Election 2024: Will the United States Follow or Buck the Anti-Incumbent Trend?

Two thousand twenty-four has been unkind to incumbents around the world.

The “mother-of-all-election years” has seen voters in the United Kingdom send the ruling Conservative Party packing. In June, the African National Congress lost its parliamentary majority in South Africa for the first time. Japan’s long dominant Liberal Democratic Party lost its majority in elections just two weeks ago. French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to call for snap parliamentary elections this summer backfired spectacularly. The three parties in Germany’s ruling “traffic-light coalition” each got a thumbs down from voters in critical state elections last month.

Will the United States be yet another country to see the incumbent administration go down to defeat?

At first glance, Kamala Harris should be able to buck the trend. Voters say the economy is their top issue. While the British, French, German, Japanese, and South African economies are all struggling, the U.S. economy is booming. The Commerce Department reported earlier this week that GDP growth was 2.8 percent in the third quarter. Unemployment is near record lows. The stock market is at a record high. Inflation has cooled. In all, the U.S. economy looks to be on a historically good run. As a Wall Street Journal headline had it yesterday, “The Next President Inherits a Remarkable Economy.”

Americans, however, see things differently. Large majorities tell pollsters that the economy is bad. Equally large majorities say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

That disillusionment helps explain why the election remains a nailbiter as the race enters its final four days. Republicans seem confident that a tight race is actually good news for Donald Trump. The polls in 2016 and 2020 badly underestimated his actual levels of support. Add in the fact that undecided voters often break for the challenger in the closing days of an election, and it’s easy to see why the Trump team thinks he will become the first president since Grover Cleveland 132 years ago to win non-consecutive terms in office.

Democrats fear a repeat of the polling mistakes of 2016 and 2020. But they hope that polling in 2024 will ultimately repeat what happened in 2022. Then the polls underestimated the level of popular support for Democratic House candidates. What was supposed to be a red tsunami that would propel Republicans to dominance in the House became a red trickle that left them with a precarious majority.

No one today knows whether 2024 will look more like 2016 and 2020 or like 2022. Pollsters have been busy tweaking their methodologies this year to correct their past errors. They may be getting things more or less right this time around. Or perhaps, by fixing one problem they have introduced others. And, as is often forgotten, poll numbers come with a margin of error. All the current poll numbers in the battleground states are within their margins of error. With Electoral College votes being a winner-take-all process in all but two states, even tiny poll misses could mean a lopsided election outcome.

This means that almost anything could happen next week. Votes could break for either Harris or Trump across the battleground states, making one of them a clear and convincing Electoral College winner. Or 2024 could be so close that vote recounts and lawsuits become inevitable, potentially producing a protracted political and legal wrangle that exceeds the divisiveness of 2020.

So will the United States follow or buck the global anti-incumbent trend? The honest answer four days out is that everyone is guessing, and no one knows. In elections, like with movies, you sometimes have to wait to the end to learn how things turn out.

Campaign Update

As of this afternoon, more than 68 million Americans have already voted. That’s nearly 43 percent of the turnout four years ago. Be leery, however, about drawing any conclusions about who will win based on reports about the partisan and demographic composition of the vote so far. No one knows who the early voters are backing, or who will, or won’t, turn out on Election Day.

The Supreme Court ruled six to three on Wednesday that the Commonwealth of Virginia can purge some 1,600 names from the state’s voter rolls that it suspects are noncitizens. Two lower federal courts had ruled against Virginia, arguing that the scrub of the voter rolls was coming too close to Election Day. The Court did not explain its reasoning. The decision’s immediate impact is limited. Virginia has same-day registration. So any citizen whose name was incorrectly struck from the voting rolls can still vote.

Government officials warn that foreign interference in the election has ramped up and will likely continue after Election Day as votes are counted. Some of the efforts involve cyberattacks aimed at disrupting voting. Other efforts involve misinformation and disinformation. For example, local election officials in Pennsylvania have identified a fake video purporting to show mail-in ballots being destroyed in the Keystone State. Federal officials attributed the video to a Russian-based disinformation campaign. More will follow.

What the Candidates Are Saying

Harris and Trump both sought this week to present their “closing arguments.” Harris spoke at a rally Tuesday evening on the National Mall. She focused primarily on her argument that Trump “is not a candidate for president who is thinking about how to make your life better. This is someone who is unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.” 

The vice president mentioned foreign policy but didn’t break any new ground. She repeated her vow to “strengthen, not surrender, America’s global leadership.” She also made the case that America’s “alliances keep American people safe and make America stronger and more secure” and that “autocrats are rooting for” Trump.

Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden in New York. He focused primarily on his intent “to make America great again” and on how “in less than four years, Kamala Harris has shattered our middle class.”

When he eventually turned to foreign policy, he repeated his previous vows to make overseas producers “pay a very steep tariff,” to “end the war in Ukraine, which would have never happened if I was president," and to “stop the chaos in the Middle East and prevent WW3 from happening.”

The fact that Harris and Trump both mentioned the world beyond America’s borders but didn’t lead with it or dwell on it highlighted the fact that in 2024, like in most presidential elections, foreign policy is not driving how most people vote. But while 2024 was not a “foreign-policy election,” the vast differences between Harris and Trump on how the United States should operate overseas mean that the election result will have a major impact on U.S. foreign policy.

What the Pundits Are Saying

The Financial Times’s Alec Russell did a deep dive into what a Trump foreign policy might look like. What he concluded can be gleaned from the headline of his story: “Trump’s Foreign Policy Plan: Embrace Unpredictability.”

The results of next Tuesday’s election matter not just for the United States but for the rest of the world. So it’s not surprising that people around the globe are debating how the result will affect them. My colleagues at the Council on Foreign Relations asked tank leaders and scholars from Africa, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East to weigh in with their thoughts. Their answers show that assessments of the election’s impact likely election vary with who wins and which region or country is being asked.

My colleague Linda Robinson argued in Foreign Affairs that a Harris victory next week “would be consequential, perhaps even transformational.” That’s because her election would “bolster those fighting against tyranny” and “quiet lingering doubts that women are equipped to make decisions of war and peace.”

What the Polls Show

Pew Research Center examined what Americans think about how well the 2024 election will be run. Democrats (90 percent) are far more confident than Republicans (57 percent) that the election will be very, or somewhat, well run. That gap, which is eleven percentage points higher than in 2020, signals that Trump would have substantial support among his followers for a second “stop-the-steal campaign” should he lose again by a whisker. Should the election get tossed to the courts, just one in five Americans is confident that the U.S. Supreme Court would be a neutral arbitrator.

The Campaign Schedule

Election Day is four days away (November 5, 2024).

Electors will meet in each state and the District of Columbia to cast their votes for president and vice president in forty-six days (December 17, 2024).

The 119^th U.S. Congress will be sworn into office in sixty-three days (January 3, 2025).

The U.S. Congress will certify the results of the 2024 presidential election in sixty-six days (January 6, 2025).

Inauguration Day is eighty days away (January 20, 2025).

Oscar Berry assisted in the preparation of this post.