The Year of Elections Part 3: Incumbency's Poison
The Year of Elections finished off with a bang, as the US elects the old incumbent to replace the new ones.
2024 has been our Year of Elections, more than a third of the world's population have gone or are going to the polls this year. And that's unusual enough but even more unusual or let's be positive? - unique - is what I like to call The Poison of Encumbency. It has infected parties from India's far-right Modi, to France's centrist Macron, Britain's right-wing Sunak, and now America's left-wing Biden-Harris administration.
There is no ideological bend to the disdain for incumbents and there's been no stopping it. In the best of cases, India, France, the EU, leading parties have seen their worst results in 3 or 4 election cycles and are barely clinging to power. In the Anglophone world in two elections both incumbents were kicked out, even as large parts of the electorate question the opposition. It's frankly no surprise Trudeau will do just about anything to keep Canadians home until 2025.
Let's talk about that election Tuesday - how significant is this incumbency disadvantage? Huge, I'd guess, considering the  Democrats managed to lose to a convicted felon, serial sex assaulter and old incumbent. And what does it mean for global politics?
Trump shouted for an end to war - and sending all that money so far away. With his win, map drawing looks set to be the biggest new job opportunity. Donald Trump's victory is a clear signal that Ukraine will not see out next year, Israel can take/raze what it wants, (Gaza as a new Kushner resort?) and warmongers across the globe were checking their bank balances and real estate holdings for the new transactional diplomacy on the horizon.
Trump is now elevating Mike Waltz, Elise Stefanik and Marco Rubio (the man he once described simply by spilling a bottle of water, drip, drip...) to the head of his foreign policy. Pete Hegseth as Sec. Defense. Their individual profiles are irrelevant, (consider one is a Fox News presenter??) but the simple descriptor for each: Leave Ukraine, Support Israel, Bomb Iran. Stefanik and Waltz have been hardliners on NATO being weak, but not on destroying it. Trump's dove strategy is apparently hire the hawks to stop the war. An oxymoron above all the others. Reagan redux without the charm.
How'd he win the presidency you ask, if soon after winning the popular vote on an end the wars platform he's looking like he'll govern differently. The easy answer is that... this is who Donald Trump is. In 2016 he ran as the dove who opposed a war-mongering, Iraq-war voting, Hillary Clinton. He won and pretty much instantly set up the environment for the October 7th attacks with his Middle East Policy. And many forget, because we plunged into a global pandemic. But 2020 started with war in Iran a close reality after Trump ordered the assassination of a leading Iranian general.
So, that's it then, Trump has the trick, run as a dove, govern as a hawk? Well, not quite, while foreign policy was such a defining issue of the 2024 campaigns, the largest issue determining nearly all of the 2024 elections: "It's the inflation stupid". Joe Biden and then for the last three months Kamala Harris were plagued with the constant problem of consumers going to their supermarkets and seeing butter at $7. The inflationary cycles that have spiralled globally first from the pandemic and then from the mass energy cost spike following Russia's Ukraine invasion has been responsible for a global cost of living shitfest.
The US was perhaps best placed to refute this argument. Biden's government had managed the softest landing of any western state for the inflationary crisis of 2021-2022. The last two months have seen inflation rates below pre-pandemic levels in the US. The fact that they were defeated highlights just how impossible economic woes were for incumbents in 2024. But, butter is still $7.
Perhaps Biden and then Harris didn't run the best campaign given the environment. While Ukraine's war is seen in liberal circles as a moral crusade - amongst the general public its seen as a giveaway of $100 billion to some nobodies in Eastern Europe while they can't afford gas or groceries.
Even worse, money is getting splashed even further - funding a war generally seen in public circles as an amoral 12th century style crusade in Gaza. Meanwhile the Biden admin - the most progressive/new-deal style economy in 50 years in America saw the death of Covid related social safety nets. Eviction moratoriums, student loan debt relief, expanded unemployment benefits, the child tax benefit all implemented in Trump's term to fight the pandemic got torn up. And try as Biden did to reinstate a bunch of them he couldn't get it through Congress. But funding the wars - that he got through.
So perhaps the easiest assessment of why Incumbency's Poison hit Democrats: They just sucked as incumbents. The first year of the campaign (American election campaigns a years long affairs) they ran a wildly unpopular, senile looking old man who didn't have the best control of his words when his brain was fully functioning. Any chance they had of winning ended when Biden went back on his suggestion of being a 1 term president, and gave Kamala Harris just 3 months to convince the electorate. Exit polls suggested 90% of Americans made up their mind before September - when Harris had been running for less than a month.
Harris wasn't helped either by a refusal to wash the incumbent stink off her. During the DNC her campaign spent the first day honouring President Biden. When her campaign finally posted a policy page it still had the metadata for the "Campaign to Re-Elect Joe Biden". In an interview when asked how she differed from the President she insisted there was not a thing she would have done differently to him. When she did try and campaign on anything for herself she spent most of the time... insisting on how Republican she actually was. She made more appearances with Liz Cheney - daughter of a man John McCain refused the endorsement of - than with her VP pick.
Harris lost by quite the margin in the electoral college - nearly 100 votes. As if a signal to just how poisonous incumbency is, those Democrats who did not have the stink of Joe Biden on them won enough state-wide races to win the electoral college with 287 votes. In every swing state but Pennsylvania Democrats running below Harris won their races. Every Democratic Senate candidate outran her - its looking likely even with electoral headwinds against them the Democrats will gain seats in the House.
But it all sort of feels pointless, after 8 years we're all in the same spot (with butter still costing $7), dysfunction and chaos once again to reign in the office of "Leader of the Free World" - but, look on the bright side: America's 2024 elections have served to make The Letts Journal the most prescient commentators of the year - everyone is talking about incumbency's curse now. We've been saying it since July! (And we're modest to boot). At least Europe has come out of this year stable, surely nothing could go wrong... What's that about German elections?
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