The Case for Incumbency

2024 was the year of the election as countries across the world held elections. As the results of these elections came in a trend began to emerge. By the middle of the year it was evident that there was a broad backlash against incumbent governments. And it really was a global trend; ParlGov global research has tracked the elections of 10 major countries and for the first time since at least the 1950s every governing party lost vote share in 2024. 

For American political pundits the questions very quickly became, "would America follow this global trend?" But as quickly as the question was asked it became muddled. Yes, Democrats held the Presidency and the Senate, but Republicans held the House, and the Supreme Court was dominated by Republican appointed Justices. Control of the federal government was divided, and while Democratic President Joe Biden experienced low approval ratings with a 56% disapproval rating as of the midpoint of 2024, House Republican governance was conspicuously dysfunctional and the Supreme Court has experienced a net disapproval rate since the overturning of Roe v Wade.

To further complicate the question the Republican Presidential nominee was a former President who had lost his previous reelection campaign to the current President, and by July 21, 2024 Joe Biden had dropped out of the race to be replaced by his Vice President, Kamala Harris. This created a real question of whether Trump would be burdened with the incumbency label, having served as President less than four years prior, or would Harris as a member of the current administration.

We have since gotten our answers to "which candidate did voters identify as the incumbent" and "whether America would follow the anti-incumbent trend". Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives while winning the Presidency and flipping the Senate, placing control of the government squarely with Republicans. This result was foreshadowed as far back as January 2024 when Gallup asked voters whether President Biden and most members of Congress deserved reelection.

This finding was reaffirmed in October when Gallup again asked whether members of Congress deserved to be reelected.

As evident by these results, the sentiment towards incumbents deteriorated over the nine months from January to October 2024 when only a plurality, not even a majority, of respondents felt their own Representatives in Congress deserved to be reelected. 

This begs the question, though, what exactly do voters want when expressing an anti-incumbency preference. To be anti-incumbent is an abstraction, after all. To move from an abstraction to a fleshed out position one must first identify who, or what the incumbent is; and as stated earlier, that was at the very least muddled in the 2024 election cycle. Even after the incumbent is identified a set of policies, or lack thereof, must be prescribed to the incumbent that voters do not support. 

In the case of the 2024 election the economy was the most important issue to voters. President Biden and Democrats were seen as both responsible for the inflationary environment of the past few years due to increased federal spending in response to COVID, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and were viewed as not having taken action to meaningfully reduce prices. 

Given that voters ranked the economy as their top issue in the 2024 election, and thought candidate Trump would be better able to handle the economy, it would seem that the nature of voter's anti-incumbency preference was motivated by economic policies. 

Outside of issue preferences of the 2024 election, there is some additional polling that may help further shape the anti-incumbency concept. First, pollsters find that an increasing percentage of Americans identify as independents rather than Democrats or Republicans. Furthermore, a majority of Americans believe we need a third-party option in our elections.

Second, between 2000 and 2020 32% to 43% of the eligible voting population is not participating in elections. Of that cohort between 11% and 18% reported not voting because they were not interested or felt their vote would not make a difference and 8% to 25% reported not voting because they did not like the candidates or campaign issues. This is a significant portion of the population that is disengaged from our political system because they do not think that system is responsive their beliefs.

These findings would seem to suggest anti-incumbency is not necessarily partisan or even issues based, but rather a rejection of our political system as a whole. Viewed in this light, the anti-incumbency vote was perhaps more of an abstraction than a rejection of a specific set of policy prescriptions after all. 

If I was to synthesize each of these poll results into a single expression of voter sentiment it would be this; voters want a responsive government and do not feel like that is what they are getting. This is further supported by the disapproval ratings for all three branches of government. But what does it mean for a government to be responsive? 

There are two ways in which a government can be responsive; it can be responsive to voters or it can be responsive in its ability to perform its duties, what I will call actionability. While distinct, these are not necessarily mutually exclusive qualities of government.

I do want to be careful here not to diminish or discredit the dissatisfaction expressed by voters in the series of polls cited above, or in the 2024 election. After all, I too want a government that is responsive to my political persuasion! However, I think it would be a mistake to not address the contradictions between voters' expressed preferences and their revealed preferences. Namely, voters' expressed preference for a government with greater actionability and their revealed preference of, at best, vacillating between a normal governing party in the Democratic Party and a party that is seemingly uninterested in governing in the Republican Party. Now some may say this is an unfair characterization of the Republican Party, but this is a party that failed to adopt a party platform in 2020 and the 118th Congress, led by Republicans, was by far the least productive Congress in at least 40 years. Whether or not one agrees with Democratic policy positions and governance, if voters desire a government with actionability then they should be voting for politicians other than what Republicans have offered.

Voters are not fully at fault for this contradiction, however. Our system presents voters with a theoretical false dilemma, but practically only allows for two legitimate options in any election. Not only is there not only a Democratic and Republican side to any issue, but voters also do not consistently hold Democratic or Republican perspective on every issue. People are complicated and their political perspectives are equally heterodox. 

While there are two ways in which a government can be responsive, my read of the motivation behind the anti-incumbency vote is a frustration with the actionability of government more so than the responsiveness of government to voters. As we saw with voters' top issue being the economy, voters were responding to inaction from the Biden administration on prices. Further, Gallup has also found that a majority of Americans would like their elected leaders to compromise on issues. That's not to say that responsiveness to voters is not also important, so I do want to come back to it, but first I would like to examine the second form of responsiveness; government's actionability. 

What I think is being overlooked by the anti-incumbent voter is the value of institutional knowledge. In the past several years we have seen examples of the benefit of legislators with deep institutional knowledge and those without. Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi was able to effectively govern the House of Representatives as Speaker of the House with a very narrow, ten seat majority, because she understood the levers of power available to her. Republican Representative Kevin McCarthy, on the other hand, may be the prime example of a legislator who did not have deep institutional knowledge; his tenure as Speaker of the House also oversaw a narrow, ten seat majority, was extremely dysfunctional and punctuated by his own caucus removing him as speaker and McCarthy resigning soon after. While both wielded the Speaker's gavel with similar majorities the Senate and White House were aligned Pelosi and not McCarthy, creating different incentive structures for both; Pelosi to enact meaningful legislation to advance Democratic priorities and McCarthy to obstruct and frustrate Democratic policies. To that end, McCarthy could be considered a success. Although, as the earlier polling cited, American voters want their elected officials to compromise on at least some issues. Further, control of Congress has been divided before and not been as unproductive as the 118th Congress and no other Speaker has been removed by their own caucus.

Congress is a complicated institution with a set of arcane rules operating in a larger governmental structure that only adds additional layers of complexity. Institutional knowledge gained from having served in Congress allows for individual legislators to have actionability within this system and as a result create a government with actionability. This is not to suggest that institutional knowledge is the only knowledge valuable to a legislator. There is value in having a Congress made up of Senators and Representatives with a diverse set of backgrounds and expertise. Expertise that allows legislators to effectively regulate certain industries and backgrounds that makes legislators genuine representatives of their constituents. 

Beyond institutional knowledge, an incumbent will have existing relationships with other legislators who they know they can work with to enact, amend, or block legislation. More senior legislators are more likely to get high ranking positions within party leadership and on committees. This allows those legislators to set the agenda for the legislative session as a whole or for specific committees. Ultimately, seniority means influence and legislators with influence have greater actionability to be able to deliver results for their constituents.

This is to argue that if voters want a government with actionability, basing their vote on an anti-incumbency zeitgeist is not the means to achieve that particular end. What this is not an argument for is an inherent virtue of career politicians. Politicians that do not need to be responsive to voters often end up being lazy or corrupt, or both. In fact, to ensure we have a government with actionability we need a government that is responsive to its voters. 

To that end a majority of voters think that there should be term limits for members of Congress. While on its face support for Congressional term limits and anti-incumbency may seem to express the same sentiment I think there is a nuanced distinction between the primary expression between support for each. The anti-incumbency vote did actually result in a responsiveness to voters, at least in electoral results. As such, and for the reasons laid out earlier, this seems to be an expression of frustration with the governments actionability, or lack thereof. Imposing term limits, on the other hand, appears to be an attempt on the part of voters to reclaim some government responsiveness.

The issues laid out with a blanket anti-incumbency vote apply just the same to term limits. Further, to impose term limits on Congress is to treat a symptom of the problem—entrenched politicians—and not the underlying issue—an electoral system that makes it overly difficult to remove lazy, incompetent, or corrupt politicians. Congressional term limits would remove both those legislators that are effective along with those that are ineffective, without discretion and with no mechanism to ensure those ineffective legislators are replaced with effective ones. 

Gerrymandering, campaign finance issues, and our first-past-the-post electoral system all contribute to a system where elected officials become entrenched and become less accountable to their constituents. In a better system, not even an ideal system, elections would be the mechanism to remove unpopular elected officials, making term limits obsolete. Improving our elections systems would allow voters to retain the effective and popular representative while removing the lazy, incompetent, and corrupt. 

I would argue the reason we do not have a government with actionability is precisely because we do not have a government that is responsive to its voters. To fix the former the latter must be addressed.