The New Law of Electoral Politics

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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.”

One obvious culprit is the world economy. Even as pandemic deaths wound down in 2021 and 2022, supply-chain disruptions, combined with fidgety spenders who’d spent months in lockdown, sent prices surging around the world. At its peak, inflation exceeded 6 percent in France, 7 percent in Canada, 8 percent in Germany, 9 percent in the United Kingdom, and 10 percent in Italy. In other countries—Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, Ethiopia—inflation exceeded 20 percent. Inflation erodes not only voters’ buying power but also their confidence in the ruling class. When voters feel poorer, they predictably take it out on their leaders.

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But the success of political insurgents in 2024 cannot be reduced exclusively to materialist factors such as prices and economic growth. Voters are cultural creatures too, and dissatisfaction with global elites may represent a cultural evolution as much as a rebellion against higher prices.

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.

The United States is hardly immune to these forces. In the past 40 years, incumbent politicians have evolved from a protected class into a beleaguered one. In 1983, the University of Georgia political scientist James E. Campbell wrote that the incumbency advantage in U.S. politics, especially in Congress, was “one of the most elemental facts of political life in America.” Indeed, the U.S. saw relatively little turnover in national power during the 1930s and ’40s, when New Deal Democrats dominated politics. The ’50s were such a snooze that in 1956, Dwight Eisenhower crushed Adlai Stevenson for a second straight election, while the party balance of the Senate remained unchanged. Campbell seemed to consider the advantage of incumbency a natural element within democracy, akin to social inertia. “In the space of two years, the political conditions, the voters, the voters’ opinions, and the incumbent himself probably change very little,” he wrote. Beyond this inertia, he added, familiarity bred fondness in politicians, and voters were more comfortable with candidates whose time in office advertised their competence. Finally, he noted, voters seemed to associate time in government with experience and ability.

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.

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 .

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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.