I was on a panel about the presidential election on Wednesday, and after we talked about it for a while we got a great question, which went something like: “But…you’re making this sound like a normal election???”
As it happened, my Good Politics/Bad Politics colleague Julia Azari was on the panel, and she said something I totally agree with. Basically, if you look at what happened in the 2016 general election, just in terms of voting and the outcome, it was “normal” in a lot of ways. Republicans voted for the Republican candidate, Democrats voted for the Democratic candidate, the election was close as most recent elections have been, and as is often the case historically it proved tough for a party to win a third consecutive term. Of course, there were plenty of things about the campaign that were highly unusual, and the Republican nomination that year was by no means normal. But the outcome, including voting patters, didn’t need any special explanations.
What would that mean for this year? Another close election, to be sure, since that’s what’s normal now. And the pattern of an unpopular president with an improving economy which might or might not bail him out in time to bring him a second term is easy to recognize: It worked out for Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama, but not for George H.W. Bush. John Sides and Michael Tesler had an excellent item at Good Authority recently explaining what we should expect from past precedents, so go there if you want the details. And this might very well be all there is to it. For all the drama in 2016, historical patterns help up pretty well.
And yet …
There are just so many reasons why this election might - might! - be different in this sense from normal cycles with the incumbent president seeking re-election:
Most obviously, the challenger is a former president
The challenger is under (multiple) indictments, and has just lost major civil suits.
The challenger basically doesn’t accept the legitimacy of elections.1
As least so far, it appears to be the first US peace-time election in 24 years, but…
…with heavy media coverage of two foreign wars, it may feel to some more like a wartime election than the law two or three cycles.
The economy is almost certainly improved, and there are good arguments it’s unusually good, but it’s also coming out of a highly unusual set of economic circumstances.
There’s also what appears an unusually salient single issue, abortion, that almost certainly has helped the Democrats recently…
…and perhaps for that reason or others Democrats have outperformed Biden’s approval ratings in midterm and off-year elections.
And, yes, the nation is recovering from a catastrophic pandemic. Which may be coloring everything that happens, although know one knows how, or why, or in what direction if it does affect vote choice.
Look: It’s very possible that none of these things will matter. We don’t know! There are always unusual things in every election cycle, and most of them turn out to have no effect on the outcome.2 We’re in an era of strong partisanship, which means most votes are locked in at the beginning of every election cycle. But that certainly does not preclude the possibility that things will change in unpredictable ways. And while there are always unusual things, it sure seems that this cycle has far more than its share of major highly unusual circumstances.
All that said: It’s still very early. Head-to-head polling isn’t really predictive this far out. Presidential approval could still change just from normal processes - partisan Democrats return to Biden as they move from the context of “Biden vs. what they want” to “Biden vs. Trump.” Others could move to Biden along with improved perceptions of the economy. And of course, there’s still plenty of time for events to go wrong and voters to blame the incumbent for them. It’s too early to know the outcome, in other words, even if this a normal election.
Which it could be. But maybe, in some ways, not.
Just to clarify: All I’m talking about here is basic election outcomes: Who wins, and by how much. That’s not the only thing that matters about elections! And in many respects, we already know that this cycle is not normal at all, just as the 2016 election was not normal at all in ways other than the raw outcome, and that’s even more the case in this cycle. Those things really matter a lot (and will no matter who wins, but differently depending on the outcome), and I certainly don’t mean to dismiss them. Just saying: In one perhaps narrow but still quite important sense, the 2016 general election was fairly normal, and we don’t and can’t know yet whether 2024 will be.
I could say: “at least not the ones he loses” but that really just means not accepting them. Besides, he’s falsely complained about even the ones he’s won
It’s also possible unusual effects could be real but cancel each other out, or are so small that statistical methods deployed by the experts can’t identify them.