You’re using “incumbency” in standard historical terms and then applying logic to that history. I’m dismissing that. Logic cannot stand before the force of spectacle. Trump alone has proven that. Heck, Philip K. Dick proved that with every drug-fueled paragraph.
The election will largely be decided by turnout. Turnout will be decided by many things, not least the actions of staff and volunteers working locally and all hail them. On a national scale turnout will be affected by who gets the most mentions, the most Google lookups, the most time putting their face before the public. Forget about logic. Joe Scarborough had a telling point.
Donald Trump is always considering himself to be the ultimate disruptor. For the first time, not just in his political life, but the first first time in his media life and in his professional life, the disruption is on the other side.
The last day of the convention is 75 days before the election. Also 32 days from today. President Harris can be prepped for those 32 days and sail through the next 75. All she really has to do in 2024 is get the most views, disrupting the acknowledged Master of Views. Any strategy that doesn’t concentrate on that truth is utterly flawed.
Nitpick: Polk, Buchanan and Hayes in the 19th century, Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman in the 20th. The 20th century crew (including LBJ) all got into office on the death of their predecessor, then were elected in their own right, but chose not to seek a second official term. (TR didn’t like what Taft was doing, and four years later ran again, but as a Bull Moose, not a Republican.) The pre-1900 guys were voted in and thought once was enough. (I daresay Polk was too ill to run again.) Anyway, LBJ was the only one who made his announcement on color television, so it seems unprecedented.
(“Ah shall not seek, and ah will not accept, the nomination of mah party for another term as yer President.” I wasn’t even born then, and I know it by heart!)
I’d just add that Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Truman were constrained by the third term bugaboo if they ran again, even if they wouldn’t technically violate it as the tradition was too strong at the time. (The 22nd Amendment was ratified during Truman’s term.)
Johnson was in the same position, but was sanctified in a way since he clearly had not served for more than two years of Kennedy’s term.
If there is an incumbency effect, presumably part of it comes from some voters’ mistrust of the unknown or unfamiliar. That factor - to the extent that it is important - applies less when an incumbent is running against a former President. So we need to discount the incumbency effect to some degree.
How important is incumbency overall? Consider Ray Fair’s model based on fundamentals, especially the economy, using data through 2006, as presented in this 2009 paper. For Presidents, incumbency gives you 2.74 percentage points in the popular vote on average. The t-statistic is 1.08, indicating statistically insignificance. Huh. I didn’t know that. It’s a control variable, not one that we could be sure was important to begin with. (Congressional representatives, on the other hand, do benefit from incumbency.)
I was all ready to provide a rejoinder to Stranger, but the data doesn’t support my preconceptions. The economic variables are significant, so it’s not that the Fair model lacks predictive power. Damn: I need to update my priors.
I would think the benefit of incumbancy comes from status quoists. If the country is doing okay and the incumbent has a generally positive rating, low information undecided voters will pull for the person in office because “things are okay, why rock the boat?” When they country isn’t doing so well and/ or the incumbent has low approval ratings, low information undecided voters will opt for a change.
That’s also why VP’s taking over as the candidate after a successful Pres’s second term don’t necessarily get an incumbency bump. Those same voters have to make a choice, because there isn’t a status quo.
Yeah, it’s not that incumbency gives no advantage whatsoever (maybe) but it isn’t enough to lift a weak candidate over a more charismatic or appealing one. Honestly, the state of the economy and perception that one candidate will be able to improve it better than another are the most dominant factors in modern (post-WWII) electoral performance, despite the fact that a president often has little to do with how the economy is doing. Trump was terrible for the economy but claims to be a fiscal genius (and some people believe him for reasons beyond my comprehension), while Harris is basically an unknown, so that is basically a null factor.
Regardless, Biden resigning to give Harris 100-odd days of notional ‘incumbency’ for some hypothetical advantage (which I realize @Hari_Seldon was presenting as a counterfactual but which has been seriously proposed elsewhere) is not a convincing pitch. Harris would be far better focusing on campaigning, especially in critical states and with swing voters who don’t really want Trump but are concerned about being neglected. But even with that, I agree @Exapno_Mapcase that we’re basically in unchartered territory, the polls will likely be meaningless for at least the next couple of months while people just figure out what they even think of Harris (and Vance, who actuarially stands an almost even chance of inheriting the presidency in the next four years if he and Trump are elected), and any projections at this point are pure speculation unfettered by past electoral precedent.
Important nitpick: The state of the economy during the year of the election but not before that is the most dominant factor. Presidents might have some effect on long-run economic growth, but election performance results from Fed policy during the previous year and changes in taxes and spending in perhaps the 6 quarters leading to the election.
Liberals were lucky that the Great Depression occurred while Hoover was President, though a Democrat would not have done substantially better, unless perhaps they were a quixotic opponent of the gold standard. Out of power fascists in Germany were equally lucky.
However the resignation on stage is a fantasy too far.
Because of this name: Richard Nixon.
He is the only president to ever resign the office. He did it in disgrace.
There is no disgrace in passing the torch to a younger generation but a man of pride like Joe Biden will not allow history books to put his name in that current category of one of presidents who resigned.
I also want Biden to finish his term without the strain of campaigning. That will give him all the energy he needs to unleash Dark Brandon and take advantage of the rope granted him by SCOTUS to do whatever it takes to help Harris win – legal or otherwise.
Just a small point. If I believed that the incumbency factor was important in this election, I never would have put forth a proposition that Biden resign. Surely his factor would be larger than 75 days of Harris incumbency.
The potential problem now will be the media’s split attention between Biden and Harris. If the focus were solely on Harris, that would give her an extra bump. (Of what size is unknown, but presumably a positive one unless she were to screw up royally.) The more attention paid to her in the next 100 days the better. Harris as President would garner even more attention than Harris as presidential candidate. As I said, and will undoubtedly repeat ad nauseam, views are all-important.
Well, currently Harris is getting all of the media buzz (which must piss off Trump because the assassination attempt is all but forgotten and the GOP convention is already stale news; Mike Lindell is getting more press than Trump at this point). If Harris were in the Oval Office, her attention would be divided and her availability to go out on the campaign trail would be limited, whereas as VP she basically has no obligatory duties, leaving Biden and his staff to manage running the executive branch and also shoulder all of the bad press over whatever the shitshow of the day is.
Harris just has to figure out how to keep the media engaged upon her and come up with a clear message to sway swing and reluctant voters to head to the voting booth and cast their votes for her. Unfortunately, her campaign already seems to be defaulting to her background as a prosecutor and how she will be able to go after Trump, which is a message that garnered little enthusiasm in 2020 and isn’t likely to be much more persuasive now when most voters can’t even figure out what Trump was actually convicted of. This is already starting to sound like a rejected Armando Iannucci pitch for a followup to VEEP. Hopefully someone can get Harris’ attention and steer her in a more fruitful direction, because this is not good.
I agree that prosecutor is not a good path to go down. Trump thrives on his convictions; they convince his supporters that the system is rigged. Nor are they simple, easy to understand convictions. Most analysts didn’t even believe before the trial that the case could be made.
Harris has to run on the three issues that do energize voters: abortion, inflation, and immigration. She’s got abortion locked down. That’s what she been campaigning on. Making the case that inflation and immigration have already started to significantly lessen should be within the province of a prosecutor; that’s literally what they do. Add to this targeted examples of infrastructure money while in swing states; the national media won’t pick it up but the local media will blast headlines throughout their district. Hit the swing states over and over. And over.
And please, please, please, if she makes a pop culture reference - which she should because she knows pop culture, unlike Biden - make it snappier than Pokemon go-to-the-polls.
“In one shining moment, at 1:46pm this afternoon, President Biden, in a true profile in courage, a selfless act for which he will be honored and remembered for years to come, put his country ahead of himself,” Moore wrote in a Substack post published on Monday. “May I ask you, Mr. President, for one more brave and bold action?”
Moore argued Vice President Kamala Harris would have a much better shot at defeating Donald Trump if she spent the next few months as president.
“Kamala Harris will be in a much stronger position to win if she can run as the President of the United States. As the incumbent President. This will give the country a chance to see her in action — as the most powerful person in the world,” Moore wrote.
In another example of how fast things are moving, he also called for Gretchen Whitmer be named the VP pick, hours before she took herself out of contention. C’mon Michael. Get your predictions right!