An underrated phenomenon in American electoral politics is the disadvantage that political parties tend to have in presidential elections. Post-World War II, an imperfect but reasonable proxy for when the mass media age began, there have been seven cases of a political party winning two presidential elections in a row—Eisenhower, Kennedy/Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama. And in only one of those cases—George H.W. Bush succeeding Ronald Reagan—did the winner of the third election come from the same party as the winner of the first two.
There are, of course, some extenuating circumstances. Post-Watergate and post-Iraq/Katrina/economic collapse Republicans were so deeply unpopular that Gerald Ford and John McCain were likely drawing dead before the election began. But America was relatively prosperous and peaceful when it eschewed the vice presidents of Eisenhower and Clinton and a Secretary of State of Obama. Richard Nixon’s 1960 loss is perhaps the most instructive of the cases—he had the largest margin of defeat by electoral votes and was the only one to also lose the popular vote. And it wasn’t as though Dwight Eisenhower’s popularity tanked in his second term: the moment from the 1960 campaign that is most remembered today was the televised presidential debate in which John F. Kennedy appeared handsome and charming while Richard Nixon, by any reasonable standard a very intelligent man, looks sweaty and came across as standoffish. What America wanted was less of a political realignment and more of a national vibes shift.
When Hillary Clinton participated in her first election, for a Senate seat in the blue state (albeit, a less blue state than it is today) of New York, she was running essentially even with Republican New York mayor Rudy Giuliani when Giuliani, amidst a cancer diagnosis and a public divorce, abruptly dropped out of the race. Clinton eventually beat Republican Rick Lazio by 12.26% in a state that Al Gore carried by 24.98% in the presidential election. Clinton, as an incumbent in a strong 2006 for Democrats, won re-election handily, but she ran behind New York gubernatorial non-incumbent Eliot Spitzer. In 2008, she was the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, backed by most of the party establishment, but she lost to freshman senator Barack Obama. And then when she ran again in 2016, despite the overwhelming (and possibly nefarious) backing of the Democratic Party, she lost 23 of the 57 Democratic contests to the severely underfunded Bernie Sanders, a mid-seventies self-described socialist who never ran for office as a Democrat before.
I am not reciting Hillary Clinton’s electoral history as a means of dunking on her as a person nor as a civil servant—I think she is very obviously competent and was the subject of plenty of unfair (though quite a bit of fair) political criticism. But she was simply never successful as a political candidate. There is no evidence to suggest an ability to win elections that were not slam dunks.
In the single greatest victory of his political career, Donald Trump received nearly three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. In a cycle where Republicans won by 1.1% over Democrats in House elections, Trump lost by 2.1%.
Obviously, the popular vote was irrelevant in determining who would become the 45th president of the United States, but the popular vote did still happen, and it marked the first time that Hillary Clinton ever outperformed the Democratic Party. But this popular vote loss was still one of Trump’s better electoral performances. Despite candidates such as Ted Cruz, John Kasich, and Marco Rubio dropping out along the way, Trump still received less than 45% of Republican votes. In 2020, he once again was outrun by Republicans in House elections en route to the biggest popular vote defeat by a major presidential candidate since 2008 while running against a former longtime political loser in Joe Biden.
The perception that Donald Trump is a good political candidate is largely based on two things, one of which is inaccurate and one of which is accurate. The former is that he keeps claiming everybody loves him—even before he encouraged his supporters and his vice president to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election under the presumption that he must have clearly won as a tautological result of his self-evident greatness. The latter is that Donald Trump’s supporters are passionate, which is true. The parts of rural Illinois I’ve driven through dozens of times to or from my wife’s family in Wisconsin have typically voted Republican, but Ron DeSantis wasn’t inspiring conservatives to paint murals on the roofs of their barns. They weren’t gathering in droves just to be a part of a Nikki Haley rally. But in an inversion of Richard Nixon’s “silent majority”, Trump supporters are the extremely loud ones. In a flip from the Obama era, it was Republicans who were relentless in online canvassing. Surely there are exceptions in Joe Biden’s family, for instance, but every Biden voter (and Clinton voter, and inevitable Kamala Harris voter) I have ever known does not view this as a central part of their identity. Even in the cases of two potential history-making candidates, and even in the case of those who wear their politics on their sleeves, the movements are built around a collective vision. The ones who brought down the house at a recent Harris rally in Georgia were Megan Thee Stallion and Quavo. Even if Trump did a better job of courting more hip celebrities, the star at any Trump rally will inevitably, always, be Donald Trump.
In modern American history, parties tend to jettison those who lost presidential elections from presidential politics. Even when they remain involved on a legislative level, such as Mitt Romney or John Kerry, there has never been a clamoring for them to run again. The last presidential loser to become a candidate again was Richard Nixon, who had the benefits of reassessing his political coalition over an eight year gap and of having mounted a much stronger campaign in 1960 than Barry Goldwater did in 1964. But Donald Trump hasn’t felt the need to reassess his approach because he has deluded himself into a belief that he actually is extremely popular, having won in two popular landslides if not for massive electoral corruption. To be clear it is possible, perhaps even probable, that Trump does not actually believe this line, but it is what he keeps telling anyone who will listen. He hasn’t made any effort to sway Joe Biden voters, and while in 2016 he at least made (vague) overtures to corporate outsourcing and the opioid epidemic, vowing to end these bad things that Barack Obama had not fixed, at this point, the entire Donald Trump campaign is centered around Donald Trump. When recently asked about his increasingly unpopular running mate J.D. Vance and whether he would be ready to take over as president if Trump were to die in office, he dismissed the notion that vice presidents actually matter. And in the mind of Donald Trump, the protagonist of his own reality and somebody for whom the world ends when his life does, this was probably a vanishingly rare example of him telling the absolute truth as he sees it.
Kamala Harris has not previously held a particularly strong reputation as a political candidate—not unlike Hillary Clinton, she won races in a dark blue state by somewhat less than you might expect margins. And in the last presidential election cycle, despite some pointed criticisms of Joe Biden in their first presidential debate, Harris 2020 didn’t even survive 2019. But she also found herself at a crossroads: she was not an unapologetic lefty like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, nor a committed centrist like Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg; she didn’t even get the monopoly on a historic campaign given the presence of another woman in Warren (and to a lesser extent Amy Klobuchar) and an openly gay/historically young man in Buttigieg. In a ranked-choice voting scenario, where she would likely finish third on a ton of Sanders/Warren or Warren/Sanders ballots, Harris didn’t have a reasonable path forward.
The reason that Kamala Harris has a considerably better chance of becoming the 47th president than she did of becoming the Democratic nominee for the 46th is because unlike in 2020, she now has the chance to run against a historically unpopular presidential candidate who has made no efforts to change. This is a man who got *shot at a political rally*, got a photo opportunity that a PR team could only dream to concoct, and his popularity remained stagnant. Donald Trump has been the main character in America: The Series for almost a decade; people have made up their minds. And the verdict seemingly is what it always has been—America doesn’t like Donald Trump.
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