The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson asks, “Can Kamala Harris break the global incumbency curse?“
The setup:
More than 60 countries, home to half the global population, are holding or have already held national elections this year. What many political analysts forecast as “the year of democracy” is turning out to be the year of the insurgents, as ruling parties fall around the world.It is a trend that Democrats are desperately hoping won’t apply to Kamala Harris this November.
After 14 years in power, the U.K.’s Conservative Party faced its worst-ever electoral defeat. The far-right party Alternative for Germany surged in European Parliament elections, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats suffered their own worst-ever defeat. South Africa’s African National Congress lost its majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. South Korea’s conservatives were knocked out of power, and in Senegal, the ruling coalition fell to an anti-corruption candidate. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi—by some accounts the most popular leader in the world—held on after a surprisingly tight election. And in France’s snap elections, voters lurched toward the far right in an initial round before consolidating behind a left-wing government in the ensuing runoff.
The most universal theme of these results has not been the rise of far-right populism or the ascendency of far-left socialists. It has been the downfall of the establishment, the disease of incumbency, a sweeping revolt against elites. Voters of the world are sick and tired of whoever’s in charge. “By and large, people are unhappy with their governments, much more unhappy with their governments than they were 10 or 20, 30, 40 years ago,” Steve Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard, told NPR. “So, with some exceptions, being an incumbent is increasingly a disadvantage.”
While he blames some of this on the global economic woes following the pandemic, he argues that the root cause is more fundamental and thus permanent:
In his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public, the former CIA analyst Martin Gurri observed that when the digital revolution unleashed a flood of “information flows”—articles, websites, posts, comments—it permanently altered the public’s relationship with elites. For example, in the age of Walter Cronkite, the dominant media technology was broadcast television, where a handful of channels monopolized audience attention. But the internet fragmented those channels into a zillion pieces, making it impossible for any group, no matter how elite, to fully control the flow of information to the public.
Gurri observed that the internet and social media tend to empower populists, fuel conspiracism, erode institutional trust, and engender a kind of nihilistic negativity among the public that makes governing with a mandate of legitimacy much harder. Under this interpretation, elites aren’t failing more than they used to; it’s that the impression of elite failure is rising. News headlines are relentlessly biased toward negativity, which can make it challenging for some incumbents to prove that the “real world” is better off than the news-media simulacrum of it. If Gurri is correct, then an internet-connected world is one where all power carries a trust tax, and incumbents are reliably punished at the polls for their power.
This, incidentally, after decades in which incumbency was seen as a huge advantage, especially in American politics.
Not anymore. Now exasperation with the ruling class is the iron law of electoral politics. According to Gallup, it’s now been three years since at least 30 percent of Americans said they were satisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.” This is the longest stretch of dissatisfaction since Gallup started asking the question, in 1979. NBC analysts, who conduct a similar survey, recently said that they “have never before seen this level of sustained pessimism in the 30-year-plus history of the poll.”
Chronic dissatisfaction has bred chronic turnover in the past 25 years. The U.S. has held 12 national elections since 2000, including midterms. Ten of those 12 federal elections resulted in a change of party in the White House, the Senate, or the House, meaning just about every election was a de facto change election. In this environment, incumbency advantage seems like a less and less useful concept for understanding electoral politics. A better one might be an extreme version of the theory of “thermostatic public opinion”—the idea that elected representatives often overshoot their mandate, which inspires voters to change the dial from left to right and back again.
While I don’t dispute the overall trend, there’s obviously a rather huge caveat with regard to Presidential elections: in both 2000 and 2016, the out party won the White House despite losing the popular vote. Indeed, the Democratic Party has won the popular vote in every election save one going back to 1992, with the exception being 2004, when an incumbent who had lost the popular vote but won anyway was re-elected. Thus, the only in-party to lose the popular vote was 2020, when the Republican incumbent who got there despite losing by 3 million votes was defeated by 7 million votes.
Anywho . . .
This brings us to Harris, whose sudden entry into the 2024 election scrambles the concept of incumbency advantage. Fresh face or incumbent? She is the former, and also the latter, and perhaps both, and sometimes neither, all at once. Her relationship to Joe Biden exists in a quantum superposition of political convenience. When it is useful to claim credit for something that happened under the Biden administration, one hears the inclusive “we.” Where she intends to chart a new path, I is the appropriate pronoun.
Harris’s quantum incumbency has lifted the Democrats’ odds of winning an election, in part because voters seem to consider her a free agent, if not quite a change agent. That is, voters don’t seem to hold her responsible for their least favorite memories of the Biden White House. Whereas Biden’s economic record polled horrendously, Harris is “more trusted than Donald Trump on the US economy,” according to polling by the Financial Times. She seems to have consolidated Biden’s support among Democrats while coconut-pilling enough undecideds to squeeze out a small advantage in the election.
This is a remarkable feat. The only sitting Vice Presidents to run for President in my memory were George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000. Bush explicitly ran as a third Reagan term, while promising a “kinder, gentler” version. Gore tried to take credit for the good parts of Clinton’s presidency while distancing himself from the icky parts. But both had the advantage of long primary campaigns to establish a distinct persona. Harris had to do it in an instant and has succeeded brilliantly.
Although these sorts of last-minute leadership switcheroos are incredibly rare in American politics, they appear to have worked in other countries. In June 2019, British Prime Minister Theresa May resigned, and London’s loquacious former mayor Boris Johnson was named the leader of the Conservative Party. Almost instantly, election polls showed conservative support skyrocketing. Before the swap, Conservatives were receiving about 25 percent support in voter surveys. In the October general election, their party won 43 percent of the vote.
The U.S. presidential race is still extremely close and fluid. But on the off chance that Harris wins in November, we may look back at this election as a watershed moment in our understanding of how the public assigns blame and credit to its rulers. By bombing the June debate, Biden may have accidentally created an antidote to the disease of the incumbent: same horse, different rider.
It certainly seems to be working.
It’s mostly irrational, in that, to the extent the sitting administration is to blame for high prices, Harris deserves the blame. Not only has every policy since Day 1 been branded “Biden-Harris,” but her instincts on things like the two massive spending bills are to Biden’s left. (Although, ironically, they may well not have passed if she had been President.) But, of course, blaming Biden for a global phenomenon—let alone one where the United States is faring better than just about any other major economy—was irrational to begin with.
So, why is Harris being treated as a change agent despite being an incumbent?
Mostly, I think, because 2024 was seen as a bad sequel to 2020, with many Americans “double haters” who wanted neither of them. Harris is a fresh choice.
She’s not just a new face but a new vibe. Whatever his functioning behind the scenes, Biden is frequently halting and confused in his public appearances. And while Trump was frequently vicious and rambling even in 2016, he’s lost most of what made him “fun” for folks looking to poke a stick in the eye of the Establishment. Harris is fun and “memeable.”
