Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — Yes, and the useful thing about this question is that it can be answered before anyone knows who won.

The primary calendar and the debate rules amplified early momentum and limited sustained scrutiny. A candidate who survives the first three contests acquires an aura that substitutes for examination, and both parties’ calendars are built to produce that.

The general-election debates produced more spectacle than information. The first one was unwatchable by any standard, and the fact that the second required a mute button is itself the finding.

Campaign finance continues to route candidates toward a small number of large donors and outside groups while leaving voters with a reasonable impression that the system isn’t theirs.

Both parties have incentives to protect rules that suit their current coalitions, which is why none of this gets fixed.

Wheeling, West Virginia Correspondent — The primaries rewarded early organization and media narrative more than sustained testing of the candidates.

The debates failed basic standards of order. I’d say the moderators were given an impossible job and also that the format was designed decades ago for a different kind of politics.

Money keeps flowing through channels that ordinary voters neither control nor see. That’s not new and 2020 made it harder to ignore.

Both parties should examine the calendar, the formats, and the disclosure rules. Neither will, because the current arrangement produced the people currently in charge of examining it.

Bismarck, North Dakota Correspondent — Primaries, debates, and money all showed familiar weaknesses.

The one I’d single out is the calendar, because it’s the one a party can actually change on its own. Two small states with unrepresentative electorates set the frame for everybody, and by the time a voter here has a say the field is down to two.

Both parties should fix the obvious things before 2024. Both parties have said so before.

Myrtle Beach Correspondent — The process looked messy and money-driven again.

What I’d add professionally is that the debate format is now competing with content that’s better at holding attention than it is. A ninety-minute broadcast where two men interrupt each other is not going to beat a clip, and the campaigns know it, which is why both of them increasingly behave as though the debate exists to generate clips rather than to inform anyone.

Fix the format for a world where the clip is the product, or accept that the debate is now a source of raw material rather than an event.

Knoxville, Tennessee Correspondent — Yes. Primaries that reward the clip, debates that are theater with a mute button, and money that arrives as fog. All of it was ugly before the virus and worse after.

Both parties should want earlier rules for ballots, formats that force a paragraph instead of a pile-on, and disclosure a longshoreman can read. They won’t want those things, because the clip pays.

What 2020 showed is that a party can keep a candidate largely off the road and the other can live inside a phone, and the system will still call it a contest.

Write the rules in an odd year. Election night is too late to invent a republic’s procedures, and we invented anyway.

Las Vegas, Nevada Correspondent — The house changed the rules mid-shoe on the debates and on the ballots and then asked for trust. Some of the trust died of that rather than of the candidates.

Finance is a dark map. The primaries are a television product. Both parties should hate that and both parties commissioned it.

Hire less television next time. Hire a hall, a clock, and a question that lasts longer than twenty seconds, because twenty seconds is how you get a country that can’t finish a sentence.

Tyler, Texas Correspondent — Yes. The process produced one man the institutions wouldn’t accept and one man his own campaign won’t leave standing for long, and neither of those outcomes is a compliment to the process.

Fix the money with names. Fix the referee with posted rules. Fix the primary by making voters look at the human being in daylight before the machine has decided.

Daylight is the theme of the entire night. It applies to the parties too.

Long Island, New York Correspondent — Revealed rather than created. We already knew about the donor fog and the debate-as-combat.

What 2020 added was a postal flood, a candidate who couldn’t be seen much, and a candidate who couldn’t stop being seen.

Both parties should write July rules for ballots, a debate format that resembles a job interview, and a donor map a clerk could read. They should also admit they like the fog when it’s working for them, and the admission is the first reform.

I’m not hopeful. I’m still for the statute written in an odd year, because a laboratory on a republic’s most important day is a deeper problem than any name on the ballot. Names change. Customs don’t.