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When US voters re-elected former president Donald Trump, the result appeared to contradict the theory that democratic electorates punish governments for failure and reward them for success.
That model had certainly seemed to work in 2020, when Joe Biden won the election. Biden’s inheritance from Trump included a failure to tackle the pandemic effectively. Only 4% of Americans were vaccinated although vaccines were only starting to be distributed as he left office. As Trump looked for re-election in 2020, he was also handling a struggling economy with 10 million unemployed (6.4%) and millions more having left the workforce.
Federal debt was at its highest level since 1945, and the country had a budget deficit of US$2.3 trillion (£1.8 trillion). Murders were surging in major cities and there were more illegal crossings of the Mexican border than before Trump took office and pledged to stop these.
Trump’s poor record during his first term in the White House certainly helps explain his eventual defeat in 2020. In contrast, over Biden’s four years the US economy added 15.7 million jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 4.1% (it went as high as 14.8% during the height of the pandemic). But the Democrats were not rewarded for that.
This top-line success, however, masked some more mixed results. Most pertinently, inflation surged in Biden’s first year. Consumer prices rose over his term by 19%, with gasoline prices up by 46%. This resulted in a drop in real weekly earnings for the average American of 2.3%.
Americans worried about inflation and also misperceived it as much higher than it was.
Trump majored on this as a failure of Biden’s administration, putting Harris on the defensive in her first major policy speech of the campaign. Furthermore, although the unemployment rate had fallen across Biden’s presidency, it was going in the wrong direction as the election loomed. Falling savings levels consolidated perceptions that voters were worse off than they had been in 2020.
The electorate also seemingly forgave Trump for his chaotic management of the pandemic. Instead, they punished Biden, his successor, for the inflation it brought in its wake.
Polling bumps
Biden’s administration had its successes, but the most significant of these – tackling coronavirus – had long receded in the public’s consciousness. Overcoming such a crisis can work in favour of incumbent parties. However, the conflict against COVID-19 was never framed in the way classic crises have been in the US.
Political scientist John Mueller in 1970 defined what is called the “rally round the flag” effect as the propensity for the public to put aside political differences and support the president particularly after a national crisis.
There are plenty of instances of these surges in presidential support, the most notable being that enjoyed by George W. Bush following the 9/11 attacks. Biden even had one briefly in 2022 following the assassination of the al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri.
Examples of the “rally round the flag” effect can also be found in other countries. The best known recent examples in the UK, for instance, are the surges in support for the Conservative party after the Falklands war in 1982 and the Gulf war in 1991. Yet these examples only seem to work in instances that could be framed as attacks on territory, or where national interests were felt to be at stake. They do not work when the public are more sceptical, hence the need for a major propaganda campaign by the British government of Tony Blair over the Kosovo war in 1999.
Nor do they work for a war-weary electorate who, having won the conflict, wants instead a leader to create a new peacetime society – as British prime minister Winston Churchill found to his cost in 1945, when the voters went for a Labour-led postwar government.
As these examples show, the “rally round the flag” effect works best when the public focuses on apparent threats to national interests. A global pandemic was never going to produce quite the same results. Nor was Biden’s support for Ukraine, an issue never framed as a vital national interest and which only engaged a minority of voters. Instead, in terms of foreign policy, his administration may be more likely to be remembered for the scuttle to leave Afghanistan in August 2021, a debacle from which Biden’s poll ratings never recovered.
If anything, the rallying effect worked against Biden (and by extension, Kamala Harris), rather than in their favour. The Democrats were not able to frame themselves as having solved a crisis they inherited. Instead, Trump trumped them on the economy by focusing on the area where they were weakest, inflation.
Harris and her team did nonetheless try to frame the re-election of Trump as an impending crisis. Initially, Harris built a large poll lead among women voters, not least by talking up threats to reproductive rights.
When rallying doesn’t work
Ultimately this strategy proved unsuccessful. Harris won the female vote, but her share of that vote was lower than Biden in 2020 or Hillary Clinton in 2016. Some women voters may not have welcomed what appeared to be a sectional appeal rather than a national one. Furthermore, abortion was not as big an issue at the national polls as had been predicted. Some analysts have suggested this was partly because the electorate could vote at state level to keep abortion legal.
In four of the states – Arizona, Florida, Missouri and South Dakota – that Trump carried, voters endorsed proposals to expand abortion access, effectively overturning existing abortion bans in Missouri and Arizona. This splitting of the ticket suggests that for many voters, including women, inflation was probably as much if not more of an issue.
Ultimately, voters were not convinced that Harris deserved credit for the last four years. Moreover, they seemed to persuade themselves that Trump had the better feel for the challenges they were confronting, not least on inflation. Ironically, if Trump does impose the tariff hikes he has promised, voters could face even steeper inflation.
As these examples show, voters can reward governments for seeming to successfully surmount crises. However, that only works if those governments also manage to align the defining of the crisis with the concerns and priorities of voters. As Churchill found in 1945, and Harris in 2024, failing to get that alignment right can ruin your chances.
Pippa Catterall is Chair of the George Lansbury Memorial Trust and a member of the Liberal Democrats.
