to spend money as a campaign restricts your ability to put your point across to voters.

The Supreme Court further weakened restrictions in 2010, when it decided that corporations and unions had the same right to free speech as individuals. They still can’t give directly to candidates, but they can give to entities known as super political-action committees, or super PACs, that can advocate for issues identical to ones pushed by candidates.

Spending by super PACs during the last two cycles has exploded, from $847 million raised by a few hundred super PACs in the 2012 election to $5.7 billion raised by 2,966 groups so far in this election, according to Open Secrets.

There are also loopholes that allow groups to hide where their money is coming from—so-called “dark money." The top Democratic super PAC in this cycle is Future Forward USA, which has raised $394 million. Some $136 million was raised by a group called Future Forward USA Action, a group that doesn’t disclose its donors, according to Open Secrets.

While Democrats usually dominate contributions to candidates and parties, Republicans have an edge in super PAC money.

So does spending all this money make a difference? Yes. A new academic study looked at the top 1,000 donors for congressional races over the past eight elections. It found that the death of a top donor decreased the candidate’s vote share by an average of 2.5 percentage points—which could be the difference in close contests.

And do donors get anything for their money? The same study also found that after the death of a top donor, the candidates’ legislative behavior becomes more aligned with the median voter of their party—freed from the donor’s “heterogeneous" concerns.

In the 1890s, former senator Mark Hanna, who ran William McKinley’s presidential campaigns, famously said: “There are two things that are important in politics. The first is money, and I can’t remember what the second one is."

Write to David Luhnow at david.luhnow@wsj.com