In France, the official presidential campaign period lasts two weeks per election round, though candidates are out speaking and debating more than a year in advance. The process has lengthened in recent cycles as the country’s major parties have begun to conduct primary elections. In Britain, where the prime minister has traditionally chosen when to call an election, the coalition government effectively fixed the date of the next election to May 7 this year. Because candidates are subject to spending limits during the six months before an election, knowing when that period will occur has encouraged them to spend money earlier. But despite the extended process, the election doesn’t really begin in the public’s mind until the queen dissolves parliament, five weeks before voting day.

So what are the downsides of the way we do it in the United States?

For one thing, many voters share the sense of fatigue Mr. Oliver says he feels, especially with the saturation of negative advertising. Polls conducted by the Pew Research Center during the last three presidential elections found that at least half of Americans consistently said that they would describe the presidential campaign as too long.

This campaign fatigue also extends to individual candidates. Running for president becomes a full-time job, sometimes requiring potential candidates to set aside whatever else they were doing to pursue it. In 2005, for example, Mitt Romney decided not to run for a second term as governor of Massachusetts, despite having had a successful first term by many measures. For candidates who already hold political office, campaigning and fund-raising overlap significantly with the job of governing. Longer campaigns also go hand in hand with more expensive ones. Candidates have to start earlier to raise the funds necessary to compete.

But as demanding as campaigns may be, there are actually a few good things about the way our system works. Long campaigns allow candidates who are not already household names (or party insiders) to introduce themselves to the public. “No one knew who Bill Clinton was nine months before he became president,” said Bruce Buchanan, a government professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The same was true of Mr. Carter in 1976. “He and his family went to Iowa and spent six months pounding on doors, on their own nickel,” he said.

For those convinced that the drawbacks of the two-year slog outweigh the benefits, the national parties have provided a glimmer of hope. The Democrats and the Republicans put in new guidelines for the 2012 cycle requiring most states to wait until March to hold their nominating contests (though several states bucked the rules), and both parties voted to apply the rules in 2016.