One year and one month after Sen. Ted Cruz became the first major candidate to announce his intention to run for president in the 2016 election cycle, Connecticut holds its Republican and Democratic presidential primaries on Tuesday. The actual general election, the one on Nov. 8, is still a half-year away.

When it is all said and done, and certainly much will have been said, the presidential election would have dragged on for about 19 months. Count the “feelers” the candidates started putting out before their formal announcements, and the lining up of funding sources, and the election actually stretches almost two years, meaning back to the 2014 mid-term election.

There is a better way to elect a president. The current process is awful.

Electing the leader of our country is supposed to inspire the citizenry. Instead, by the end of this process, most Americans are so sick of the endless campaigning they just want it to end.

Because the state caucuses and primaries tend to attract the most ideologically committed voters from the right and left, the candidates tell them what they want to here. Primary voters often punish any candidate who suggests that the other party may have a point on an issue or offers any hint of a willingness to compromise on political philosophy.

And those voters are becoming increasingly ensconced in their respective camps. Conservatives and liberals alike visit Internet sites and watch TV networks that confirm and amplify their respective opinions and belittle the other side for their idiocy and un-American views.

The country first saw this phenomenon in the election of highly partisan majorities in the House and Senate. Now it has become part of the presidential election, where candidates running for that national office once saw it as necessary to make sure they could appeal in the general election to independents and other voters in the political center. Now a presidential candidate can’t survive the nomination gauntlet with that attitude.

No wonder the candidates elected are unable and, usually unwilling, to find common ground on the many challenges confronting the nation — such as reforming immigration policy, providing for the health care of citizens, reducing waste, getting deficit spending under control, balancing protection of the environment with economic growth, fixing the tax system, and modernizing the nation’s infrastructure.

As things stand, this election will likely offer Republican businessman Donald Trump, who has never held elected office, against former first lady, senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Though vastly different in experience, they share unpopularity.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released a week ago found 65 percent of potential voters have a negative opinion of Trump, 56 percent of Clinton. This could prove to be the most depressing presidential election in history as many voters choose the candidate they feel the less negative about. And expect those negatives to go up as the candidates attack each other in the general election.

How could this happen? In part because many qualified people would never consider entering a presidential race given what one has to go through. In part because not many people are making the choice of who will run in the general election. And in part because tiny states, which in no way demographically reflect the nation, have out-sized influence because they vote first.

In a recent commentary published in The Hill, Mark Penn, a Democratic pollster and strategist, concluded it takes about 10 million votes — in a nation in which about 220 million people are eligible to vote — to secure a presidential nomination.

So while Trump and Clinton may not be popular with many, they are popular with enough.

What are changes that could help?

Shorten the process. Begin the voting in March. Hold regional primaries rotating every presidential election, with Northeast, Southeast, Midwest and West primaries. Hold one primary in each of March, April, May and June, with the national conventions still in July, followed by the general election.

Make them primaries, ditching the caucuses that particularly play to the ideological extremes. And open all primaries to independent voters who can choose which party primary to participate in, encouraging the candidates to voice some centrist views.

Perhaps the one good thing that could come out of the current process is a movement to change.