Comparative Incumbencies
The US was not exceptional.
After making this point in my previous post, I came across this via the Financial Times, Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents.
From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year. The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.
Indeed, the piece contains this rather remarkable figure. Interestingly, the Democrats did better, in terms of their vote share, than did most other incumbent parties.
I knew there had been an anti-incumbent wave, but did not realize it was this extreme. This is stunning stuff.
Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world. Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit. The cost of living was also the top issue in Britain’s July general election and has been front of mind in dozens of other countries for most of the last two years. That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday’s American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.
Mass behavior is a real thing and is more complicated than just summing specific individual preferences. It is certainly more complicated than parsing campaign rhetoric and assuming different words are the main issue.
I’ve been seeing a lot of coverage on this. One thing that it’s gotten me to think about is whether we should include the 2020 election in this pattern as well, given it occurred well into the C-19 global crisis.
It seems to me this pattern could help explain the Trump -> Biden -> Trump patterns AND suggests a lot about incorrect conclusions that have been/will be drawn about both wins.
@Matt Bernius: I wouldn’t include 2020 because that was still in the middle of it and the inflation stuff didn’t come until later.
Plus, it the resentments about C-19 policies came to the surface after the initial threat passed. It was easy to point backward and say it should have been done “better” while in the middle of the death, people were less eager to complain (let alone make political hay out it).
@Steven L. Taylor:
I get that argument.
And I also think that, to some degree, we have to contextualize the 2020 election as taking place amid a crisis that led to a LOT of people being out of work and what was seen as a chaotic response from the Trump team. So in that way we might have seen some early signs of these types of factors at play.
Again, this is one of many thoughts that I’m still trying to flesh out.
@Matt Bernius: Another question would be when in 2020 those elections took place.
Yes. Oh my goodness yes.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Completely agree on taking timing into account.
To be clear, I was thinking specifically about the 2020 US Presidential General Election and to what degree these sorts of forces came to play in Biden’s (challenger) victory over Trump (incumbent). So this is a case of me trying to exploring if it is useful to use this broader trend as a lens for thinking about the 2020 election.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I’m sorry. What?
The resentment was there all along. It blew up in the summer of 2020. remember “liberate Míchigan!” And it didn’t stop until well into 2021. We were all there to see it.
@Kathy: Point taken, but they are far deeper now.
Look at the way people like Nate Silver talk about the restrictions. There is also a lot of retconning of how schools should have stayed open, etc.
Some of it is also a legitimate reconsideration of policies.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I forgot: What about Sweden!!11!!! I think you even wrote a post about it, way back when.
I read one book and several online pieces on the 1918-1920 flu pandemic. there was a lot of resentment then, too. Not helped by the fact no one really knew what caused it, and that the masks of the time were woefully inadequate.
I got the impression from it that people don’t remember pandemics as they happened, and the survivors, even those who lost loved ones to the disease, tend to downplay the measures taken even when they are effective.
Policies need to be reconsidered. All I will say for now is that I hope nothing like the trump pandemic, or worse, hits in the next fifty years. I think by then people will be over their hatred of face masks and distrust of the safest vaccines ever made.
There were 4 statewide races in Michigan this year, President, Senate, and two MI Supreme Court Justices. Three of the Democrats squeaked by. All of them were female.
Make of that what you will.
Other countries did not have Trump as the opposing candidate. With the number of people who (rightly or wrongly) think the country is going in the wrong direction, this should have been a very lopsided election. Instead, Trump got 51%. If Republicans ran someone normal, they almost certainly would have done a lot better.
The Senate was a terrible map for the Democrats, so I’m not surprised that we lost a bunch. And the House is still up in the air.
For a Republican year, support was wide and shallow. Which counts for a lot in who holds office, but means that barely more than half voted for the guy who is promising fascism, and that there’s not a lot of room for them to lose support going forward without it affecting the next elections.
As usual, hordes of pundits are offering sophisticated “analyses” of why Harris lost. Not why Trump won, but why Harris lost, at least in most cases. IMHO they are over-complicating things. In 2020, millions of irate Americans navigated the voting sustem for the first time to eject Trump for his incompetent handling of the pandemic. In 2024, more than 10 million of those irate voters said to themselves “This mob’s been no better than Trump, what with the inflation and the illegals”, so they saw no point in repeating the exercise.
@Ken_L: Until your statistics are in making excuses about non-voting should be deferred. Statistically the current data show the turnout as approximately the same as 2020, not falling off ; if current data shows that with counting incomplete, it is rather unlikely that the explanation of your loss is people giving up and not voting – it rather more appears there was a motivation to vote against.
Rather then fundamentals are that the Democrats writ large failed – failed in their sale to the US people and sold the wrong product (as certainly Trump showed no great political campaigning in traditional ways but he did show his usual animal cunning for the Sale, the expert conman that he is, he is a master of the Sale, of Marketing).
Without doubt it is the pocketbook and then the off-putting tone-deafness and closed discourse of the Democrats, overly infected by the Uni campus dorm-lounge and faculty lounge arch modes.
* inflation (and Democrats extended inflation denialism, and bourgeousie-splaining tone deafness envers the working class) – although inflation reaction is a broad international one – hardly restricted to USA, and as said again and again in the face of the inflation denialist comments here, there is broad international track record of populations absolutely hating inflationary bursts. Unemploymnet is tolerated much more – the Progressives made a fundamental political error here, fundamental.
* immigration: the same broad international reaction including in middle income markets experiencing secondary immigration flows
* Your mode of discourse and focus on the cultural Left factors of importance to the bourgeousie but not shared by the working classes: as exemplified here and other professional / white collar classes Lefty commentariat spaces I persue, the close-circuit Uni lounge mode of discourse, with its arch Academic-style pretences to egalitarianism is off-putting to broader populations. And the over focus on agendas both cultural and econonic (e.g. wiping loans for the already comparatively priviledged minority who are Uni graduating, a staggeringly tone deaf demarche in the face of inflation impacting labouring classes disproporitionately) most important to the Uni grads without actual listening to “deplorables” of the working class fractions.
While Pr Taylor argues messages do not matter this is academic mypopia in my opinion – just as any single company marketing campaign itself is near impossible to really draw a line to sales, but when one looks in the aggregate it is clear that while almost never can one say a single marketing campaign can be shown to have an effect, in the aggregate over time, such communication is not meaningless – done poorly it can wreck you, done well and you can indeed break out – not done at all and you are buried (done adequately other factors take over but not doing it all leaves you of the game).
Democrats understanding of this is egg-headed rather too much – on policy lists and proposals and on the specifics – rather than as marketing – the one area Trump is a genuine genuis, a master despite having a shit product. And it obviously leaves you all baffled as you analyse it all wrong on message specifics rather than as a long-term marketing to establish a feeling.
Your brand is bleeding percentages cycle after cycle – medium-to-long-term evoluation from the labouring classes, the 60%+ of the population that does not go to University.
Mr Klein comment is wise as he touches on observations on the mode of reaction that I myself have noted, the write-off reaction and denialism