The seeds of Kamala Harris’ defeat were sown four years ago

Trump and Biden debate
Joe Biden also played a bad hand very badly - Gerald Herbert/AP

When Democrats beat Donald Trump in 2020, they were jubilant. The victory only grew sweeter when they won the Senate in the Georgia runoffs, watched Trump disgrace himself and his supporters in rejecting the 2020 election results, and won a battery of close races in 2022. It felt like a winning streak that would never end.

Now, they may regret having won that election in 2020. It turns out that Democrats lost by winning in 2020. They may also have lost by doing well in 2022.

As much as observers of American politics obsess over the skill of candidates, the tactics of campaigns, and the realignment of demographic groups, the reality is that a huge amount of our politics is driven by powerful cyclical trends. Those trends tend to draw both sides back to an equilibrium in which the two parties take turns in power. It’s always better to take power when you’re prepared to hold onto it for a while.

Presidential incumbents typically win. Before 2020, incumbents were re-elected 22 out of 32 times since 1792. This is just the third time since 1896 that a party took the White House, then gave it back four years later – and the second was four years ago. Then again, Democrats knew when they nominated Joe Biden in 2020 that he’d have to seek re-election when he was 81 years old. That worked against them from day one.

Exceptions to incumbents winning have come in clusters during periods of inflation and recession, such as when Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison traded ousters in 1888 and 1892 or when Jimmy Carter booted Gerald Ford in 1976, and then was turned out by Ronald Reagan in 1980. Both of those short cycles of instability ended with conservative Republicans building a broader coalition around sound money.

But the flip side to incumbent victory is that parties that gain power produce a reaction. That’s reflected in losses in midterm elections in Congress and the states. The longer they stay in power, the stronger that reaction gets. Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.

When a party holds the White House for eight full years, it always pays a powerful penalty in the next presidential cycle. It usually loses unless its coalition was broad enough to sustain the erosion. Combine that reaction with eight years of losses in lower offices, and the other party usually comes into power with a mandate and a deep bench – as Republicans did in 2016 and Democrats did in 2008.

If Trump had been re-elected in 2020, Democrats might have been reaping that reward now. Republicans would probably have lost House seats in both 2022 and 2024; instead, they look likely to hold their House majority and gain between three and five Senate seats. That Senate buffer could make it harder for Democrats to retake the upper chamber in 2026.

Worse, Joe Biden inherited a bunch of bad hands, and played them so poorly that he made them worse. In the process, his party alienated large voting blocs.

The pandemic produced supply shortages due to the interruption of manufacturing and transport, while bipartisan bills in 2020 pumped money into the system while people were at home and unable to spend it all. Inflation was inevitable, and appeared across the Western world. It would have bitten Trump had he been in office. But Biden flooded the economy with deficit spending while his party railed against energy producers. That not only made inflation much worse, it meant that Democrats shouldered all the blame for it.

There was no good way to leave Afghanistan, and Trump was paving the way to do so. There, too, Biden was the one to bite the bullet, then mishandled it to maximise the political fallout. His approval rating never recovered. Meanwhile, war in Gaza produced inevitable fissures in the Democratic coalition, which could have been papered over had it happened on Trump’s watch. By contrast, war in Ukraine may have divided Trump’s coalition much worse had he remained in office.

The Covid vaccines, developed under Trump, were first available under Biden. Heavy-handed Democrat-backed mandates caused a backlash that ended with the likes of Robert F Kennedy Jr defecting to the Republicans.

The pandemic artificially throttled immigration. Trump had capitalised on emergency authority to seal the border. Biden was left to deal with its end, and again, his poor choices created a dramatic migrant crisis.

Finally, Democrats overplayed the hand that Trump gave them on January 6, 2021. Had Trump remained in power, he wouldn’t have faced the same overreaching barrage of criminal prosecutions. Instead, Biden’s own Justice Department ended up trying to jail his opponent while elements of his party tried to get Trump thrown off the ballot. It backfired.

The bills for all of this just came due. Inflation was an especially large factor in the mass defection of Hispanic voters to the GOP; while that may not prove permanent, it breaks down taboos and opens new vistas for Republicans to compete for their votes.

Democratic recriminations are only starting. They may begin with Biden’s decision to run again, which itself was a product of confidence built in 2020 and sustained by a better-than-expected 2022. They ought to cover how Biden governed, too. But the sad reality for Democrats is that they ended up choking on their own premature success.


Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review