How British election races are very different from American ones

By the time a presidential election takes place in the United States, the electorate will have already endured months of seemingly endless electioneering — with the entire election campaign process from candidacies and the campaign trail to the actual presidential election and inauguration taking up to two years.

In the U.K., the time frame between a prime minister calling a general election to the actual vote is just six weeks. American readers might, very reasonably, read that and weep.

With such a tight window in which to win voters’ support, the leaders of Britain’s political parties dash about the U.K. on campaign “battle buses” as they try to visit as many constituencies as possible to persuade voters to elect the local party candidate as a member of Parliament (MP).

The party that wins the most seats in the House of Commons (the British Parliament) usually forms the new government and its leader becomes prime minister. It sounds simple, and usually is, unless there’s a “hung parliament” in which no political party wins a majority of seats. In that case, the largest party can either form a minority government or enter into a coalition government of two or more parties.

Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, told CNBC that there are many historical and structural differences between the countries when it comes to politics, and reasons why American campaigns are so much longer.

“The hugeness of the election in the U.S. is a function of the massive amounts of money at play to some degree. You do have to have these long periods of fundraising alongside campaigning and we just have completely different rules and structures around that.”

Money is certainly one of biggest differences between U.K. general elections and U.S. presidential elections. Stateside, billions of dollars can be fundraised and spent on campaign activities and political ads, far above that spent in the U.K. (after all, the parties in Britain only have six weeks in which to spend the money!).

For a Brit, the money raised and spent by Republicans and Democrats during election campaigns is eye-watering. In April, the U.S. Federal Election Commission released data that showed that during the first 12 months of the 2024 election cycle (covering 2023), presidential candidates collected $374.9 million and disbursed $270.8 million, while political parties received $684.5 million and spent $595 million, and political action committees raised $3.7 billion and spent $3.1 billion, according to campaign finance reports filed with the commission.

There are political action committees, or PACs, with a number directly raising money and making contributions to candidates’ campaigns or parties. In the case of “super PACs,” such committees raise and spend an unlimited amount of money in support of their preferred candidates, often funding large-scale ad campaigns.

Another point of difference in British elections, and politics in general, is that “morality issues” are not prominent points of debate, dissent or divergence. Unlike the U.S., where the abortion debate, gun control and gay marriage are sources of contention, those debates are not hot topics in the U.K. where abortion is legal, gun ownership is rare and heavily restricted (critics would argue the U.K. has a knife crime problem instead), and gay marriage is (aside from among some members of the clergy) uncontested.

Similarly, “identity politics” and “culture wars” — the umbrella term for conflicts between often opposed political groupings with different cultural values and beliefs — are not so prominent in the U.K. But the U.K. does have our “moments” — the topics of immigration, transgender rights, the U.K.’s relationship with the European Union (yes, Brexit is still “a thing” eight years after a referendum on EU membership) and assisted dying are hot topics where divisions are evident among the British press and public. Still, such issues are seen as “more of a personal rather than a party issue” in the U.K., according to John Curtice, a top U.K. polling expert who has studied British social attitudes extensively.

“Moral issues of life and death are indeed taken out of our party politics, but other aspects of the argument between social liberals and social conservatives are not taken out, and it’s become more important,” he told CNBC.

British political experts note that, unlike in the U.S., where broad political debates tend to remain the key focus, U.K. election campaigns can see more minor or fringe issues dominate the short election campaign.

A betting scandal has erupted in Britain in recent weeks, for example, after several candidates for the Conservative Party, and a candidate for the opposing Labour Party, were found to have placed bets on the date of the general election before it was officially announced, and its outcome, leading to accusations of impropriety in public office. It’s uncertain what amounts were staked, and those accused deny wrongdoing, though investigations have been launched by the U.K.’s gambling watchdog and the police.

Before the gambling debacle, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to skip the main D-Day commemorations in France also caused a massive stir in the British press, who questioned his judgment. Such “diversions” during British election campaigns are common, and often pertain to issues that start as “matters of principle” that are then “taken to absurd lengths,” according to Stevens.

“There’s a tendency for our campaigns to veer off in these strange directions where we just lose the big picture,” Stevens said. “I don’t think that happens in America where maybe the stakes are just higher,” he said.

“There, the stakes are just massive.”