There's no reason why it has to be this way other than DC careers being an absolute rat race. Elections happen literally like clock work. There is no need to get an app out in 2 months; there will always be the next election if the app isn't ready to ship. Plenty of elections have happened smoothly without your app; it isn't necessary.

However, if you are only a campaign manager for six months or whatever and have to prove your worth or else move back in with your parents and spend the rest of your working life fetching coffee and slowly paying for your $200k georgetown political science degree, then yeah that app better be out in 2 damn months.

Rat races don't lead to quality, they lead to desperate people taking shortcuts and making mistakes, and fodder for managers to point to on a slide when they have to appear in front of superiors. Things that woudn't otherwise happen if pressure was lowered and we thought about things like burnout and well being rather than whatever meaningless work-related metric is hot right now. This sort of failure is inevitable in fields operating like this.