Quote Originally Posted by Marshal View Post
It's because the US has SO many elected officials. Every 4 years there's the Presidential elections. There are 100 seats on the Senate and 435 in the House of Representatives, every few years a handful of each house of Congress need elections. Each state has a governor - think miniature President, and it's own form of mini-congress these positions are also up for grabs every few years. So at any given time there's an important seat somewhere needs an elected official, thus what seems to be round the clock campaigning.
What matters isn't the number of elected officials but duration of the terms and US isn't very different from the rest of the world. The national elections are every 4-5 years in most places in the world (unless there's a crisis), and many local elections in US are set for the same time as the national ones - in many other countries they do not happen at the same time.

US has legislative elections every other year - 1/3 of the Senate and all of the House, so that's on the short end, but that is still 2 year terms for the House, and 6 year terms for the Senate.

I think the permanent campaigning has a lot more to do with money than anything else - simply the US politics are a far more advanced and profitable business than anywhere else in the world.