For decades, incumbent leaders enjoyed a clear advantage, with the prestige of office often tipping the scales in their favour. However, recent elections reveal a shift: anti-incumbency sentiments have surged across democracies, from Trump’s ousting of Kamala Harris in the US to major upsets in Britain and Argentina
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Incumbent leaders once held a clear advantage. In the US, the prestige of the Oval Office and the allure of Air Force One traditionally made sitting presidents the front-runners for reelection.
With Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris, Republicans and Democrats will alternate control of the White House for a fourth consecutive term — a level of political fluctuation between parties that the US hasn’t seen since the late 1800s.
Anti-incumbency sentiments have spread beyond the US, impacting major democracies and affecting both left- and right-leaning governments.
In the UK,
Labour ousted the Conservatives in July; Argentina saw “anarcho-capitalist”
Javier Milei claim victory last November; and longtime incumbent parties have recently lost ground in countries as varied as India, Japan, South Africa, and South Korea.
Though there are exceptions — such as
Claudia Sheinbaum from Mexico’s ruling left-wing party, who was elected president in June — the wave of anti-incumbency has challenged established political patterns.
Despite strong economic growth under outgoing US President Joe Biden, with the US leading the developed world despite high inflation and no active combat deployments, political analysts widely anticipated US Vice President Harris’s win.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre attributed the loss to the broader global trend, noting the lingering impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. “What we saw two nights ago was not unusual to what we have seen from the incumbencies around the world on the global stage,” she said on Thursday.
Trump
is expected to reintroduce the US withdrawal from international climate commitments, adopt a tougher stance with European allies, and attempt to roll back hallmark Democratic domestic initiatives on health care and the environment.
Is disapproval the new normal?
Trump won despite never once topping 50 per cent approval in his 2017-2021 term – the first time in Gallup polling since it began such ratings after World War II.
Biden enjoyed majority support only at the start of his term, with approval tumbling after the chaotic August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, even as the pandemic eased.
Economic statistics, of course, do not mirror what ordinary voters feel, and every election also needs to factor in more abstract points such as candidates’ personal charisma.
John V Kane, a political scientist at New York University, said there was an increasingly smaller share of persuadable voters than in the 20th century, when presidents sometimes would win by 10 or 20 percentage points.
Voters still “tend to think presidents should be afforded two terms so long as the economic, social and international conditions are fairly normal,” he told AFP.
“And herein lies the challenge: the past five years have been anything but normal in these respects. The pandemic and subsequent shock to the economy in 2020 very likely turned incumbency from an asset into a liability,” Kane said.
“Swing voters may not know the best policies, if any, to fix the situation, but one thing they can be certain about is that they want the situation to change.”
Democracy ‘pendulum’ in the digital age
Todd Belt, a political scientist at George Washington University, pointed to Covid and inflation but also the fragmentation of media sources, with voters turning to partisan outlets that fuel animosity toward incumbents.
“There are a lot of things in the world that are beyond the control of the president, but the president has to take credit or blame for all of them, and that makes things difficult,” Belt told AFP.
“We’ve reached sort of a pendulum aspect of democracy, because people are paying so much more attention to what’s going on now, and people’s patience is lessened for the incumbent party.”
Kane noted that incumbents still won overwhelmingly in the US Congress, and he expected future presidents to enjoy an incumbency advantage in more stable times.
“If, however, the ’new normal’ for the US economy is lackluster growth, high prices, etc., then swing voters may very well just perpetually keep trying their luck with the other party every four years,” Kane said.
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With inputs from AFP
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