As Donald Trump would say, you've never seen anything like it.

The presidential election has just over 100 days to run — less time than it takes to complete a major league baseball season or to become fluent in a second language.

Of course, much of this brevity was due to Joe Biden's lackluster debate performance, the subsequent Democratic panic, and the sudden transition from president to running mate Kamala Harris in late summer.

Since then, every day has felt like a week during the regular campaign period, and every week has felt like a month.

But while a surprise general election would be unprecedented, there are broad parallels.

Just over 20 years ago, Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger made a surprise appearance on late-night TV to announce his candidacy for California governor as part of a reckless vote to oust Democrat Gray Davis. Schwarzenegger's campaign lasted just two months, with the Hollywood A-lister ousting the embattled incumbent governor.

Different times, different circumstances. But there are notable similarities between the recall election and today's 50-50 presidential race, most notably the advantage that both Schwarzenegger and Harris enjoyed as a result of a severely shortened campaign.

First, there is the novelty of the two candidates.

“She remains fresh and different,” said Don Sipple, a veteran political ad man and top strategist for Mr. Schwarzenegger, who, like Ms. Harris, has promised jaded voters a change from business as usual. “That's not going to last a year and a half.”

The compressed time frame also allowed Harris, like Schwarzenegger, to sprint from one major campaign event to the next with little time in between.

Presidential elections, Sipple said, are typically defined by a series of headline- and meme-generating moments: “The convention. The acceptance speech. The debate performances. Her nomination was followed by a highly successful convention and convention speech. Then, just when that was starting to fade, she went one-on-one with Trump and won the debate spectacularly.”

All of this has given Harris a huge boost with less than six weeks to go until Election Day — or, more accurately, less than six weeks until the polls close on November 5th.

Three states have already begun voting – Minnesota, South Dakota and Virginia – and four more, including the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, will by this time next week. By mid-October, 12 more states, including California, are expected to have voted.

There's still a lot of campaigning to do, but as the voting progresses, the day-to-day events — endorsements, policy announcements, missteps and gaffes — begin to fade in importance.

Besides the condensed schedule, another advantage enjoyed by Harris and Schwarzenegger was the avoidance of a bitterly partisan primary election.

“That would have been difficult for Mr. Schwarzenegger,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican strategist who served as Mr. Schwarzenegger's spokesman during the recall campaign.

A committed environmentalist with a laissez-faire stance on social issues, Schwarzenegger had positioned himself well to the left of California's Republican base, and in the year before the 2003 recall, Republican primary voters had easily rejected fellow moderate former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan in favor of a more conservative candidate, the awkward Bill Simon Jr.

“The big advantage is [Harris] “Like Arnold, both men will go straight to the general election,” Stutzman said. “By avoiding a primary, they've been able to build larger, broader coalitions in the center rather than on the fringes.”

Indeed, Harris ran unsuccessfully on a left-wing platform in the 2020 presidential election, and some of the positions she took in the Democratic primary, such as on energy, immigration and health care, are now issues in the current election campaign, where many are just getting to know the vice president.

Stutzman said one drawback of the shortened election is that it limited time for Harris to introduce herself, as polls consistently show independents and other undecided voters are hesitant and say they need to know more about Harris and her positions.

So Stutsman believes Harris should be more proactive in engaging with the media, given how much she has grown since her early stumbles as vice president.

Stutzman pointed to the example of Harris' jokey appearance with Oprah Winfrey last week, when she let slip (was that a coincidence?) that she keeps a gun in her house and that she would “shoot” any intruders.

“It was a very smart move, leaning more towards the middle,” Stutzman said.

Harris got a lot of luck in her rush to run for president.

Among other assets, she inherited Biden's well-crafted reelection team, anchored by several Obama campaign veterans, which allowed her to avoid the drama and trauma of Harris' last presidential run, which was rife with partisanship.

But recall election veteran Richie Ross said the months and years of Democratic strategizing before Harris entered the race, or the skills she has demonstrated in filling Biden's shoes, shouldn't be discounted.

“It's not that she was underprepared, and it's not that a lot of people worked hard to crack the code,” said Ross, who ran Cruz Bustamante's 2003 campaign. (The message to Democrats was “No recall, Yes Bustamante.”)

“We're not looking at it with hope, we're looking at it with preparation,” Ross said of the vice president.

Call it luck, call it skill, or call it both. Let's see if it lasts another six weeks.