Why Kamala Harris lost: Around the world, incumbents are in trouble

The aftermath of Kamala Harris’ electoral defeat has followed a predictable pattern: First the political pundits and then the representatives of different factions within the Democratic coalition have all claimed that the result confirms their prior assumptions and beliefs. Big surprise! 

But this year really is different. As social psychologist Jay Van Bavel summed up in a Bluesky post, it was simple: “Anti-incumbency bias.” Electorates voted against incumbent parties not just in the U.S. but in virtually every country in the world this year, for the first time in more than 70 years. Van Bavel added, “This global trend was a tsunami that swamped ideology, gender, race, age, etc.”

Why did Trump beat Harris? Anti-incumbency bias:People voted against the incumbent party in every part of American and every country in the world this year–for the first time in 70+ years!This global trend was a tsunami that swamped ideology, gender, race, age, etc.

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— Jay Van Bavel, PhD (@jayvanbavel.bsky.social) November 7, 2024 at 6:09 AM

Two counter-caveats should be added: As late votes are counted, the Democrats’ vote-share loss continues to shrink, and those losses were largest in noncompetitive states where the Harris campaigns did not focus. In the key “blue wall” swing states, vote-share losses were far smaller (as the New York Times notes, about Pennsylvania), reflecting the fact that for all the finger-pointing, Harris’ campaign almost bucked a historic worldwide trend. That only makes it more important to understand that trend, because it’s much bigger than just the 2024 election, momentous as it may have been. Understanding what’s driving this climate of discontent is a necessary framework for understanding our own situation. 

Predictably, the Democratic Party’s establishment is finding all sorts of ways to duck responsibility for this loss. But one thing should be clear: There was an unprecedented burst of self-organized grassroots enthusiasm for Harris as soon as she announced her campaign — a series of mass video calls, beginning with Black Women for Harris, reflecting an enormous depth of interest, compassion and commitment that nothing in Donald Trump’s campaign came close to matching. Yet she still lost, despite having the best-funded campaign imaginable. All kinds of contradictory arguments can be made, and are being made, about why that happened. But the disconnect between elite opinion and mass voter behavior was striking, and we need a broader view to assess which arguments make the most sense and how much they mattered.  

Before we begin, let’s address something fundamental: what voters want. As the Washington Post drily put it, “Voters prefer Harris’s agenda to Trump’s — they just don’t realize it,” summarizing the findings of a 128-item YouGov survey, which led me to post this on Bluesky:

Case in point:

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— Paul Rosenberg (@paulrosenberg.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 5:03 PM

As YouGov reported, “53% of Harris’ policies and 19% of Trump’s policies are bipartisan,” meaning policies supported by majorities of voters in both parties. Nonetheless, centrist swing voters who agreed more with Harris ended up breaking for Trump.

This was underscored by Data for Progress, which found that Trump voters in the crucial states of Pennsylvania and Michigan supported populist economic policies more in line with Harris’ agenda than his. While it’s frustrating to see people voting against their own expressed policy preferences, it’s hardly new. As I’ve repeatedly noted over the years, Lloyd Free and Hadley Cantril’s 1967 book “The Political Beliefs of Americans” found that while half the population qualified as ideological conservatives, two-thirds supported progressive government programs, a finding consistent with decades of polling ever since. So this represents a long-standing problem — a profound deficit in the deliberative dimension of our democracy — which was exacerbated by unprecedented levels of disinformation, reflected in the finding that “80% of swing voters who chose Trump believed Harris held positions she didn’t campaign on in 2024.”

But this combination of long-term and newly intensified problems (including wildly misleading economic reporting about the strongest economy in the world) can’t adequately explain the global big-picture view required for any analysis or discussion going forward.  

If your kid is failing in school, that’s your kid’s problem (and yours, of course). But if everyone’s kid is struggling, you’ve got a different kind of problem on your hands. That’s where Democrats find themselves today. Trying to fix specific electoral failings without a wider view of the broader challenges that face democracy worldwide can’t get to the root of the problem. We need to ask why people almost everywhere rejected incumbents, regardless of ideology, and what’s to be done about it. 

A story I wrote here in May 2020 suggests some answers: The most obvious “why” is the global pandemic and its after-effects. Popular opinion four years ago supported a strong social-democratic response, and bipartisan majority support for such a response could have pointed to a path beyond polarized gridlock. That path could have moved us away from the failed neoliberal model that both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders railed against, with very different alternatives in mind. Trump wanted to return to 19th-century economic protectionism, and apparently still does. Sanders reflected critiques like those of economist Dean Baker’s open-source book “Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer,” summarized here.

Given that polarized elite politics stood in the way of such a public-goods care economy, I argued that citizen assemblies could deliver the goods while substantially deepening the deliberative dimension of democracy, as has already been demonstrated around the world. Like criminal or civil juries, citizen assemblies rely on the capacity of ordinary people to deliberate seriously and build bonds of trust, in ways that are often mistakenly assumed to be beyond them.

In other words, I argued that the pandemic had exposed long-standing problems, and that an economic restructuring supported by a broad bipartisan majority and civic deliberation was the answer. You could argue that article represents my priors — and you’d be right. But my preference for deliberative democracy involves giving everyone’s priors a chance to be heard and taken seriously, in a way that no one’s priors get examined today. It’s a preference for a better way of collective sense-making, one that might actually help steer us out of our current neofascist skid. 

I first explained that globalization, in historical terms, comes in waves that often break with pandemics. I cited a blog post by evolutionary anthropologist Peter Turchin, who traced this pattern back to earlier waves of Afro-Eurasian “continentalization” in the Old World and of “Mediterraneanization” before that. While COVID-19’s mortality rate was much lower than past pandemics, its spread was rapid and dramatic, “and our neoliberal, debt-financed, just-in-time, global-supply-chain economic system deliberately has far less resilience than previous globalized trade systems,” with possibly worse systems ahead. I continued: 

“Government is the problem,” neoliberals argue — except when it’s working in service of the market. “Not so much,” the pandemic reminds us, with climate crises looming right behind it. A response that prioritizes enhanced resilience may be both the most prudent and the most visionary alternative we have.

I quoted Arundhati Roy: “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” But getting to a better new world required resources of leadership and trust that were in dramatically short supply, for reasons that Turchin’s work helps explain.  

Secular cycles and the end of “The End of History”

Turchin identifies the driving force behind waves of globalization as “secular cycles” of integration and disintegration that individual societies go through, which can become synchronized by shared experiences such as pandemics. Such cycles, driven by demographic change and its interaction with social structure, were first identified by sociologist and historian Jack Goldstein in his 1991 book “Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World,” which broke with the dominant view that associated revolutions with ideological advancement, or at least with dramatic change. That dominant view was the background assumption behind Francis Fukuyama’s much-celebrated 1992 book “The End of History and the Last Man,” which argued that the end of the Cold War marked the endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution, with “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” 

Needless to say, Fukuyama was wrong, although not everyone has woken up and smelled the coffee. Goldstone saw something different: a continuation of revolutions around the world, and the possibility of precisely the sort of political crisis the U.S. finds itself in today. (He specifically warned about the danger of selfish elites failing to invest in the nation’s long-term well-being.)

In early modern England and France, revolutions did lead to ideological change, Goldstone found, while elsewhere — most notably in China and the Ottoman Empire — they did not. There were changes in leadership with no coherent ideological element. The common driving forces, playing out over multiple generations, were mass immiseration (as living standards fell, due to overpopulation), elite overproduction (too many elites struggling over not enough resources) and fiscal crisis, as the state tries to put out too many fires at once. I summarize the specific dynamics more precisely here. In Turchin’s subsequent research, he found that erosion of trust was also a predictable part of the process, along with other measures of declining social, political and economic well-being.

As elite overproduction worsens, dissatisfied elite aspirants form “counter-elites” that seek to overturn the system. They may develop narrative justifications, but those aren’t necessarily ideological or political. In these low-trust environments, conspiratorial narratives that combine contradictory or conflicting views will do just fine. When people have suffered long enough, they’re likely to follow just about anyone who promises to make things better — or at least to make someone else pay. 

This may be a factor, alongside active disinformation and bad media reporting) in why Joe Biden’s remarkable economic record simply didn’t matter to many voters. They may be doing better than they were four years ago, but they still face worse economic prospects than their parents did 20 or 30 years earlier. Misleading or alarmist economic reporting blinded them to Biden’s actual accomplishments and left them open to Trump’s false claims that Democrats “are KILLING SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE by allowing the INVASION OF THE MIGRANTS” (when immigration actually has exactly the opposite effect). That combination produced pseudo-factual narratives that seemed to describe deep-seated frustration and suffering. 

But the suffering is real enough, as the dramatic rise in deaths of despair testifies. Similar suffering has been experienced repeatedly throughout history, as Goldstone, Turchin and their colleagues have found. In conditions like this, opportunistic “counter-elite” figures like Trump are “typical actors,” I wrote in 2020, “but some counter-elite figures — such as the Gracchi brothers during the Roman Republic — promote more just alternatives.”

Based on this kind of “structural demographic theory,” there was no reason to expect an end to the cycle of revolutions, or to expect America to be immune. Goldstone already saw worrying signs that American elites were under-investing in the nation’s basic long-term needs. But we can certainly hope to better understand the process and minimize its ill effects. 

Turchin has written repeatedly about this theory over the years, most recently in his 2023 book “End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration” (see my interview, review and further commentary), based on a database of hundreds of examples. He developed a typology of failing regimes and a simplified diagnosis of their most basic failing: “a perverse ‘wealth pump’ … taking from the poor and giving to the rich,” that our society has not found a way to turn off. We did so during the New Deal era to some extent, a trick that Turchin says only one in five declining nation-states or empires manages to pull off.

A politics of care and deliberation 

In 2020, I expressed hope that the pandemic afforded us an opportunity to do that again. At the time, polling by Data for Progress found substantial bipartisan support for a New Deal-style response to the pandemic, even though Republican elites usually hate that sort of thing. In the months and years after that, Biden’s embrace of the Democrats’ Unity Task Force recommendations — a peace treaty of sorts with the Sanders faction — led to a robust response, similar in spirit to the Data for Progress proposals. But it was Sen. Joe Manchin, a nominal Democrat, who ultimately crippled the effort, refusing to support Biden’s Build Back Better bill. Waleed Shahid sums it up in The Nation: 

Progressives pushed mightily for Build Back Better to pass. It was centrist obstruction — namely Senators Manchin and [Kyrsten] Sinema — that blocked those policies. The result was a patchwork of long-term measures like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, whose benefits won’t be felt until 2025 at the earliest, if at all. By failing to pass Build Back Better, Democrats lost the chance to deliver easy-to-understand, tangible economic benefits and solidify their image as the party of working people.

This was the opportunity missed, although of course I didn’t know that in the spring of 2020. But I was certainly aware of conservative elite opposition, and raised the prospect of empowering mass political engagement through citizen assemblies — randomly selected, demographically representative bodies that engage in informed and respectful deliberation, facilitated by professionals. As stated above, such assemblies are analogous to something more familiar: the jury system. The same basic principle applies: In the proper setting, ordinary citizens sworn to a public duty can be relied on to make sound judgments on serious and consequential matters. (It’s no accident that Donald Trump has done everything possible to keep himself away from such citizen-based justice.)

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I had previously interviewed Claudia Chwalisz, who then led the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation, and she told me that political polarization was a design feature of electoral systems, but that its effects could be mitigated through a broader democratic vision:

Democracy is more than elections. If we see things that way, then there is a search for rethinking the architecture of our democratic institutions more broadly to overcome some of these design flaws in electoral representative democracy — not in a way that destroys that system, but in a way that complements it.

Deliberative processes are one part of the picture of the type of change needed for democratic governance to become capable of addressing complex and long-term problems, in a way that builds trust and tries to bring society together.

As I wrote at the time, creating these kinds of assemblies “to develop comprehensive frameworks around such areas of broad agreement could play a significant role in moving our politics beyond its current state of deadly stalemate.” 

I had written earlier about a similar process developed decades ago by political scientist James Fishkin, which he calls a “deliberative poll.” In 2019 he held a session in Grapevine, Texas, with just over 500 people, divided into smaller groups of 14 each, which he called “America In One Room.” I wrote about it both before and after the event. An overwhelming 98.2% of participants found it “valuable.” People formed bonds of friendship, even with those who had different views and, most significantly, common ground increased on a wide range of issues, mostly by people moving toward the center — but not entirely and not symmetrically. The most dramatic change was on the question of whether undocumented immigrants should be “forced to return to their home countries before applying to legally come to the U.S.” Republican support dropped from 78.7% before the deliberations to 40.3% afterward. That’s even more remarkable when you consider how much the national tone on immigration has shifted since then.

There’s currently no formal or legal status available for such assemblies, but the fact that so many Trump supporters already favor Democratic policy ideas suggests that convening these kinds of processes in blue states, or in blue cities in red or purple states, could help to move policy in a more progressive direction and, more important still, could help build trust and fact-based consensus.

In the short run, perhaps they could rally opposition to draconian cuts to government programs that are clearly on the chopping block. Trump appears to have won a bare plurality, on a margin of just over 230,000 votes in three key swing states. The cuts now being discussed would roll back programs and policies that have been in place for decades, based on majority support. That’s a sign of Trump’s utter recklessness and the callousness of those around him, but it’s a sign of our democracy’s weakness, as it’s currently constituted, that he could very well get away with it. Creating new democratic structures — on the fly, and out of necessity — is an altogether worthy and quintessentially American response. It could help prevent wanton destruction, while giving a fair hearing to justified criticisms and complaints that may not have been taken seriously.

America is not alone: Liberal democracy around the world is imperiled by its lack of robustness, responsiveness and deep deliberation. Other countries with parliamentary democracies are better off than the U.S. in many respects, as explored in my interview with Maxwell Stearns about his book “Parliamentary America.” But even the world’s best democratic systems need more help faced with this dangerous moment of world history.

I believe it makes sense for the Democratic Party to take the initiative in launching this new deliberative process, but it must do so in a way that places the process in nonpartisan (but not “bipartisan”) hands. In my next article, I’ll further explore the specifics involved, as well as the broader requisites for strengthening the deliberative dimension of our democracy.

We stand at a moment of great peril, unlike any our nation has known since the Civil War. But we are not powerless to act, and we must act together. If we are forced to make our democracy anew in order to save it, then perhaps this moment of great peril is actually a blessing in disguise. In the words of Tom Paine, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”