Voters Lose Their Appetite For Incumbents
42:14 Share

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion.

And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to LibsynAds.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.

I mean, I don't really drink dairy milk much anymore on occasion, but... You live in Vermont. Are you kidding me? Yeah, I know. I'm real bad. I drink, like, soy and oat and... On the topic of, like, things that affect your digestion, can we stop recording for a second?

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk and happy Thanksgiving week. This week, we give thanks to you, our dear loyal listeners. We hope you're having fun stocking up on Turkey Day essentials like cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and of course, cold, hard data.

We all better be prepared for Uncle Tim's controversial opinions about waiting by recalled vote. Anyway, that was a real nerd joke. I mean, even I wouldn't make that joke. I mean, read the room, Nathaniel. Look where we are. Yeah, fair. And just as it is important to read the room at the Thanksgiving dinner table and on this podcast, it is also wise to read the room that is America. How about that transition?

Specifically, it's important to get a read on how Americans are feeling about the economy. Last week, we mentioned that consumer sentiment among partisan groups had already moved notably since Election Day. Republicans cheered, Democrats jeered. But now a new poll suggests that partisans aren't just more likely to change their tune about their financial future. They're also saying different things about their financial past.

So we're going to get into it. And speaking of predicting the future, we're going to play another round of buy, sell, hold. So can our panel outsmart the betting markets? We're going to find out.

And 2024 wasn't just a bad year for Democrats. Incumbent parties all over the world had poor showings. So is this year's throw-out-the-bum sentiment specific to this moment, or is there no longer any advantage to being an incumbent? Here with me to discuss it all is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Welcome to the podcast, Nathaniel, and happy Thanksgiving. Hey, Galen. Happy early Thanksgiving. Also with us is senior elections analyst Jeffrey Skelly. Welcome to the pod, and a happy Thanksgiving to you too, Jeffrey. Happy Thanksgiving week.

Because it is a holiday week, we're only going to have one episode. So in all sincerity, I do hope you have a nice time at Thanksgiving and write in if you actually do get in a fight about waiting by recalled vote at your Thanksgiving table. We'd love to hear. And also just please keep sending in questions in general. We will get to another mailbag episode.

You can reach us at Twitter, Threads, Blue Sky, Carrier Pigeon, Smoke Signal, whatever you like these days. Also, I am going to be on vacation next week. So, Nathaniel, you're going to be filling in for me on Monday. Any chance I can get a little taste of your Galen impression? Sneak preview? I'm sorry, Galen. You're going to have to wait just like the good people of America to hear that one. Not even a welcome to the 538 Politics podcast? I cannot reveal...

my impression until it is ready to the world. And I still have a week to polish up. OK, I'll give up. We have talked plenty on the show about the relationship between consumer sentiment and partisanship. And in recent years, consumer sentiment has basically flipped on a dime when the incumbent party loses the White House, leading some to question if that data amounts to anything significant or just partisan signaling.

But it does make sense that sentiment would change immediately after election, at least the way I see it. Consumer sentiment is calculated in part by measuring expectations for your financial future. So if you have more faith in Trump's economics policies, that would probably change how you consider your economic prospects and maybe even on a dime.

But we recently looked at YouGov polling on the question that follows. Are you better off, worse off, or about the same financially than you were a year ago? So a retrospective question. Since the election, Republicans' estimate of whether they were worse off financially than a year ago has fallen by 15 points from 63% before the election to 48%.

Now, notably, independents and Democrats changed little. There was a slight movement amongst Democrats to say they were worse off immediately post-election, but it returned to the average in the most recent survey. Jeffrey, is this a good or bad use of polling? If respondents are now changing not only how they think about the future, which I think is fair game, but also how they view the past, are questions like this telling us anything?

I mean, I think it's a good use of polling only in the sense that it indicates something about how people interpret the world. Right. I think it is helpful because I think it says a lot about just how important partisanship is to understanding basically everything in life and politics in the United States.

It is true that it seems like Republicans are a bit more inclined to shift sharply on this than others. But you do see it to some extent, even in historical data. You can sort of chart, oh, there was just an election. You can see like, you know, Republican sentiment go up.

you know, more positive right after Republican win, like in 2016, or go more negative, which happened just after Biden's election in 2020. And then on the Democratic side, you can also see some of that as well, although not quite to the same extent. And I do think that there is still some usefulness for this question for thinking about independence. Maybe you don't want to hone in on the Democratic and Republican numbers as much, but if you look at the independent numbers, you actually get maybe something of a

a truer sentiment. So yeah, I think it's perfectly helpful.

I agree. I think it is a good use of polling for all the reasons that Jeffrey mentioned, including the kind of fundamentalness of partisanship to understanding politics today. I would actually take issue, Galen, with you saying that this is changing their views about the past. I think it's changing their views about the present, which can include future considerations. I think it's completely legitimate for Republicans to be like, well, I'm much more confident right now about my financial situation today because I'm no longer worried I'm going to lose my job. But it's not.

are you confident? Okay, well, what's the question? Let me see. Are you better off, worse off, or about the same financially? Which is, I mean,

I mean, maybe you could say, I guess my 401k has gone up since Election Day. So I am. No, but I don't think you even have to say that. I think you can say like I'm better off financially right now because I'm no longer worried about losing my job because I trust Trump or just to think like I am more confident now that we're not going to have another spike in inflation. And like, therefore, my financial situation, which like maybe is like teetering on the edge. I'm like, OK, doing like right. OK, now, but I can't deal with another big spike in inflation.

And so I think it's completely legitimate for people to think that way. I don't necessarily think the partisans are correct to think that there's going to be that big of a difference between a Harris versus Trump economy, given that we know the presidents don't have that much control over the economy. But I think it makes sense. And to Jeffrey's point, it tells us a lot about the mindset of American voters, which is what we're primarily interested in on this podcast.

How do we tease out, though, what's partisanship and what is real? And obviously, partisanship is real. So that's a complicated question. But leading up to the 2024 election, there was some analysis, particularly on the left, that Americans say they're really down on the economy. But really, that's all partisan signaling. And if you look at the data, the economy isn't so bad. So, you know, people are not necessarily going to vote just based on that economic sentiment data. But

Ultimately, the economy endured as the most important issue inflation in particular, it looked like in the exit polls at the very least that people were motivated to vote on this issue. And it wasn't just partisans, it was Americans switching their votes and kicking Democrats out of office, based at least in part on this issue.

Yeah, I mean, I think...

what you said, Galen, is that partisanship is real. And I don't really think you can very easily tease those things out. But to the extent that you can, like, I think what Jeffrey said, looking at independence as kind of this measure of how people, quote, unquote, really think, because theoretically, even though Jeffrey's absolutely right that not everybody who says they're independent is actually independent, theoretically, there's probably an equal number of Democratic-leaning independents and Republican-leaning independents in that sample. And

Even if there are, say, more Republican-leaning independents in the sample, that tells you something, right? Because if partisanship or those vibes have seeped into a majority of independents or a majority of Americans, then obviously that is going to have implications for the election.

Jeffrey mentioned, and we have seen over time, that Republicans tend to cheer louder and boo harder when it comes to the economy. So the partisan effect on economic sentiment is greater for Republicans. And I think this has, in part, along with other things, led to some criticism from the left wing of the Democratic Party to say that, you know, Republicans live in an information environment of their own creation. And after the 2024 election, you saw some charts making their rounds of, you know, this is the...

hard data reality on the economy or crime or immigration. And this is perception. And Democratic voters seem to be closer to reality in their perceptions than Republicans. And so the argument is for Democrats, not necessarily like, oh, we got the policy wrong or whatever, but a bunch of these voters are living in their own reality. Jeff, do you buy that?

There absolutely is fragmentation in people's news sources, and people can very easily silo themselves off into a universe where they're really only hearing partisan talking points. I mean, that's just the fundamental truth of the world we're living in now. But at the same time, I think that's a little simplistic, and it sounds a little bit like saying –

Oh, you people just, however you're interpreting how your lives are going, isn't legit because this top line number says this. That's kind of maybe not a wise course of going about things. There is a lot of evidence that like the economy is doing better than it was, or it's doing decently, especially compared to a lot of other countries around the world and sort of the post-COVID world. But people are still unhappy and there's a lot of negative economic sentiment around

Yeah, I think that's absolutely right, Jeffrey. I agree with all that. But I think there is a broader question of why Republicans cheer harder and boo harder than Democrats do. And I think a lot of that has does have to do with like media consumption and trusted media in particular. So we know, obviously, that trust in the media has been declining in general among Americans over the last decade.

several decades, but that that has been especially pronounced among Republicans. So in the latest Gallup data about how much trust people put in mass media, 54 percent of Democrats say they put a great deal or fair amount into that, but only 12 percent of Republicans do. And I think that leads to things like

On the economy, sure. But and there are plenty of confounders. But also for me, the canonical example of this is trust in elections. Right. So in the 2020 election, obviously, a lot of Republicans, majority Republicans didn't believe that that election was free and fair, despite the fact that the media and other independent observers were insisting that it was.

And a lot of that is because, obviously, Donald Trump and other Republicans were saying that it wasn't free and fair or at least rising questions about it. And I think that Republicans are more likely to trust their

independent leaders than they are to trust independent arbiters like the media and Democrats. Some of them will still trust, you know, their in-group elites who are saying things, but a lot of them will still trust the media as well. And I think that's the reason why you see after the 2016 election, for example, some Democrats thought that that election was not that the election results were not fair, but it was not nearly as many as Republicans thought in 2020. Yeah.

All right, so I am going to rate this a good use of polling because it sparked an interesting conversation suggesting there is nuance in how people view the world. Let's move on to buy, sell, hold, but first a break.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Ramp. Want a better way to simplify finance operations for your business across expenses, vendor payments, and accounting? If so, Ramp could be a complete game changer. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket.

Ramp gives finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. Ramp saves you money. Businesses that use Ramp save an average of 5% the first year. And it's easy to use. Get started, issue virtual and physical cards, and start making payments in less than 15 minutes, whether you have five employees or 5,000.

And now get $250 when you join Ramp. Just go to ramp.com slash 538. Ramp.com slash 538. That's R-A-M-P.com slash 538. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Today's podcast is brought to you by Shopify. Ready to make the smartest choice for your business? Say hello to Shopify, the global commerce platform that makes selling a breeze.

Whether you're starting your online shop, opening your first physical store, or hitting a million orders, Shopify is your growth partner. Sell everywhere with Shopify's all-in-one e-commerce platform and in-person POS system. Turn browsers into buyers with Shopify's best converting checkout, 36% better than other platforms. Effortlessly sell more with Shopify Magic, your AI-powered all-star.

Did you know Shopify powers 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. and supports global brands like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen? Join millions of successful entrepreneurs across 175 countries backed by Shopify's extensive support and help resources. Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Start your success story today. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash 5S.

That's Shopify.com slash 538. Last week in our game of buy, sell, hold, we focused on Trump cabinet appointees. And since then, Trump has completed his cabinet picks. And one of those betting contracts has already reached maturity. Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for attorney general. When we spoke last, he had about a 20% chance of confirmation. And Mary and Jeffrey were buying that contract.

Today, we'll take a look at his replacement and also what the betting markets are telling us about what Trump might do once he is in office. So, Jeffrey, how are you feeling about selling RFK Jr. so you could buy Matt Gaetz? Hey, you know, sometimes you take a loss. I'll say, Jeffrey, you could have made some money because you bought it 20 and it got up into the 30s before he withdrew his name.

Okay, so according to Polymarket, there is a 93% chance of his replacement, Pam Bondi, being confirmed as Attorney General, just as a refresher. She was the Attorney General of Florida from 2011 to 2019. And she's also worked as a lobbyist and has been loyal to Trump for years. She was a member of Trump's defense team during his first impeachment trial and supported him in his false election claims after the 2020 election. 93% chance that is very different from

Matt Gaetz. Are we, Nathaniel, buying, selling, or holding Pambondi at 93%? I think I'm going to hold Pambondi at 93%. That seems good to me. I think you can make the argument that it should be higher because she's just much more of a conventional pick. She obviously has...

literally the qualifications being a state attorney general to be the national attorney general. But I think it makes sense to leave like some wiggle room in case there's some skeleton in the closet that comes out. You never quite know with these things. But I think she is very likely to be confirmed because she's just

qualified on the face of it, even though Democrats brought up the fact that she's an election denier and she's been very much a Trump loyalist and I think would do a lot of the same things that Matt Gaetz would have done. And the Democrats were worried that he would have done in terms of using the DOJ as more of a political tool. But I don't think that a lot of Republicans will see it that way again, unless there is something we don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think I agree. Yeah, I mean, this also gets at a dynamic we talked about last week, which is that

In maybe suggesting some so unqualified nominees for positions, Trump sets the baseline lower so that other people have an easier time of being nominated. Which brings us to Tulsi Gabbard, one of the people that we did not get to last week.

Her high in polymarket was an 80% chance of being confirmed as director of national intelligence. It's now at 47% chance. And for some more context here, she's a former military officer in the U.S. Army Reserves. She represented Hawaii in the House for eight years as a Democrat. She's not made it clear what she would do as head of national intelligence yet.

In the past, she's been pretty vocal in her criticism about the, quote, American war machine and our, quote, wasteful foreign wars. She's also been accused of being sympathetic to Russia, at one point endorsing a Russian war justification about U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine.

Are we buying, selling, or holding Jeffrey at 47% chance that Tulsi Gabbard gets confirmed? I'm interested in buying. The fact that it was up as high as 80, at that point, I probably would have sold. But we're basically talking about a coin flip right here. And I feel like there could be some more news that comes out that, you know, I don't want to say something about Trump, like, reasserting that he wants Gabbard and maybe the market goes up.

Doesn't the failure of Matt Gaetz suggest that there is a coalition in the Senate that includes Collins, Murkowski, Mitch McConnell and others who are willing to hold the line and say, no, we're not going to pick a Bernie Sanders ally who's been sympathetic to Russia as the director of national intelligence? That actually is an interesting wrinkle and something that we talked about last time with RFK Jr. He's like Democrat.

democratic past is that going to be like an issue for some republican senators i think in this case it's probably just more that there is a group of not isolationist republicans in the senate who might find gabbard's past comments uh not the biggest win so i guess i would hold yeah i would hold gabbard is the one for me that i'm most uncertain about right i i

I would bet on Hegseth and Kennedy going down. Oh, interesting. I think most, if not all, of the others are probably pretty safe. For me, Gabbard is the real question mark. And I think it's for all the reasons that Jeffrey was pointing out. I think national security is an area that a lot of Republican senators don't want to mess with, even if they also don't want

to cross Trump and especially doing it multiple times, perhaps with Gates and Hegseth and all this stuff that, you know, as maybe you guys talked about last time. But I think in addition to the kind of moving the Overton window with like a pick like Gates and then like Pam Bondi looks really good in comparison, there's also a cumulative effect to this, which is the more nominees that get shot down or kind of quietly withdrawn under pressure, the more pressure is going to be on the Senate to confirm the remainder, because at a certain point it starts to look like a total sh**.

show where it's like Donald Trump can't even pick a cabinet with a Senate of his own party. Does he even control like his own destiny?

Those kinds of pressures could tip Gabbard over the edge because she doesn't have like this really salacious sex scandal or something the way that Gates does or Hegseth does. But at the same time, yeah, the national security stuff, I think that kind of thing is really going to spook Republicans of a certain ilk. People like Mitch McConnell may be willing to cross Trump.

See, I would almost think the reverse that there's a better chance that Hegseth, for example, gets confirmed in,

in order to sort of go along with Trump's wishes than Tulsi Gabbard. There's also a cumulative effect on Trump, which is, you know, he's already down one nomination, which suggests that any he admitted himself, he couldn't get to 50. That suggests that he doesn't necessarily have full control over his own party. So they've become incentives for him in order to look strong and claim his mandate and all of this stuff to nominate Trump.

Yeah, no, I think that's true. Okay, let's talk about some of the things that Trump might do once in office. And we'll get to more of these later on as we get closer to inauguration day. But according to the markets, there's an 83% chance of Trump pardoning a January 6th protester in his first 100 days.

days. For context, this is not a popular move to make, according to YouGov polling. 36% of Americans favor handing out such a pardon, and it's only Republicans for whom a majority approve. And even there, it's about two thirds of Republicans. So, Nivania, are we buying, selling or holding? I mean, this is such a tricky one. I think this is really an area where betting markets are going to struggle tremendously.

having insider information about what one famously capricious person will do. It feels right, so I guess I'll hold. Like, he has promised to do that on the campaign trail. And we know, actually, we do know empirically that despite their reputation, politicians do tend to keep their promises. But also at the same time, doing that unpopular move in the first hundred days seems silly when, like, you can maybe just do it

later on at a time when people are fewer people are paying attention and you can bury it a little bit more. So I really don't feel like I have a great handle on this, but it does seem like the type of thing Trump would do at some point in his presidency. I'll say that. Yeah, I think that timing aspect is why I'd be inclined to sell

Doing it in the first hundred days when you might be focused on other things a bit more seems like a potential way that this doesn't happen quickly, but it does happen eventually. So I would probably sell.

Maybe related to that timing issue is that according to Polymarket, there's an 8% chance of Trump pardoning himself in the first 100 days. So overall, Americans do not support a president pardoning themselves. Even Republicans are not supportive in general, although there are some wrinkles that when you add in Trump specifically, more Republicans will say that they approve of him.

him pardoning himself 58% in a CNN poll. But overall, under 30% of Americans approve something like this, you know, just 11% in a YouGov survey and just 28% in that CNN survey. So are we buying, selling or holding at an 8% chance of Trump pardoning himself in his first three months or so in office?

I'd probably hold on this. We're holding everything, guys. I know. Well, no, no. Here's the thing. You guys think the markets are doing pretty well. No, I think it's entirely possible that he will do this. But the first 100 days, this is exactly the kind of thing I would think you would do at the end of your time in office. Right. So that even if it gets caught in legal stuff, you're out of office by the time it's being dealt with. It just seems like something that Trump would do in like...

December 2028, you know, after the election.

There were like four criminal cases against him, right? Two of them are on the state level, which he can't pardon himself against. And then two of them are federal, which he can now make disappear. And so why would you even pardon yourself? Why would you even bother and give yourself the political headache? And I think maybe the reason is the one reason is when you're leaving office and like maybe you've been replaced by a Democratic president and then you're afraid of that again. But yeah, to Jeffrey's point, then just do it when you're leaving office. Why would you do it in the first hundred days?

Yeah, this also gets a question surrounding his motivations at the end of his second term, which is if he feels like he needs a Republican to replace him in order to grant a pardon or something like that. Things that we will, I'm sure, get to in coverage of Trump's second term. But moving on, according to the markets, there is a 42% chance that Trump ends the war in Ukraine within his first 90 days in office. This is such interesting wording. Yeah.

The idea that Trump will end the war. That's true. Yeah, that's that's not falsifiable. The Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin spoke in the days after the election and Trump reportedly told Putin not to escalate the war and that he was interested in further conversations about the resolution of Ukraine's war. He said on the campaign that he could resolve the war in one day.

To your point about presidential candidates keeping their promises, Nathaniel, maybe it will happen on January 21st. 42% chance of me buying, selling or holding. This is an easy sell for me. So with the caveat that I am not a foreign policy expert, wars are really hard to end.

We have very famously had a lot of trouble ending some recent American wars. And I don't think you can just kind of snap your fingers and make something go away. I don't think this is a failure of diplomacy. I think it's just a really difficult and intractable problem. And so I don't think that Trump will be able to end it.

I don't think this is something that is going to end quickly, even if suddenly, you know, maybe Trump stops helping Ukraine, for example. Ukraine, I think, has shown an aptitude to resist Russia that has surprised or initially surprised a lot of observers. And so I don't think that would mean the war would end quickly in Russia's favor. And I certainly don't think that Trump is going to intervene on Ukraine's side either. It's

Certainly not more than Biden did. I don't see how this war ends anytime soon. Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything Nathaniel said I would sell. We can actually pivot to the next one of these because. Yeah, I mean, I was going to say there's a similar market for the war in Gaza. I don't know if you feel any differently, but the market has a 51 percent chance of Trump ending the war in Gaza within his first 100 days.

days. It's interesting that these are so high. The Scottish teens are really confident in Trump's ability to end wars. Yeah. And I mean, especially for Israel, Gaza, like that one, you could see Trump obviously weighing in heavily on the side of Israel and like really helping them out. And like maybe there could be some kind of brute force campaign against Gaza. But the whole point of the Israel-Palestine conflict, right, is that it is

been going on in like on and off for decades and that it's a famously difficult thing to end. And so even if you had maybe something that looked like a conventional military victory against Hamas, there would still continue to be an insurgency against Israel. So like, does it count as ending the war? I don't know. We are past the point where there are these grand trees of Versailles ending wars, right? Like that is not going to happen. They're not going to have some big fancy like summit.

So, yeah, selling. All right. Let's move on to something that is a little more tangible. There is a 37% chance of Trump signing any federal legislation or performing any executive action that explicitly eliminates federal income taxes on tips in the U.S. by May 1, 2025. One of the more popular things that Trump promised on the campaign trail, eliminating tax on tips, a 37% chance.

Honestly, I'd probably sell. I think at the end of the day, this is something that could very well happen, but I think it's going to get tied up in larger conversations about taxing and spending and Trump's tax cuts and all these other aspects of the American fiscal planning or whatever, rather than necessarily just happening that fast. That's very fast.

That's true. The timing aspect of all of these adds an extra layer of uncertainty and difficulty. Sounds like I'm a little more optimistic than Jeffrey that this will happen or that it'll attempt to happen because, A, like you said, Galen, this is more popular. This seems like one of the kinds of things that Trump could actually get through Congress, which a lot of his other policies seem less likely given the narrow margins in the House.

And then also just like we do know that Trump intent that he has said and his staff has said that they plan on issuing just like a flurry of executive actions very early in the presidency. I don't know legally if he could do that through executive action, but like maybe he'll try. And like, I don't know if that satisfies the contract in that regard.

Yeah, I think actually this is a question that gets more at what do you expect the White House to do totally on its own in the first 100 days? Because when it comes to putting together a budget and putting legislation through the reconciliation process, Republicans have about a year to do something like that. And there is going to be vigorous debate over things like this because it will significantly decrease government revenue and Republicans are going to have to decide how much they want to stick to their arguments about the debt

and deficit and how much they want to stick to Trump's campaign promises. And that's not something that's going to resolve itself quickly. It's not going to resolve itself in 90 days. It probably won't resolve itself in four years, but they at least have a year to come to some sort of conclusion about where they want to set the total deficit spending for the budget that they're going to put forth.

So I say basically 0% chance that this makes it through Congress in the first 100 days. However, if you just expect Trump to come into office and sign like a hundred executive actions in the first 100 days, why not do this? You know, like in the same way that Biden would forgive student loan debt with an executive action, the courts say you couldn't do it. The courts will almost certainly say that Trump can't do this without Congress, but like,

Right. Right.

Yeah. And I think you could say something similar for some of these other contracts that are out there. So, for instance, Polymarket says there's a 56 percent chance of Trump issuing an executive order or signing a bill that would try to eliminate birthright citizenship. There's a 67 percent chance of him issuing an executive order or signing a bill about transgender rights.

rights in sports. And those, again, feel the same way where like maybe he'll issue an executive action. You know, that seems likely and like fairly characteristic of Trump. But who knows if it will actually make a difference policy wise, but it might be more about picking a political fight. All right, let's move on and talk about whether the incumbent advantage is dead. But first, a break. Marketing is hard.

But I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now, and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion.

It may take some time before there's a firm consensus on why Democrats lost the presidential election.

As Democrats point fingers and the blame game rages on, there's no denying that the party faced global headwinds. This year, in elections all over the world, incumbent parties suffered historic defeats. By our estimate among democracies that held elections this year, which there were more of than any other year on record, more than 80% saw the incumbent party lose seats or vote share from the last election.

So how did this global anti-incumbent wave shape our election? And what can it tell us about politics going forward?

Jeffrey, what's going on here? What is with this anti-incumbent sentiment that we've seen worldwide? Can you answer it with just one word, COVID? Yes, I think COVID and the fallout from COVID. So in the aftermath of the pandemic, the world's supply chains got messy, inflation rose, a bunch of pent up demand. So the price of products shot up. That affected everything.

people the world over. There's a lot of negative economic sentiment around the world about the way things are going. The parties in power tended to take the brunt of that once they had to go up for election. And I do think it's interesting in the grand scheme of things,

We've been talking about those economic numbers earlier in this and what people believe or don't believe about the economy, what they feel about the economy. But maybe the narrow margin in the presidential election in terms of national popularity in the grand scheme of things was indicative of people actually thinking the economy was not good, but maybe it wasn't as bad as it could be because Kamala Harris lost but didn't lose by a ton.

Whereas a lot of other incumbent parties around the world lost a lot more. Yeah, I want to get into that. So Harris will end up with a popular vote share around 48%. Biden had about 51%, three-point decline. If you look at other countries in France, the ruling party's vote share fell by five percentage points. In Japan, it was eight, Austria 12, Portugal 13. In the UK, conservatives lost a whopping 20 points.

Why were democratic losses smaller? Is it just the economy or is it what we were talking about earlier in terms of partisanship?

Yeah, I think it's partisanship and the flawed nature of the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, being Donald Trump and so unpopular and having a lot of people thinking that he is a threat to democracy and him being a convicted felon and all of these things. Obviously, this is not provable, but my suspicion is had Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley won the Republican nomination instead of Donald Trump, I suspect that it would have been much more of a blowout.

One of the challenges with this analysis in general is that obviously different countries have different electoral systems and the U.S. has a two-party system. Democrats were also helped by the fact that there wasn't necessarily another place for some voters to go except to stay home or vote for third party. But that's obviously voting third party in this country is pretty rare.

There is still the difference that at the very least, the American economy is growing and growing sort of by historically decent rates, whereas the British economy is not. And that in and of itself, like inflation on top of economic stagnation.

Obviously, there's even more economic reason for Brits to be unhappy. But there is still that 20 percent of democracies where ruling parties defied the odds and either held on or increased their vote share. Do we know sort of what the trend is there? Why that happened in some places? Yeah, I think another thing that is common to some of the incumbent parties that have

kind of bucked the trend this year worldwide is that they have placed more of an emphasis on like national security or like homeland security type things and like being really hawkish on like immigration, for example. And so there have been some countries that have really cracked down and like the incumbent parties were like deporting people. And obviously, I think that's a big part of this whole populism wave is it's both economic issues and also immigration issues, which we see in Europe as well. And I think

Democrats being the more dovish party in immigration, they weren't about to deport a bunch of people, though we did see Biden kind of take a more rightward turn on immigration, but obviously it wasn't enough. Yeah, so I think maybe you're talking about the Dominican Republic. If the national security question is a trend, we also saw countries closer to the conflict in Ukraine have their ruling parties do a little better, maybe like Moldova and Finland, for example. All told, there's the trend of 2024, but we've actually picked up on a trend going back, you

you know, maybe a decade or even more that the incumbency advantage in the United States in particular is declining. I mean, traditionally in political science, we think of, you know, incumbents have an easier time raising money. They have higher name recognition. They may have credibility with their constituents because they're put in a position where they can provide constituent services and the like. We already have tracked that that has declined. You can see that in the numbers.

Are we at the point where we're ready to say that being an incumbent could even be a disadvantage or not quite yet, given how we saw Senate incumbents perform in 2024?

I think it's compelling. There's no way to prove it. So, first of all, I would separate out the presidency from Senate and House, because I think in Senate and House, it's very easy. And I think a lot of voters still do this is that you will say, well, like Congress in general is doing a real bad job. But like my representative is OK. And there's a throw the bums out. But like everybody else, all the other bums, which they don't get to vote on, obviously.

I think for president, it's different because there's only one president. And so it's clear if you are unhappy with the direction of the country and you want to react to that at the ballot box, you have to throw out the sitting president. This is obviously the type of thing that will take literally decades to get enough data to really be able to say for sure. And we're not there yet. But I am fairly compelled by the fact that so Gallup asks Americans generally, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States? And the last time that

more Americans were satisfied than dissatisfied was literally 2004. So it has been 20 years since Americans were happy about the direction of the country. Also, since then, 2004, George W. Bush was reelected. But during that time, the only incumbent party that was reelected was Barack Obama in 2012.

I think there is a real possibility that we should start to think about party switches being the default and reelection being the thing that's a little more flukish, because I think in '08 you had Obama coming in over wide dissatisfaction with Bush and the economy. In 2016, obviously, Trump was a reaction to Obama and Biden was a reaction to Trump and now

Trump is a reaction to Biden again. And I think that in 2012, you can explain that away because Mitt Romney was a fairly weak candidate. He's like you talk about like the opposite of populism, whereas Barack Obama, obviously a generationally talented campaigner. And so, yeah, I think it is fairly compelling to say, hey, like if Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, as they have been telling us for literally 20 years that they are, maybe your default expectation should be a party change unless there is a another compelling reason to say otherwise.

Pretty hot take there, Nathaniel. Jeffrey, do you agree? I think I agree with the broad strokes of what Nathaniel is saying in the sense that if you're thinking about this just sort of like overall control of a chamber in Congress or overall control of the presidency, I can totally believe that

Being the party in power is not necessarily going to be a guarantee of holding on to power. But that was never true necessarily. It's just that we may be in a more consistent back and forth in this current political environment, in part because the country is just extremely closely divided. But obviously at the individual seat level, there is evidence of less of an incumbent advantage, particularly thinking about like the House of Representatives. Almost all incumbent members are safe as a default starting point.

And their biggest worry in a lot of cases is actually a primary rather than a general election. But then that doesn't necessarily change which party controls it, but it may change the type of person from the party that controls it. Right. And we have seen an increase in the number of incumbents who have lost in primaries or who have gotten real scares in primaries. So I do think there is something to this whole anti-incumbent thing.

Do you guys know the last time we had a rapid spate of single term presidents? It was the Gilded Age, which is my favorite comp for this this era in politics. Another very closely divided time. Partisanship was super high. There was a lot of enmity between the two sides. Lots of unrest, like social, political, economic unrest.

There's a lot in common there and an interesting thing. And obviously, there's no guarantee that things will turn out the same way. But kind of the way that that situation ended up resolving itself was that there were factions within each party that kind of evolved out. And there was a progressive Republicans and the progressive Democrats. And then there was a whole progressive movement. And for a while, the parties got really frustrated, like the definitions and the ideologies of the parties got really frustrated because it wasn't necessarily the best way to think about ideology in the country. And there was the whole Teddy Roosevelt in the election of 1912 and on.

and on and on and on. All right. Let's not get carried away. I'm rambling. Cut me off, Galen. Cut me off. And with that, happy Thanksgiving to all. Thank you, Nathaniel and Jeff. Thanks, Galen. Thank you, Galen. My name is Galen Drew. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcast at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion.

And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads. Go to LibsynAds.com. That's L-I-B-S-Y-N ads.com today.