Right now is a terrible time for your preferred party to win, because all they can do when in power is fail and let down their constituents. We are living through a period of “incumbent disadvantage.”
Western democracies are in a devastating spiral of economic and political decline—what we might call, after Adam Tooze, the “polycrisis,” where overlapping crises in overall economic profitability, ecology, democratic governance, institutional legitimacy and geopolitical cooperation and consensus all reinforce each other. In this context, our politicians are incapable of reversing the interrelated crises, because they are beholden to the ideologies and special interests associated with the very paradigms that are failing (e.g., US hegemony, neoliberal economism, fossil fuel dependency, etc.). Decades of “reforms” have made our political institutions less accountable to everyday people and their demands, and more accountable to the entrenched demands of capital and the pragmatic problems arising from growing fiscal constraints. Meanwhile, the citizens in declining democracies are becoming increasingly irate, suspicious of institutions, and polarized.
Under these conditions, there is no real possibility that politicians can enact or preside over any significant success in addressing people’s (or the world’s) problems. The best they can do is manage decline. One of the problems this presents for political figures is that they must engage in populist rhetoric and promise-making to get elected—capitalizing on people’s frustrations and distrust. But once they get elected, politicians are stuck facing the same constraints that their predecessors faced: they need to figure out a way of serving the demands of capital, while maintaining the faith of their political base, while facing fiscal constraints and the ever-growing consequences of the polycrisis. In this dilemma, they inevitably break promises with their base and burn their populist credibility, which undermines their ability to get reelected. They fail precisely because they succeed.
We are seeing this on the political right at this very moment: conservatives in the United States are feuding and falling out with each other, despite controlling all three branches of the federal government. Every day, more influential figures within the conservative coalition are expressing outrage at Trump’s betrayal of populist goals, as the president and his allies prioritize the interests of their donors above those of the citizenry. It is clear that the campaign promises of tackling inflation, reducing the national debt, improving medical affordability, and exposing the corruption of political elites were hollow promises he used to get elected—valuable for the campaign, but not for the actual presidency. What we are witnessing is a clear example of incumbent disadvantage.