"Throw the bums out" is a fine, old, American tradition dating back to the early 1800s. In fact, it used to be a semi-regular occurrence for incumbent parties to suffer huge losses, especially during the midterms. In the days of party-line voting, the House and Senate changing hands every two or four years was commonplace.
It's only recently that members of Congress have been able to secure a lifetime sinecure, regardless of party. For most of the republic's existence, many congressional races were competitive.
So when we hear that there's a "global trend of anti-incumbency," we should view the source and the argument with great skepticism.
Americans don't care what or who other countries are voting for or not voting for. It's just not a feasible argument to claim that Donald Trump's victory was due to a worldwide backlash against those in power. If that were true, Republican incumbents would be falling away as well.
It's still far too early to predict who will control Congress. As of 1 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday, Republicans have won 210 House seats while Democrats have won 194 with 33 races still to be decided.
In a bad sign for the Democrats, two races called on Thursday were Pennsylvania seats that changed hands. That's a trend that's likely to continue as Democrats across the country in tight races are sweating out increasingly narrow leads as late votes appear to be favoring the GOP.
The notion that it's an "anti-incumbency" trend is fanciful. If that were true in the United States, Republican incumbents would be losing as well. The "anti-incumbency" argument is meant to explain away the toxic policies of Joe Biden and the left. It's the policies and the people who are toxic, not the fact that they are incumbents.
Vox:
Given Trump’s victory, we can confidently say the United States is not exceptional. Three different exit polls found that at least 70 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s current direction, and they took it out on the current ruling party. (While exit polls are based on preliminary, rather than comprehensive, data sets, it is notable that so many polls appear to be picking up on the same trend.) Trump registered as the change candidate despite being a former president himself, and the voters rewarded him accordingly.
Once we start thinking about the US election result as part of a global trend, rather than an isolated event, we can start to make a little more sense of what just happened here.
Not one Republican incumbent senator lost. There are three outstanding Senate races all currently in Democratic hands. If this were an "anti-incumbency" election, at least some sitting Republican senators would have lost.
It's not anti-incumbency that's motivating voters. It's anti-Democratic Party sentiment that's driving the disgust of the electorate.
You can’t explain Harris’s defeat in terms of losses with the white working class when she also seems to have done worse than Biden with nonwhite workers and college graduates based on early data. You can’t focus primarily on her stance on Gaza alienating Arab and Muslim voters when her margin of defeat was far larger than the defections in that group. Ditto with Latinos, and every other subgroup that postmortems are beginning to focus on.
“The central plot lines of the [2024 election] are already clear, and not that dissimilar from four years ago,” the political scientist John Sides writes at Good Authority. “In 2020, an unpopular incumbent lost reelection. In 2024, an unpopular incumbent’s party lost reelection.”
Why is the incumbent's party unpopular? It has nothing whatsoever to do with what happened in elections in the United Kingdom and Botswana, in India and North Macedonia, and in South Korea and South Africa.
In how many languages can you say "Throw the bums out"?
