It's because America has three elections for President:
1. Republican primaries
2. Democratic primaries
3. General election
The drawn-out part is the primaries, part of which are parties trying to get their candidates in the news for a while. Once the parties officially pick a candidate — July this year for the Republicans, August for Democrats — the election proceeds on a pretty quick timetable.
The UK doesn't do primary elections to the same extent, nor do most parliamentary democracies. So they're faster, since there's just a general election.
The concern about Kamala's "short" time to make a case for electing her to the presidency is that she didn't get to make use of the ~year+ news cycles of the primaries, and will only have the general election to convince voters. (There's also a specter of it being "undemocratic" since party nominees are typically elected by the party's voters, rather than chosen by officials, but since she was Biden's VP in 2020, and he won the election, IMO this is overblown: the entire point of a VP is to take over if the president is unable to function, which is what happened in this case. Her claim to democratic election is that voters chose the Biden/Harris ticket in a general election, which is pretty reasonable.)
1. Republican primaries
2. Democratic primaries
3. General election
The drawn-out part is the primaries, part of which are parties trying to get their candidates in the news for a while. Once the parties officially pick a candidate — July this year for the Republicans, August for Democrats — the election proceeds on a pretty quick timetable.
The UK doesn't do primary elections to the same extent, nor do most parliamentary democracies. So they're faster, since there's just a general election.
The concern about Kamala's "short" time to make a case for electing her to the presidency is that she didn't get to make use of the ~year+ news cycles of the primaries, and will only have the general election to convince voters. (There's also a specter of it being "undemocratic" since party nominees are typically elected by the party's voters, rather than chosen by officials, but since she was Biden's VP in 2020, and he won the election, IMO this is overblown: the entire point of a VP is to take over if the president is unable to function, which is what happened in this case. Her claim to democratic election is that voters chose the Biden/Harris ticket in a general election, which is pretty reasonable.)