“Why is this even close?” That question consistently rings out as an accusation in the left precincts of American political life. The suggestion is that Donald Trump’s continued viability as a presidential candidate reveals something dark and damning about either the country as a whole or the Democratic Party specifically.
The presumption is that Kamala Harris is — or at least might be — blowing it, either by being too liberal or too centrist, too welcoming of the Liz Cheneys of the world or not welcoming enough or that there is something fundamentally off-kilter about the American electorate or American society.
Consider, though, that on Oct. 27, Japan’s long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party suffered one of its worst electoral results. In late September, Austria’s center-right People’s Party saw an 11-percentage-point decline in vote share and lost 20 of its 71 seats in Parliament. Over the summer, after being in power for 14 years, Britain’s Conservative Party collapsed in a landslide defeat, and France’s ruling centrist alliance lost over a third of its parliamentary seats.
Which is just to say that almost everywhere you look in the world of affluent democracies, the exact same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often losing quite badly.
It appears that the unhappy electorates are unhappy in fundamentally the same way. Inflation spiked, largely because household spending patterns seesawed so abruptly during and after a global pandemic, and though it’s been tamed, prices of many goods have not fallen to what voters remember, and what’s more, the process of taming has involved higher interest rates, which in their own way raise the cost of living. The question of why, exactly, voters so hate inflation — which increases wages and prices symmetrically — has long puzzled economists. But the basic psychology seems to be: My pay increase reflects my hard work and talent, while the higher prices I am paying are the fault of the government.
Under the circumstances, it’s Republicans who should be asking why the race is even close and Democrats who should be breathing a sigh of relief to be heading into a coin-flip election.
It is not a left-right thing. Examples show that each country has unique circumstances. Center-left governments from Sweden to Finland to New Zealand have lost, but so have center-right governments in Australia and Belgium. This year the center-left governing coalition in Portugal got tossed out. Last year the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, the incumbent center-right governing party in the Netherlands, finished third in an election dominated by far-right parties.
There are a handful of exceptions, but they are a bit odd. In Denmark and Spain, incumbent coalitions lost their majorities in Parliament, but the incumbent prime minister was able to hold on to power by switching coalitions. In Denmark that meant Social Democrats’ ditching their left-wing allies in favor of a centrist coalition dependent on conservative support. In Spain it meant making agreements with a wide range of separatist and regionalist parties.
But across the board, there is simply no example of an incumbent party in a rich country securing a strong re-election. And current polling suggests the trend of losses is overwhelmingly likely to continue when Canadians go to the polls next year for a vote that Justin Trudeau’s Liberals are on track to lose by an overwhelming margin. The incumbent so-called traffic light coalition in Germany, too, is hideously unpopular.
Once you accept that voters are cranky and incumbents are losing everywhere, much about this campaign starts to click into place and make more sense. President Biden’s age was surely a handicap on the campaign trail, but one of the main reasons swapping nominees gave Democrats such a boost is simply that incumbents everywhere are unpopular. There were sound reasons that when the nomination was vacated, it fell to Kamala Harris, but Democrats might have been better off with someone less linked to the incumbent administration.
Her campaign has been very wise to emphasize rhetorical formulations like “New way forward” that associate her with novelty and “We’re not going back” that tie Mr. Trump to the past — after all, he has already been president. But more broadly, her campaign, despite whatever shortcomings you may think it’s had (nobody’s perfect), has put up an impressive performance despite an objectively daunting set of headwinds.
To the extent that Ms. Harris has erred, it’s perhaps been by underestimating the extent of the headwinds. Democrats’ relatively strong performance in the 2022 midterms, when races were heavily influenced by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision and a clear majority of voters backed G.O.P. candidates in House races, perhaps led to excessive complacency, hanging too much narrative weight on Republicans’ eccentric decision to nominate a television doctor who lives in New Jersey for a Senate race in Pennsylvania.
What’s more, while prices were high then, voters were also still riding high from three rounds of pandemic emergency cash. Mr. Biden opted to declare victory after the midterms rather than acknowledge the House losses and execute a postmidterm pivot to anti-inflation zeal, and in the campaign Ms. Harris has passed up multiple opportunities to criticize him on that score.
What she has done is campaign extensively with figures like Mark Cuban and Ms. Cheney, who are not part of the Biden administration or affiliated with the Democratic Party — a loose approximation of the coalition swap moves that worked in Spain and Denmark.
It’s also palpably true that the things liberals believe should be costing Mr. Trump support — the events before and around Jan. 6, the rollback of abortion rights, his tendency to ramble incoherently — have, in fact, hurt him. If Republicans win this week, they won’t be in any mood for self-scrutiny. But if they lose, it may strike them that they blundered away what should have been an astoundingly winnable election.
Some of this comes down to Mr. Trump’s personality, his scandals and his association with the overturn of Roe v. Wade. But he has also waged a very strange campaign for a candidate receiving a boost from voters’ concern with inflation.
Republicans talk extensively about the cost of living and wield it as a political cudgel. But the policy agenda of higher budget deficits and higher tariffs are clearly interpreted by financial markets as implying more inflation, not less.
It should not have been hard for an opposition candidate, no matter what his other flaws, to put together some kind of inflation-busting or cost-cutting (or both) policy platform in an election season when voters around the world are demanding help with costs.
But Mr. Trump, for whatever reasons, stuck to budget busting and what he called “the most beautiful word in the dictionary”: tariffs, which would almost certainly raise prices rather than lower them. And for better or worse, that’s why the election is close.
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