It's not even short, ours (in the UK) are six weeks, and the switchover happens immediately. You guys spend more time switching over than we do on our elections!
The crazy thing is our primary schedule. Some people literally change their votes based on what happened in previous states’ primaries (think DeSantis supporters this year who realized he wasn’t viable). Then we wait 6 more months and have a general election. Our entire lives are political campaigns
The reason our elections last so long is because the 24 hour news channels turned them into a horse race to fill 24 hour coverage. 24 hour news has done a huge disservice to this country.
I say all candidates get exactly 10 days to make their case to be president with only a $10000 budget and a preselected film crew to do it. We all just sit at home and watch the poorly written reality tv show that it is and cast our votes throughout the campaign Survivor style. Anyone can run, last one standing gets to be president until next season.
Or the president stops running (because it's so long) and the VP takes over; someone almost gets assassinated... so much happened, but I have zero idea about what policies were enacted or anything achieved this year by the incumbents.
The conventions and announcements of VP picks are so late in the cycle because that's about the point where the election is close enough that the broad population is likely to pay more attention. I'm not at all worried that there's a mere 100 days for Harris to campaign.