Who will be the incumbent in 2024? Harris and Trump point fingers at each other

How can you hold a change election when the two candidates are a sitting vice president and the most recent former president?

This question may seem like a puzzle, but who voters think is “the incumbent” is undoubtedly the most important question to answer in determining who will win the 2024 election.

In short, the candidate who loses will likely be the one that the majority of swing voters consider to be more “incumbent-like.” And next week’s debate will go a long way toward confirming that, depending on how well the candidates can portray the other as part of the problem at hand.

There is an obvious reason why both campaign teams are trying so desperately to portray the other as the incumbent: Voters are grumpy, and have been for most of the 21st century.

If you step back and look at U.S. voters’ views on whether the country is going in the right direction or on the wrong track, you’ll find that the country has essentially been on the “wrong track” side for nearly two decades—what you might call a massive, generation-long political recession.

And the results of our presidential and midterm elections during this time have shown that a majority of this electorate wants change.

Only two national elections in this century – 2004 and 2012 – have not experience a change of power in one of the following three centers of power in Washington: the White House, whose partisan ownership has changed three times (2008, 2016 and 2020), the Senate four times (2002, 2006, 2014 and 2020) and the House of Representatives four times (2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022).

Compare that to the 1960s and 1970s, when neither the House nor the Senate saw a single party change! The House saw only one party change in the last 40 years of the 20th century (in 1994). Moreover, every party that won the presidency in the 20th century was reelected at least once, with one exception: Jimmy Carter’s Democratic Party in 1980. Every other president who served one term or less was preceded by a president of the same party.

This current era of discontent arguably began in late 2005, when trust in the government, and particularly in its leaders, plummeted after September 11, 2001. The decisive impetus at that time came from the lack of discovery of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It was this perceived threat that ultimately convinced a majority of Congress to give then-President George W. Bush their approval to invade the country.

The loss of trust in government and the direction of the country only got worse over the next 20 years as more and more perceived failings of the government and/or elite institutions came to light. From the economy to personal security to the broken information ecosystem, it has been largely a negative spiral since 2005. The public did express positive sentiments at times (for example, after the election of Barack Obama), but these were only slow motion, as the general mood of pessimism returned fairly quickly and continues to this day.

Both candidates find it difficult to advocate for a change simply because of their current or previous activities.

Trump has really struggled with this issue since President Joe Biden dropped out. With Biden as his opponent, Trump was the candidate of “change” because the election became a decision about which term you hated the least. And since Trump was not the current incumbent, he became the default candidate of “change” even if he didn’t propose anything new.

With Harris as his opponent, Trump runs into the same problem that cost him reelection in 2020: he is the same person he has always been. That trait, I believe, exhausted the country in 2020 (especially with his terrible handling of the pandemic), and it is now central to Harris’ campaign’s attempt to portray Trump as the incumbent of this political era—hence the “turn the page” message that Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, are leaning heavily on.

Ironically, the candidate who provided the blueprint for this Harris message was Trump’s biggest opponent in the 2024 primaries: Nikki Haley.

Check out this February 2024 press release from the Haley campaign, which was in response to Trump’s statement that he could “only see the black people,” referring to fellow Americans in the audience at one of his primary rallies. (The reason for this was apparently a lighting problem.)

Haley said:

“This is what happens when Donald Trump goes off the teleprompter. This is the chaos that comes with Donald Trump. This is the insult that will be heard every day until the general election. … This is a huge red flag. We have to stop the chaos. We have to stop the drama. We have to stop the bad soundbites that keep happening over and over again, and we have to listen to the American people. … There is a choice. We can leave the chaos and the drama behind, we can leave the incompetence behind. We can move on to something normal. And that’s what people want, especially the younger generation. They just want to know what normal feels like.”

Try this exercise: Imagine if I told you that Harris said all of the above after Trump’s recent rally? You’d probably believe me. Harris’s messages about Trump aren’t much different from those about Haley these days. In fact, Harris used the phrase “chaos and mischief” in her DNC acceptance speech last month.

In short, the Harris team believes it can portray Trump as the de facto incumbent, even though he is not currently in the White House.

It’s not unlike the campaign Biden ran against Trump in 2020. Here’s a select quote from Joe Biden’s 2020 acceptance speech:

“What we know about this president is that if you give him four more years, he will go back to what he was for the last four years. A president who doesn’t take responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, aligns himself with dictators, and stokes hatred and division. He will wake up every day believing that this office is all about him. Never about you.”

(By the way, if I told you that Haley said the previous paragraph sometime during her primary campaign against Trump, you would probably believe me.)

She certainly adopted the same tone and tenor in her attacks on Trump, but with the reservation that he does some things right.

Of course, it would be much easier to portray Trump as an incumbent if the current Democratic candidate were an incumbent governor rather than an incumbent vice president who cast a record number of tie-breaking votes in the U.S. Senate.

But the fact remains, Harris Is the incumbent Vice President, and while those of us who have followed this administration closely know that her influence in Biden’s West Wing had limits (certainly less than Biden’s in the Obama administration, for example), the average voter expects someone whose name is on the 2020 campaign bank account to take responsibility for how the electoral roll has run the country over the past four years.

And what is more likely if she wins the election? That she will lead a radically different federal government than Biden – or that the change will be as noticeable as the change of office between Reagan and Bush in 1989, when some of the members of Reagan’s cabinet remained in office into George HW Bush’s term in office?

I think we know the answer: Harris would likely have a cabinet with roots in both the Obama and Biden White Houses. And Biden’s cabinet certainly shares a lot of DNA with the Obama years.

So who do voters think the incumbent will be? That’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a voter who tends to swing back and forth on policy and feel negatively about Biden based on a particular issue, then the Trump campaign may have an easier time arguing that Harris’s ties to the Biden administration are relevant and that she’s not the change you expect.

But if you are the kind of voter who cares more about a president’s character and behavior, and his overall impact on the nation’s psyche, than about a particular policy position, then the Harris campaign will have an easier time convincing you that Trump is the “incumbent” of the current political era.

At the moment, I would argue that Harris has done a better job of portraying herself as “new” and “change” than Trump.

But this campaign to define the other as “the incumbent” will be revved up again next Tuesday at the debate. Immediately after the election, I will be watching to see how each candidate portrays the other as “more of the same” and themselves as “the change.”

Keep an eye on a poll question we’ll ask shortly after the debate: Which candidate “better embodies change?” This may be the only poll question you need to understand the outcome in November.