Shilya wrote:There are factors that support that. For one, the american system with its preliminaries and whatnot favours the incumbent. While the challenging candidates are busy throwing dirt at each other, the incumbent can just sit around presidently and be above such quarrels. He comes off as more dignified. Nearly all elections favour incumbents for this reason. The incumbent is seen as suitable for the office by virtue of already having it.
I disagree that this is the mechanism whereby most incumbents win reelection.
The problem most challengers have in defeating an incumbent lies in the difficulty challengers have in accepting the earlier election results, seeing the incumbent as legitimate, and then acting on the basis of that knowledge to construct an effect coalition for his or her removal.
More specifically: If you think about any election, it should be clear that the winner has
NECESSARILY assembled a coalition sufficient to win
REELECTION barring no defections from that coalition. IOW, if
<Candidate A> wins office in
<Year X>, and none of his supporters abandon him come the next election in
<Year Y>, then
MATHEMATICALLY he cannot lose in his effort to secure reelection (unless there are a whole lot of new voters who didn't participate in the election last time around.
A winning coalition, once established, should be able to continue to win until it is demolished.Losing Parties
NEVER go into an incumbent's reelection campaign thinking about the race in these terms. They always seem to have a hard time believing they lost the last time around, and in the vast majority of campaigns all they want to do is relitigate the last race — a strategy that will almost always produce the same result (
i.e., defeat), since most of its "charm" lies in trying to convince the voters that they fucked up last time around. "We had the right idea, the right candidate, and the right platform, but you people just didn't
GET it!" is
NOT an effective campaign theme (see ASB's First Rule of Successful Campaigning™: "Don't insult people if you want them to vote for you"), yet far too often that seems to be the way challengers try to unseat an incumbent. In particular, it was the (implicit) strategy used by Kerry against Bush ("We Democrats can't believe you people voted for Jar-Jar Bush in '00; please pull your heads out of your asses and try again") and by Romney against Obama ("We Republicans can't believe you people voted for Obummer in '08; please pull
YOUR heads out of
YOUR asses and try again").
No, a
SENSIBLE strategy involves:
- Recognizing that the incumbent earned the trust and support of enough of the electorate to win last time around.
- Understanding WHY the incumbent was able to do so.
- Indentifying vulnerable elements within the incumbent's coalition who might be peeled away and aligned behind the challenger.
- Making a case in favor of such a realignment, NOT on the basis of the failed arguments of the last campaign, but with full understanding, acknowledgement, and ACCEPTANCE of the choice the target audience made, followed by a cogent argument for why a different choice is called for THIS time around.
Political Parties have a hard time doing this, because they have a hard time admitting that the People didn't agree with them in the last campaign. Part of the problem lies in the fact that those running such campaigns made the opposite choice last time around, so clearly those old (and failed) arguments convinced
THEM; that they didn't convince OTHERS is therefore hard to accept ("Why can't
EVERYBODY see the world as clearly as
I do?!?"), which is why you see so many assertions to the effect that the People "were stupid", "were fooled", voted for the incumbent for superficial reasons or because the incumbent pandered effectively for their votes,
etc. These are all less than helpful ways of looking at the previous election, yet invariably they end up becoming part of the basis for the campaign to unseat the incumbent.
The thing is, if your argument didn't work
LAST time, it'll probably fail
THIS time as well.
THAT'S what most political Parties fail to grasp, and it kills them again and again and again and again.
Take '04 as an example: The great issue of the '00 campaign was what to do with the growing budget surplus. Gore wanted to use it to lower the debt and place Social Security on a firmer footing, while Bush wanted to give it back to the public in the form of tax cuts. Bush effectively "won the argument", so all of Kerry's subsequent critiques of Bush's handling of the budget should have been couched in such terms as to
ACKNOWLEDGE this fact, using an argument such as this:
In 2000, the American People spoke: They said they wanted most of the surplus we had built up at the end of the last decade returned to them in the form of tax cuts. When they did this, the did not vote to take us back into the era of chronic budget deficits, but rather for an era of balanced budgets, in which lower taxes would be paid for by prudence in spending. What the People did not foresee — indeed, what no one COULD foresee, especially in a world where America appeared to be the last Great Power, was that the actions of a few fanatics would lead us into a costly overseas war.
Yet here we are at war, and it does not appear that we will be back at peace any time soon. Can we afford to pretend that no war is going on, that this war isn't costing us billions each year, and that these billions are having no effect on our budget or our National debt? No, we cannot. We should have rolled back the cuts when we realized that we'd be sending our military into harm's way, in order to be able to sustain the conflict without driving our Nation back into debt again. But it's not too late for us to do that; we can still repeal those tax cuts, fix the problem, and then finish this war. Once it's over and our fiscal house is once more in order, we can then reconsider cutting taxes again.
The value of this approach is that it doesn't reject the last election; rather, it
AFFIRMS it. It doesn't say to Bush supporters, "You were wrong." Rather, it says, "We hear you and accept your choice, but now things have changed; shouldn't you reconsider your decision in light of this?"
The Republicans COULD have done something similar in 2012: Indeed, unlike John Kerry in 2004 (who was seeking to build upon the foundation Al Gore left him in 2000 — a year in which it could be argued that Democrats had actually
WON the electoral argument in popular terms [due to the fact that Gore won more of the popular vote than Bush]), Mitt Romney could not hope to win without expanding his base beyond that which John McCain had left
him in 2008. Indeed, it should have been obvious that if Barack Obama won the support of all the same people he'd carried in 2008, he'd win reelection without breaking a sweat.
So here's the question we need to ask ourself about the Romney campaign in 2012:
What did they do to persuade people who voted for OBAMA in 2008 to vote for Romney in 2012 INSTEAD?Political analysts and observers are not used to thinking of elections in these terms (
i.e., "What do I need to do to get the other guys' supporters to change sides"). They think in terms of their OWN base, their OWN supporters, their OWN strengths, but never in terms of taking voters AWAY from the other candidate. Any sane observer of politics would grasp immediately and intuitively that taking votes
AWAY from the incumbent is the only way to keep the incumbent from repeating their success, yet seldom if ever does a challenger actually approach a campaign in this way.
This is why many of us openly wondered if there was
ANYTHING Romney could do to be Obama in '12. Obama was elected by supermajorities of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and gays; he won the women's vote by a full 12 points in a Nation where women outnumber (and outvote men); he did very well among young voters, who both turned out and voted for him in great numbers; and he enjoyed a greater level of support among registered Democrats (who outnumber registered Republicans Nationwide) than most recent Presidential candidates, suffering minimal defection to McCain.
So what did Romney do to win back women? What did he do to appeal to gays and minorities? What did he do to win over young voters? And what did he do to try and persuade registered Democrats to bolt their Party and vote Republican?
The answer to all of these questions is "little or nothing". Romney spent the entire campaign speaking to his base, rallying the same voters who cast their ballots for McCain in '08. Those 59,950,323 voters had given McCain 45.60% of the popular vote; yet as impressive as that is, it's not as good as 50.01% — which has to make any sensible observer wonder how on Earth Mitt Romney thought that would be
ENOUGH.
Consequently, Mitt Romney won the support of 60,932,235 votes, and increase of 981,912 votes over McCain's tally. That's an increase of 1.64% in absolute terms — pretty good for a year in which overall turnout went down. It's likely that few if any McCain voters failed to vote from Mitt Romney as well, which means that Romney did indeed achieve his objective: He won over the people who voted for John McCain, and who were that group most heavily predisposed to support him in the first place. Bravo!
<slow golf clap>The thing is, it still wasn't a majority: It was only 47.15% of the vote. Obama didn't get all 69,499,428 of
HIS 2008 supporters to vote for him again in 2012; he only got 65,917,258 votes, or 3,582,170 less. Maybe a few of those people voted for Romney, but most — never motivated to
SWITCH SIDES by any positive appeal on Mitt Romney's part — simply stayed home. Those who went and voted, however (being 94.85% of Obama's 2008 base), were still enough to win the race for Obama.
And that illustrates why incumbents win: If you don't give someone good reason to change their vote, you're relying on them simply changing on their own. With a minimal effort and no real counterargument, the incumbent can probably keep them in line. And why not?
They voted for that same candidate last time around; without any good reason to change, why shouldn't they vote the same way again and again?Challengers routinely refuse to aggressive go after an incumbent's supporters, largely because they can't believe the incumbent really gave those supports any good reason to back him in the first place. But people
DO have reasons for voting the way the vote, and so — unless those challengers are prepared to actively try and change their minds in a respectful way ("Yes, I understand
AND RESPECT why you voted for
<Candidate A> last time around, but I'm going to ask you to change your vote this time, and
HERE'S WHY..."), they cannot hope to win.
And because they can't believe their side got rejected in a fair race last time around, one in which the voters considered their choice on the merits, they just can't approach those voters in a sensible way and win them over the second time around (or the third, or the fourth, or...).
Posted: Thu Dec 05, 2013 11:19 am