Of all the developments that conspired to wreck Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, none has received more retroactive blame than the international revolt against incumbents.
In the weeks following the Democrats’ Waterloo, academics and journalists were quick to point to the body count of foreign leaders who have been felled by their electorates’ fickle loyalties over the last few years. After the defenestration of the Conservatives in the U.K., the once unbeatable ANC in South Africa, and even North Macedonia’s Social Democratic Union, Donald Trump’s return to power struck some commentators as simply the American adaptation of an unstoppable global trend.
There are reasons to be leery of this explanation. One principled objection is that it tends to absolve the Democrats themselves, along with their aligned complex of policy and campaign professionals, of responsibility for voters’ low opinion of them. The actual contingencies of governance in the world’s oldest democracy—including years of corrosive inflation and unchecked migrant flows, and the Biden administration’s disputed responsibility for each—ought not be reduced to a variation on themes also playing out in North Macedonia.
There are also exceptions to the anti-incumbency rule. In Spain, where the runaway economy resembles that of the United States much more closely than its European neighbors’, Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez received a higher share of the popular vote in last year’s parliamentary contest than in 2019. And earlier this year, Mexicans cheerfully elected Claudia Sheinbaum of the leftist Morena party to succeed her mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The particulars of the recent U.S. election were also globally, and historically, unique. The Democratic Party was fully aware of the headwinds facing Joe Biden, but still stuck with its own incumbent far too long before nervously anointing Harris, the single figure most connected with his unpopular presidency. She was not, in fact, the incumbent, and she ran against a cult figure whose ubiquity in American culture made him a kind of crypto-president while out of office.
All those caveats aside, it’s true that running for reelection in a post-Covid, high-inflation environment has been a macabre proposition for virtually anyone attempting it. Every plausible Democratic candidate, from Biden to Harris to the host of aspirants who might have jumped into a contested primary, likely would have met the same fate. Even so, the popular narrative misses something critical: Americans’ distaste for their own elected officials is not the symptom of a memetic bug recently caught from Argentina or Poland, but a distinctly homegrown phenomenon. In fact, it has been at work for the better part of two decades.
This becomes clear when one asks which recent election, whether in a presidential or midterm cycle, was decided in favor of continuity rather than change. Control of either the White House or at least one chamber of Congress switched parties in nine of the last 10 federal elections dating back to 2006; even in the lone exception, 2012, Republicans held onto their majority in the House of Representatives despite winning 1.3 million fewer votes than their Democratic opponents nationwide.
While Biden’s belated exit from the 2024 race will be remembered as a singular episode of political hubris, the whiplash of those results has befooled a generation of leaders in both parties—periodically leading them to make, and lose, political gambles that subsequently appear mysterious. George W. Bush staked the political capital he won in 2004 on Social Security reform, only to have it open a trapdoor under his entire second term. Barack Obama hit the Tea Party wall just two years after charging into office on a generational tide of progressive enthusiasm. Mitt Romney’s team was reportedly dumbfounded on election night in 2012, just as Clinton advisers deluded themselves on their way to a 2016 shock for the ages. The list goes on.
The peculiarity of the age is even more apparent when examined over the sweep of the twentieth century, during which an incumbent president was reelected in almost every decade. More impressive still, he typically captured more votes, a higher vote share, and often a better Electoral College margin than in his previous race (or that of the man he succeeded in office). Theodore Roosevelt accomplished the feat in 1904, Wilson in 1916, FDR in 1936, Ike in 1956, LBJ in 1964, Nixon in 1972, Reagan in 1984, and Bill Clinton in 1996.
You can throw in Bush II for good measure, but none others have followed. Barack Obama, as gifted a vote-getter as any of his predecessors, couldn’t recreate his huge 2008 margins after four years in Washington. Trump collected 11 million more votes in 2020 than he had in 2016, yet still lost by a considerable margin. Add it up, and a different party has won the White House in each of the last four consecutive elections.
The most recent time that happened was between 1880 and 1896, when Republicans traded blows for five straight campaigns with a Democratic Party that had finally washed off the reek of slavery and secession. Not coincidentally, it was also the only other period when a president—New York’s Grover Cleveland, beloved of bar trivia contestants and mugwumps alike—served two nonconsecutive terms.
The politics of the late nineteenth century are often cited as an analogue for those of modern times. We too live in an era of close elections and ultra-high voter turnout, each driven by our intense partisan identification. And, as in the Gilded Age, modern Americans’ animus toward incumbent politicians extends from the Oval Office to Congress. Back then, the House flipped between parties six times in the span of 20 years. The political entrepreneurs of our own times have put a ceiling on that kind of volatility through the use of algorithm-powered gerrymandering, but it is impossible to imagine one party installing a four-decade majority, as the Democrats did in the 1950s.
The electoral lessons of this comparison are undeniably murky. In 1884, the Democrats managed to break the GOP’s 24-year stranglehold on the White House by running Cleveland, the governor of what was then the country’s most important swing state. If they wish to turn the page from the Obama-Biden-Harris epoch, they can choose from among its talented governors in Pennsylvania, Michigan, or North Carolina, none of whom are closely associated with the party’s disastrous 2024 performance. (They could follow Cleveland’s example even more closely by tapping a known moderate to attract defecting Republicans, but this is a doubtful proposition.)
But nominating a few outsiders in the short run won’t quell the apparently perpetual disgust that Americans feel for their leadership class.
Perhaps our contemporary political disillusionment seems drawn out of the Gilded Age because the social conditions of the two eras are so similar. Rapid industrial change has transformed, or destroyed, whole communities and industries while producing a new vanguard of corporate titans in the mode of Gould, Carnegie, and Rockefeller. The country’s demographic composition has been transformed by historically high rates of immigration, even as the clustering of opportunity in cities exhausts the urban housing supply. What’s more, as in the 1890s, marriage and childbearing rates are sinking noticeably as both sexes navigate an economy that increasingly devalues blue-collar work.
These essential features of American life were only harmonized through the political reforms of the Progressive era, when both parties helped lay the groundwork for workers’ rights, the welfare and regulatory states, antitrust enforcement, and early efforts for equality among sexes and races. Much more controversial initiatives, including Prohibition and drastic immigration restrictions, reshaped society in their own ways. Though we are inclined to remember its most heated moments of partisan competition, from McCarthyism to Watergate, the political milieu experienced by our parents and grandparents was actually marked by extraordinary stability when contrasted with what came before—and since.
Our lengthy experiment of continually throwing the bums out may also be consigned to history if one or both parties can offer the public a revised social contract along similar lines. In that case, they will have earned a few reelection wins.
