Guest Opinion by Hank Beckman. Photo Credit official White House website.
Let’s close 2024 with what is hopefully the last in a seeming endless list of postmortems on the recent presidential election.
And it points to an explanation that should be obvious and could have easily been predicted long before election night—Kamala Harris never had more than a snowball’s chance in hell to outpoll Donald Trump and spend the next four years sitting in Lincoln’s Chair in one of her stylish pantsuits.
It didn’t matter if Harris were able to separate her candidacy from Joe Biden’s toxic record, or if Biden hadn’t dropped out too late for her to run a proper campaign, or she had better responses to address her controversial positions from her first presidential campaign other than her values hadn’t changed, or if she could just refrain from that irritating cackle, or if she went on Joe Rogan’s podcast, or…insert any criticism of her performance here.
Her candidacy was an impossible dream from the start. (And a rather expensive dream at that; turns out that dreaming is not free, no matter what Deborah Harry sang all those years ago.)
Nor would Joe Biden have retained the White House for the Democrat Party, or any other candidate the party chose as its sacrificial lamb, be it Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, or Jay Pritzker.
The stark reality is that the American people had decided—by a wide margin—that the nation was headed in the wrong direction; a margin so wide that no incumbent party in modern history has managed to retain the office against such widespread voter unease.
Honorable people can disagree about whether the electorate was wrong in its judgement, but that’s a subject for a different column.
One poll after another showed the electorate thought the country was headed in the wrong direction.
Yahoo News’ September 27 poll of registered voters showed 65 percent of them unhappy with the country’s direction. ABC News’ November 3 survey of likely voters showed 75 percent thought we were on the wrong track.
The trend held through election day exit polls, with the New York Post reporting 70 percent of voters believing the country on the wrong track and only 13 precent believing their families were getting ahead. Newsweek’s exit poll reported 72 percent thought we were headed in the wrong direction.
For historic reference, refer to a Cook Political Report article from July 21, 2020, listing the right track/wrong (RT/WT) track numbers for presidential elections going back to 1980.
The numbers, drawn from data from the Roper Center, show that in every case where the incumbent party failed to retain the presidency, the electorate felt the country was on the wrong track by a similarly wide margin.
In 1980, the RT/WT number was 20/79, a deficit of a whopping 59 points; it was similar in 1992, when the the numbers were 17/75/58; in 2000—39/57/18; in 2008–11/76/65; and in 2016— 31/62/31. The only year the electoral landscape was remotely doable for incumbents was 2000, the year Al Gore won the popular vote, but lost in the Electoral College.
The years the presidency flipped parties the numbers averaged 24 percent thinking right direction, 70 percent wrong direction, for an average of being 46 precent underwater.
The numbers when the incumbents retained the White House show a different scenario.
In 1984, the numbers were 47 percent in the right direction, 48 in the wrong direction, for a 1 percent deficit; 1988, they were 41/54/13; 1996–39/44/5; in 2004–41/47/6; and in 2012–42/58/11.
When a incumbent party retains the White House, it was still underwater, but less so, the average being 42/49/8. (Also showing we’re always a little cranky and inclined toward pessimism.)
For those old enough to have lived through the last half-century, or younger people truly interested in political history, the patience in years the incumbent party held the presidency should be no revelation.
Ronald Reagan was reelected in 1984 when only 1 percent in the negative because, while the country had gone through a deep recession in the first part of his presidency, leading to Republican losses in the 1982 midterms, it came roaring back toward the end of his term, blunting any ill feelings about the recession.
Although the numbers slid some in the run-up to 1988, no doubt because of Iran-Contra, Reagan also signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with the Soviets, leading to the Republicans keeping the White House for George H.W. Bush.
Bill Clinton was 5 points underwater when he ran for reelection in 1996, but most of the negative feelings were due to his poor start, which he overcame by tacking to the center, actually coopting Republican strong points on the budget and crime. And Clinton had a victory in signing the Dayton Accords, bringing peace to Northern Ireland.
George W. Bush won reelection in 2004 despite being underwater on the RT/WT ledger, but there was the unusual circumstance of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the invasion of Iraq. Whatever criticism there was at the time of the way Bush handled these issues, the American people tended to give him the benefit of the doubt when dealing with such momentous problems.
When Barack Obama was reelected, passing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and being the first black president helped him overcome the messy rollout of ACA, botching the civil war in Libya, and the perception that he had unnecessarily race-bated in the Cambridge Police case with a police officer questioning Henry Louis Gates and the death of Trayvon Martin.
But if the electorate can be understanding with our leaders, the years when the presidency flipped parties show the limits of that understanding.
However much some people approved of Jimmy Carter’s policies on energy and the signing of the Camp David Accords, his naive approach to Human Rights on the international stage, the fact was that the misery index, (then the combination of inflation and unemployment), was almost double what he criticized Gerald Ford for four years earlier, and the utter humiliation we suffered during the Iran Hostage Crisis, made worse by the almost comical failed rescue attempt, doomed his chances for reelection.
In 1992, despite foreign policy successes, George H.W. Bush failed to retain the White House for Republicans when the he was viewed as a failure in domestic affairs, especially with the Savings and Loan debacle, the Rodney King riots, and the Democrats hammering him continually on his 1988 “read my lips; no new taxes” promise that he broke at the same time the country was just coming out of a recession.
Similarly, George W. Bush’s presidency squandered the good will he had earned in his first term when he limped along in Middle East wars with no end or weapons of mass destruction in sight, and presided over the economic crash of 2008.
The scenarios were similar in 2016 and 2020, when Barack Obama drew a “red line” in Syria about chemical weapons, only to fail to mount a coalition to seriously punish Bashir Al-Assad when he jumped over the line, and his promise that the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t mean people losing their health insurance was judged by Politifact to be the 2013 “Lie of the Year.” The Covid pandemic and the crashing economy it produced signaled the end of the first Trump administration and flipped the White House back to the Democrats.
So put aside the personalities of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Forget whatever campaign mistakes were made. Any errors avoided by Harris, or any better approach to campaigning would only have been marginally helpful.
The historic RT/WT numbers show it’s possible for an incumbent party to retain the presidency with modestly unfavorable numbers.
But inflation still hurting the working class, an unprecedented invasion by millions of illegals while the administration assured us for three years that the border was secure, crime spiking notwithstanding Democrats’ claims, some high-profile crimes committed by those illegals, two major wars ongoing that threaten to become much larger disasters, an obvious partisan attempt by Democrats to jail their chief political opponent, ordering landlords to forgo rent, and snubbing his nose at the Supreme Court and illegally cancelling millions in student debt?
And maybe the worst indignity to the voter, a president that’s obviously in an advance state of dementia, while we’re assured by his supporters that he’s sharp as a tack?
That’s just not going to work for the incumbent party—any incumbent party.
The Democrats lost the majority of the electorate; it’s really no more complicated than that. And depending on events, some of them beyond Donald Trump’s control, the White House can easily flip back to the Democrats in 2028.
Hank Beckman is a freelance writer with 20 years experience covering local politics in the Western suburbs. His work has appeared in several local publications. He holds a B.A in Political Science—with a concentration in international politics—from DePaul University and an M.A. in general writing, also from DePaul.