Biden’s Second Term? Or Trump’s?
A Republican columnist is angry that Trump, not Harris, is being seen as the incumbent.
The latest WaPo column from former Bush and Rumsfeld speechwriter Marc A. Thiessen asserts, “A sitting VP has won once in 188 years. Harris isn’t likely to be next.” It is an exercise in wishful thinking around a factoid.
The Democrats are coming out of their Chicago convention brimming with confidence. But to win in November, Kamala Harris will have to defy history — because only once in the last 188 years has a sitting vice president been elected president of the United States.
Many vice presidents have gone on to become president. Some, like Joe Biden, ran after leaving office. Others, like Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson and Gerald Ford, assumed the presidency because of the death or resignation of the incumbent, and then ran for a full term on their own. Still others, including Al Gore and Richard M. Nixon, tried and failed to succeed popular two-term presidents. (Nixon ran again eight years later and won.)
The only sitting vice president to win the nation’s highest office in the modern era was George H.W. Bush in 1988 — and he was the first to do it since Vice President Martin Van Buren, the “Little Magician,” was elected president in 1836.
Because there have only been 59 presidential elections in U.S. history, it’s easy to find things that have never or rarely happened. Indeed, every President has been the “first” at many things. Further, a great many of those elections featured a sitting incumbent, essentially precluding their Vice President from contesting the seat.* There have only been 49 U.S. Vice Presidents, many of whom never sought the presidency; indeed, seven of them died in office.
Harris will need some magic of her own to pull off the same feat. Bush succeeded where other modern vice presidents failed for one simple reason: Americans wanted a third Reagan term. Today, no one wants another Biden term. (If voters did, then Biden, and not Harris, would still be the Democratic nominee.) Ronald Reagan left office with a 63 percent approval rating. Today, Biden has 57 percent disapproval.
Which would be a sound argument if those were the only facts. Such as the fact that the same Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Harris with a 42-37 lead over her Republican opponent nationally and 42-30 in the seven “swing states.” They don’t poll the favorability of non-office-holders, so a direct comparison of Trump and Biden in that particular poll is not possible. But Trump has a 52.5% unfavorable rating in the 538 aggregate. An August 14 Pew survey (thus conducted before a Democratic National Convention that most believe boosted her approval, at least in the short term) found that Harris has a 52% unfavorable rating while Trump is at 56% unfavorable.
The rest of Thiessen’s column argues that Americans should blame Harris for everything wrong in the country, treating it as though Biden were running for a second term.
When Bush ran in 1988, it was still “Morning in America.” The economy was growing and inflation was finally under control. Well, it’s not Morning in America today. Americans are still struggling under the weight of the historic inflation that Biden-Harris unleashed, as well as skyrocketing interest rates. Six in 10 are racking up record credit card debt just to pay for groceries and other necessities.
In 1988, the world was at peace. Russian troops were withdrawing from Afghanistan, the Berlin Wall was soon to fall, and the Soviet Union would peacefully collapse not long after. Today, the world is on fire, with wars raging on two continents and Iranian-backed proxies attacking U.S. troops with impunity in Iraq, Syria and the Red Sea.
So, look, I was an enthusiastic backer of Bush even in the GOP primaries. But the situation wasn’t that rosy. We were, after all, still mired in the Iran-Contra scandal, several proxy wars in Latin America, and a whole slew of Iran-sponsored terrorist activities in the Middle East. While Bush eventually won in a blowout—he was the last Republican to carry California—his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, actually led in the polls early in the campaign.
The closer historical analogy to Harris’s bid is not 1988 but 1968, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey ran to succeed the deeply unpopular Johnson amid crushing inflation, global turmoil and antiwar protests. The difference between then and now is that Biden is almost 10 points less popular today than LBJ was in 1968, when voters rejected Humphrey as his successor.
This is just objectively moronic. In 1968, America was at the height of an unpopular war that was killing hundreds of American draftees a month. We lost 16,899 KIA in that year alone. There were also multiple prominent political assassinations and race riots throughout the country. In 2024, food prices are somewhat higher than they were four years earlier. Those are not remotely equivalent.
To be sure, Biden’s poll numbers are worse than LBJ’s. But we live in a radically different political and media landscape than we did then. We don’t have a Walter Cronkite equivalent who people trust to tell “that’s the way it is” anymore and haven’t in decades. And, granting that Barry Goldwater was an unusually polarizing candidate, Johnson had won the previous election by a whopping 486 Electoral Votes to 52.
Democrats are hoping that voters were concerned with Biden’s mental fitness rather than his unpopular policies, and that forcing him off the ballot will have solved their problems. The catch: Harris was the co-architect of those policies.
The vice president was clearly hoping that the anti-Israel movement on the left would not hold the Biden policies they dislike against her. Those hopes were dashed by the protesters in Chicago, who transitioned seamlessly from chants of “Genocide Joe” to “Killer Kamala.” For better or worse, Harris owns the administration’s national security policies.
Whether the voters will see it that way remains to be seen. But it’s odd not to note that almost all this criticism comes from the left. Trump would be much more pro-Israel and radically less concerned about the plight of the Palestinians than Harris. Indeed, his main criticism of Netanyahu has been that he hasn’t been aggressive enough, thus letting the war drag on and thus lose the sympathy gained from the October 7 attacks.
The same is true for the border. Harris is bending over backward to deny that she was ever the administration’s “border czar” — which is an admission that Biden’s border policy is an unmitigated disaster. If it were a success, she’d be wearing the “border czar” title as a badge of honor. If she wants to distinguish herself from the border failure, she has to explain what she would have done differently. And the truth is, her border policies are in fact more radical than Biden’s. In 2019, she promised to decriminalize illegal border crossings and provide taxpayer-funded health care for illegal migrants, which would have created an even more powerful incentive for illegal entry.
The border is an unwinnable portfolio but, to the extent she’s the incumbent, she owns the results. But I suspect those for whom “the border” is a primary voting issue are already in Trump’s camp.
On the economy, 60 percent of Americans say Harris should make major changes or take a different approach from Biden’s. But, as president of the Senate, she cast the deciding vote for all the profligate spending bills that unleashed the worst inflation in four decades. And in her first economic policy speech, she proposed $2 trillion in new spending, along with socialist price controls that would lead to scarcity and cause prices to skyrocket even further.
I’m not going to fact-check the last sentence of this. Indeed, I tend to agree that the Inflation Reduction Act was a massive boondoggle and that Harris is proposing more of the same. But most spending programs are popular with the voters, especially when someone else (or no one!) is going to have to pay more taxes to pay for them. So, it may well be a winning strategy from an electoral standpoint.
So, Harris is trying something no sitting vice president has ever attempted: running as an insurgent and treating Donald Trump as the incumbent. In her telling, she is the fresh new face on the political scene, while Trump is the one running for reelection.
Voters seem to be buying it thus far. Trump has been center stage in American politics for nine years now while Harris has been an afterthought. Objectively, whatever role she played in crafting Biden administration policy (I tend to think very little), she wasn’t the face of it. Sure, she voted to break ties on major, controversial bills. But it’s not like she was a free agent; her votes were, quite rightly, seen as doing Biden’s bidding.
She is asking voters to forget that she co-presided over an unprecedented panoply of disasters over the last four years and is now campaigning on a message of denying Trump another term.
The Veep isn’t co-President but a spare tire. There have been times, notably the first Bush-Cheney term, when an inexperienced President relied heavily on a Washington-savvy Veep for policy advice. But Biden was elected to the Senate when Harris was in 1st grade and has advisors whom he’s trusted for decades.
And, uniquely in the modern era, Trump was indeed President for four years and running to reclaim a lost seat. He can run on “Were you better off four years ago?” But so can Harris.
This is absurd. Democrats have been in power for the past 3 1/2 years and have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. But, so far, that strategy is working. A new Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll finds that 64 percent say Harris had only some or very little influence on Biden’s economic policies, while 57 percent say she had only some or very little influence on his border policies.
Given that I follow politics rather closely and believe the same thing, I don’t dismiss it as “absurd.”
Trump needs to make clear that Harris not only helped craft those Biden catastrophes, but also she plans to double down on the administration’s failures — and that a Harris presidency would be a second Biden term. Because history shows that when a sitting vice president runs to succeed a sitting president, the election is a referendum on the current commander in chief.
Trump has been trying to do just that. It hasn’t worked. But he’s welcome to spend the next ten weeks doubling down on that message.
*At least since the passage of the 12th Amendment in 1804. Technically, John Adams ran against George Washington while his Vice President and Thomas Jefferson not only actually ran against but defeated John Adams in the days when the VP was the second-place finisher in the Electoral College.
I’m kind of boggled that both this site and WP wasted so much space on some guy no one’s ever heard of outside of political circles maybe 10 to 15 years ago. Also, someone should tell him his former boss isn’t supporting Trump even if he hasn’t had the guts to say it out loud.
The only question this raises, a question that must be asked, is why WAPO continues to publish Thiessen. I read to be informed or to be entertained. OTB provides both. Thiessen is boring and makes his readers dumber.
@Not the IT Dept.: I think it’s a bad column but the broader question of incumbency is a legitimate one. How much should we blame/credit Harris for the current state of affairs? How should the campaigns frame the choice being made?
I understand why you linked to a Wikipedia article (which I haven’t seen before–thanks!), but I was expecting the classic XKCD cartoon.
@James Joyner:
Well, if you can find any evidence that anyone’s been worried about the activities of any of the vice presidents we’ve had since the turn of this century, then it might be worthwhile.
Why don’t you write a column about how the Republicans in Congress pass or refuse to pass or even propose legislation that Trump doesn’t like? In that respect, as far as the House is concerned, Trump is still the incumbent. I think that might be more relevant to “the current state of affairs”.
I was also reminded of a May 2020 Byron York column on “Three reasons Joe Biden will never be president.” These were the reasons:
1. No one who served several decades in the Senate has ever become president. Proof: Bob Dole, John Kerry, and John McCain all served several decades in the Senate and failed to become president.
2. No former vice president out of office has ever become president–except Nixon. But Nixon was a lot younger than Biden, so that explains how he was able to overcome this hurdle.
3. The “14-year-rule” says that no one whose first Senate or gubernatorial victory was 14 or more years ago has ever been elected president. As Biden’s first Senate victory was 47 years earlier, that meant he couldn’t be elected president.
York and Thiessen give a bad name to election trivia nerds (a category to which I proudly belong).
@James Joyner:
Not at all, to the limited extent voters are making rational logical choices.
Logically, voters should only care what the candidate will do, not what the candidate has done.
(Basically, a variation on sunk cost fallacy). The only relevance of the historical record is as a guide to predicting what the candidate will do.
(I have learned to skip Marc Thiessen, although I occasionally make exceptions for especially click-bait headlines. Dude is reliably dishonest GOP propaganda).
“The Democrats are trying something new and different that hasn’t been tried before! And it’s f***ng working1!! NO FAIR!!1!!!1”
We’ve all been alive and sentient for the past four years. Whatever they were, they were not the policy-based disaster the GOP is saying. I don’t think anyone believes in the GOP’s picture of the last four year, including Marc Thiessen. It’s all over-determined rhetoric which only the crazy follow in reality. I.e, RFK Jr.
Let’s add that Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000. That alone messes up his thesis a tad, as it shows two sitting veeps winning the popular vote since 1988. (Not that his thesis is, the OP notes, especially impressive).
Does this guy know that she is running for President not for Precedent? “Aiming to do what’s never been done before!” would make a good slogan.
@charontwo:
Last time I read Thiessen was one of those ‘in today’s paper’ things outside the opinion page that had the title without a byline. I got three paragraphs in, said, “Who wrote this crap?”, looked at the byline, and quit reading.
ETA – Oxford comma in last sentence courtesy of the newly recovered EDIT function. Thanks Matt.
The WaPo will publish the more prominent BS artists from Dubya’s administration forever.
@Modulo Myself:
Ain’t that the truth. I read what GOPs say, ‘chaos, hundreds of thousands murdered by immigrants, price of bacon quadrupled, rampant inflation, crime rising, Christians persecuted, uninhabitable cities’, and have to ask myself if GOP voters ever leave the house.
@Barry: The name of the game seems to be clicks. Clicking on Thiessen or Will or Ponnuru or Douthat just to point and laugh still counts as a click. Three thousand comments pointing out errors and idiocies is still engagement.
This.
Also, elections have taken place over a long span of time, under varying circumstances. Lots of things from who could even vote to the general cultural landscape are vastly different.
There’s also a great diversity of candidates. Combine this with the small sample of elections, and you can make up all sorts of permutations that haven’t happened, down to the favorite snack of one candidate, or their preferred wardrobe colors.
“No first term governor of a Midwestern state who likes Fritos and wears blue underwear has ever been elected president.”
Here is a point Josh Marshall makes, as quoted over at Steve M.’s joint:
https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-incumbent-trap.html
@Kylopod: That’s actually what I was looking for but my brain somehow filed it away as a column, rather than a cartoon strip!
While I think evaluating a VP in relation to the administration she served is reasonable, James Joyner, I think the reasonable public impression of Harris’s impact on the Biden administration for the last four years pales in comparison to Trump’s impact on the Republican members of Congress as noted by Not the IT Dept.. So, while tying Harris to Biden is fair rhetoric it is patently ridiculous to yoke her to every minutia of Biden’s administration while pretending Trump has been sitting on the sidelines.
What Marc fails to realize is than it FEELS LIKE Trump has been the incumbent since 2016.
Also, today, the NYT inexplicably handed over half a page in their Op-Ed secton to Rich Lowry who basically opines that Trump could be elected on the basis of character and on Harris’s unsuitability for the office.
In the usual situation where an incumbent has a challenger, the incumbent is the known quantity, the challenger relatively unknown – because, for example, you can see what sort of president someone would be if they already are president.
In this case, we can see what sort of president Trump would be because he has already been president – thus, more like an incumbent than Harris who has never been president.
@gVOR10:
They do it to be “fair”. They do it so that conservative/Republican readers can read it and thing, “Well, this paper isn’t *all* left-wing socialists”. Thiessen isn’t some third-stringer, he has the credentials, even though he writes like a full-on propagandist. But let’s face it, that’s what his credentials say he is.
Not that I read that stuff, mind you.
To me it’s an open question whether the “fair” media source can survive this climate. We are in an age of advocacy, where many, many people and outlets have a point of view and speak from that point of view, and readers/viewers can lean into only one point of view, or they can assemble a kaleidoscope of viewpoints.
We aren’t going back to “just watch Walter Cronkite” though.
And honestly, one probably wants to know what those guys are saying, even if one thinks it’s hogwash. One might ask how much traction it might get with someone who isn’t one’s own self. And clearly, there’s some traction there.
@charontwo: I have personally the dubious pleasure to say I knew Marc in real personal life decades ago. He was a smarmy weaselly (and rather prejudiced) cunt then and from looking at Washington Post, he has not grown nor improved with age.
Those here putting him in same bucket as Douhat et al are doing great disservice, confusing disagreement with dishonest weasely idiocy. Marc is well in the later territory, he rather deserves Trump always was a smarmy weasely little snake oil salesman.
@Jay L Gischer: It is not the role of such papers to be party political cheerleaders, à la Guardian (or the Talkingpointsmemo linked).
the fact you lot really just want cheerleading is quite boring.
Not that the quality of Post or NYTimes opinion writes of either political flavour particularly recommends them but constantly whinging on about the other point of view is mere boring tribalism.
I recall Theissen actively, proudly supporting W’s torture program during Gulf War Part 2. Never took him seriously ever since.
Couldn’t they afford someone better?
If it turns out that he is responsible for “known knowns and unknown knowns” I’ll have to eat my hat, but based on his WaPo output I have assumed he has never written anything worthwhile.
Good take down on MT but he has always being a hack. I wish you talked more on the IRA and why you think it is a boondoggle.
@Jay L Gischer:
Exactly. I read a general interest newspaper to learn about what’s going on in the world, and that includes what the people I disagree with are thinking. If I wanted only Right-Thought(TM) there are plenty of places to find it.
That said, I rarely if ever read Thiessen beyond a quick glance to see what he’s natttering on about. He’s as much an intellectual whore for the Right as George Will ever was, but without the intellect.
@Steven L. Taylor: Not only did Gore win the populat vote, it took a really bad SCOTUS decision that even they knew shouldn’t be precedent to prevent his win.
@James Joyner:
I’ve started to look at the Wikipedia page, and it seems to focus more on firsts for presidential administrations than firsts for elections.
Here’s a first for Trump it doesn’t mention: Trump is the first election winner to lose his home state by over 20 points.
@Pylon:
I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of supposed historical patterns in elections (the idea that every winning candidate had X going for them) are bullshit in part because they overlook the weirdness of 2000–for example, the claim that Ohio was a consistent bellwether state from 1964 to 2016. Dubya easily carried Ohio. But Republicans are not only dismissive of the idea that Gore was the rightful winner in that election, they act like Bush’s victory was cut-and-dry, not ambiguous or questionable in the slightest.
There’s a high level of magical thinking in the way Republicans talk about elections, in which historical patterns to them represent rules which cause the results to be somehow foreordained. The problem isn’t so much that they’re ascribing meaning to something totally random–I do think a lot of these bits of historical trivia are reflective of real trends–but that they treat them like they’re absolutes that can never be broken.
@gVOR10: That’s something I need to keep in mind regarding twitter, too. (I’ll never use “X”, blecch.) Don’t respond to blue check idiocy because it may enrich them. Block and move on.
Of course, this election ought to be a referendum on the current administration, but as always it is a choice between two possible administrations. Voters aren’t offered a choice between this administration and nothing at all.
Typically, the non-incumbent party gets to offer up an imagined future government based on professed ideals and wishcasting – they get to sell sunshine and light simply by being different than what we have now. But, as a former POTUS, Trump doesn’t get to do that and the reality is Trump is deliberately selling a return to what he gave us before. He has also chosen (compulsively and foolishly to my mind) to present his past term as an unmitigated success, so he’s taken a pass on offering “even better than Trump 1.0” with his pitch for Trump 2.0.
Thiessen is pissed off that Trump isn’t getting some advantage as head of the outside party, but that advantage was forfeited by Trump through his decision to run again and run as a POTUS that made no mistakes. Kamala hasn’t done anything more artful than reminding people that Trump isn’t new and that there is a record of his last turn at the wheel.
Though perhaps Harris should get credit for getting Trump to run away from Project 2025 – the closest thing the GOP has to offer as “new and improved” over their last adminstration.
Maybe neither here nor there, but I’d argue that, while imperfect, the IRA is an important reason the COVID recession was far less painful than it could have been. The inflation faced wasn’t out of step with most of Europe and economic recovery was much quicker. 2008 redux was avoided. Honestly seems like a big win for the Keynesians.
@Kylopod:
Philosophy is far from my line of territory, and I won’t get the terminology right, but Plato thought in terms of ideal forms. Basically, everything was a member of a class and an imperfect copy of the ideal form of that class existing in the mind of god, or the minds of gods, or the cosmos, or something. Contra some comments above, if I wish to understand conservative thought, I’ll read conservative sources, which I do. I learned far more about conservatism from reading Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind than I ever will from reading Thiessen. Reading conservative publications there seems to be a strong need to put any idea into a box. It can’t be looked at for itself, it has to be labeled National Conservative, or Neo-liberal, or Austrian, or something, before they know what to think about it.
LOL this shit always gets me. These people are outright lying sacks of shit. In 1988 the USA was involved in the “tanker wars”. Hell in 1988 the USA sank half the Iranian fleet in operation Praying Mantis after the sammie B hit a mine. In general in 1988 there were localized wars and battles fought around the world indirectly and directly involving the USA. Hell the next year the USA invaded Panama among several military operations that year.
I’m so tired of these shit heads ignoring large chunks of history because it’s inconvenient for their argument/propaganda.
Love that he keeps pretending that all the cost increases are purely inflationary and it’s all the demonrats fault!! While ignoring all the record corporate profits that we keep seeing every year for the last few years. Over half of the “inflation” is directly linked to corporate profits. This is what happens when we allow corporations to consolidate to the point where 12-14 companies own every single brand in a grocery superstore.
Now we have 6 companies that own over 90% of all media in this country. THose billionaire owners sure want some tax breaks and we’re seeing the results on so called “liberal” networks. I don’t see how anyone with a D next to their name could ever hope to have low unfavorable ratings in the future. Not as long as the billionare owner class wants to pay less than their fair share in taxes. The fourth estate is fcking this country because of greed.
Oh please do tell why you believe this. Here in reality the USA had less inflation and recovered faster than any other first world nation….
@Lounsbury: Was there something in what I wrote that suggested I wanted cheerleading? (Although, I must add, my observation of humans is that everybody wants some cheerleading, just the right kind of cheerleading.)
I’m responding to your use of “you lot”. Do you mean to suggest that you think Fox News viewers don’t want, don’t seek it out for, cheerleading?
Seeking other people’s points of view and taking them seriously is hard, hard work. Respecting those different views is also hard, hard work. Mockery and ridicule is so much easier.
@Pylon:
More accurately, it took a completely flawed ballot design that caused approximately 2,000 Floridians in Palm Beach to mistakenly record votes for Pat freaking Buchanan when they meant to vote for Gore-Leiberman. If that doesn’t happen, Gore wins with no questions.
@Not the IT Dept.:
This.
Having de facto veto power makes you the incumbent. Trump has it, Harris does not.
Whether the columnist likes it or not, we already know exactly what a Trump presidency looks like, and we do not yet know what a Harris presidency will look like. Hence, of the two, he is the being correctly perceived as an incumbent.
Heck, if you ask him and at least half of the MAGAt populace and politicians, he’s never stopped being President.
Remember when morgues were running out of space? Remember when hospitals were stacking body bags in refrigerated trucks?
Those were the days.
I don’t think the standard “were you better off four years ago?” question is a very good one this time out, unless you are either completely oblivious or in complete denial.
Even if we were to say “were you better off six years ago?” a reasonable person would have to notice that there was a global pandemic that changed things, and a recovering country is a very different place than a pre-pandemic country.
Sure, gas was cheaper then, but there wasn’t any toilet paper.
@gVOR10:
I agree that humans often demonstrate such a need. I’m not sure if it is over-represented amongst “conservatives.”
This brings to mind the distinction between high vs. low decouplers. Ironically enough, the tendency toward high(ish) vs. low(ish) is rather context dependent.
Trump’s latest thing is complaining about how the White House pressured and attempted to censor Facebook during the 2020 election. People keep pointing that he was the one in the White House in 2020. Whether he or any of his followers will acknowledge that remains to be seen.
@Slugger: Kudos on both sentences there, ha ha!!!
@Monala:
I was a bit more tolerant of his whiny voice 4 years ago. I distinctly remember several times in his ramblings then, where he blamed the state of the nation on Biden. He never actually claimed Biden had been president since 2017, but the Weirdo Felon did imply it a lot.
And lest we forget, as we hear a lot lately on how the Weirdo had dialed in his attacks on Biden to perfection, that earlier in the campaign he did say he was running against Obama.