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a presidential election with two incumbents?

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Incumbent presidents have a substantial advantage for reelection. Only 10 have lost. Statistical models that attempt to control for other factors, such as the economy, typically give a presidential candidate a bonus of 4-8 percentage points just for being the incumbent. In 2009, David Mayhew noted that parties had won the White House only half the time when they didn’t run an incumbent for reelection, but two thirds of the time when they did. That disparity is a little smaller now that Trump has lost a reelection race, but it’s still substantial.

Incumbents also have a vast advantage in their own party’s nomination race, with only Franklin Pierce actually losing his party’s support while he was in the White House. (Several others have chosen not to run.)

However, it’s not clear what these patterns mean for 2024. After all, two leading candidates have recently been presidents of the United States. Whether one, both, or neither will get an incumbency advantage is hard to tell from the historical data. There have only been 59 presidential elections ever, and only 23 in the modern era since FDR beat Hoover. Many variables are relevant to the outcomes of these cases. It is therefore hard to detect which aspects of incumbency may matter–and certainly hard to extrapolate any patterns to our unprecedented situation.

(I think that only one president was unseated but got his original party’s nomination again in a subsequent year: that was Grover Cleveland, who won the rematch.)

Mayhew identified 12 possible explanations for the presidential incumbency advantage and collected the evidence that might bear on each explanation. See his table 3.

Possible explanations of presidential incumbency bias from Mayhew 2008.

Some of these factors presume that the incumbent typically has impressive “capabilities,” because a president has already managed to win a national election and has governed for up to four years. The challenger could be equally capable, but the odds are against it.

In this case, I personally think that Joe Biden has demonstrated strong capabilities, whereas Trump’s campaigns and his time in office demonstrate a blatant lack thereof. However, it doesn’t matter what I think, but what the electorate decides. According to today’s New York Times/Siena poll, 44 percent of Americans agree with me–they hold a very unfavorable view of Trump–but 42 percent strongly disapprove of Biden’s performance in office. What is unusual is the fact that both likely nominees have recently served as the president, which may make this factor a wash.

Voters might also simply prefer a candidate who already holds office. For instance, perhaps some voters are risk-averse: biased against changing horses. Or perhaps they think that any newcomer would need too much time to become effective. Risk-aversion might help Biden a bit in 2024, although some voters may feel that electing him in 2020 was the unwise change. Voters can presumably see either Trump or Biden as the status quo if they want to. Some Trump voters even believe that he is the rightful winner of the most recent election.

“Incumbent party fatigue” refers to the pattern that each party loses a small amount of support–on average–each year that it holds the White House. However, this trend does not doom incumbents, in part because too little “fatigue” typically occurs within four years. The candidates who tend to suffer are those who try to succeed a president of the same party.

The explanations that Mayhew calls “strategic behavior” are of the following type. Perhaps the party of an incumbent president typically organizes to renominate him if he’s been doing well but moves against him if not–as was the case with LBJ in 1968. That would imply that incumbents who run for reelection have generally had successful first terms. And perhaps the opposition party is easily captured by marginal figures when its prospects already look weak against a popular incumbent (consider Barry Goldwater in 1964, or Michael Foot against Margaret Thatcher in 1983). However, Mayhew does not see a lot of power in this type of explanation.

Somewhat buried in his list are factors under the incumbent president’s direct control, such as the ability to allocate funds (e.g., to decide whether to locate the Space Command in Colorado or Alabama), where to deploy cabinet members, which bills to sign or veto, etc. Early in 2021, I predicted that the “$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 would prove popular by putting cash directly and quickly into people’s pockets,” and this would help Democrats in 2022. Democrats did somewhat better than most people expected that year, but there’s no evidence that nearly $2 trillion helped them electorally. (In other words, I was wrong.) The other side of the coin is that presidents must make difficult and unpopular decisions.

Overall, I think that Biden has an advantage in 2024 if the economy avoids a deep recession. I think a substantial Biden victory is possible if the economy starts to lift. I suspect that the 4-8 point incumbency advantage–which would typically give Biden a landslide–will not apply, because the electorate will split on the question of who is the rightful incumbent in the first place.

*Mayhew, David R. “Incumbency Advantage in U.S. Presidential Elections: The Historical Record.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 123, no. 2, 2008, pp. 201–28. See also: 1984 all over again? The Reagan/Biden analogy; What kind of a claim is “Biden has an 87% chance of winning”? (on the metaphysics of probability)

Miles Horton & Paolo Freire in 1987, photo by Candie Carawan, in Horton & Freire 1990.

highways on the sea: from Machado to Paolo Freire

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This is a perfect short poem from Antonio Machado’s Proverbios y Cantares (1912):

     XLIV

Todo pasa y todo queda:
pero lo nuestro es pasar,
pasar haciendo caminos,
caminos sobre la mar

Everything passes and everything stays,
But ours is to cease to be. 
As we go, we make a highway,
A highway on the sea. 

[revised on Dec 1, 2023.]

Machado had already juxtaposed caminos (roads, paths, journeys) with el mar (the sea) in the second poem of the volume:

     II

¿Para qué llamar caminos 
a los surcos del azar?... 
Todo el que camina anda, 
como Jesús, sobre el mar. 

Why designate as highways
furrows left aimlessly? ...
Anything that travels moves,
like Jesus, on the sea.

The same pairing recurs in the most-quoted lyric of the whole book:

     XXIX

Caminante, son tus huellas 
el camino y nada más; 
caminante, no hay camino, 
se hace camino al andar. 
Al andar se hace camino, 
y al volver la vista atrás 
se ve la senda que nunca 
se ha de volver a pisar. 
Caminante, no hay camino, 
sino esteles sobre la mar.

Traveler, the highway
is your footprints, nothing more;
Traveler, there is no highway,
you make it as you walk.
As you walk, you make the highway—
and the path you see when you turn back
is the route where you'll never be.
Traveler, there is no highway,
save for trails upon the sea.

In 1987, the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire (then 66 years old) and the American organizer Myles Horton (82) interviewed each other at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which Horton had led. Freire says, “Myles, I think we could start our conversation by saying something to each other about our very existence in the world.” A little later, he adds, “It’s very important for Brazilian readers to have information about Myles. About me, they have already, but about Myles they don’t have and it’s very, very important.”

Horton adds, “Yes, but the people in this country need the same thing about you.” He then proposes to talk “mainly [about] the things that would help people understand where I came from in terms of my ideas and my thinking, what they are rooted in. Is that the idea?” Freire replies, “Yes. Everything you recognize as something important. I think that even though we need to have some outline, I am sure that we make the road by walking. It has to do with this house [Highlander], with this experience here. You’re saying that in order to start, it should be necessary to start.”

The resulting book, We Make the Road by Walking (Horton & Freire 1990), explains in a footnote that Freire is adapting “a proverb by the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, in which one line reads “se hace camino al andar,” or “you make the way as you go.”

For activists, this phrase suggests that people can make new pathways by taking action, and perhaps that we should learn the trails that our elders have left for us. But I think Machado’s original point was apolitical. He meant that the stories we tell about ourselves are not permanent–or even important–and they vanish as we pass through them.

Translations by Peter Levine. Photo by Candie Carawan in Horton & Freire, We Make the Road by Walking (Temple University Press 1990). See also: Machado: Glory is never what I’ve sought; Lorca’s rivers.

[I had misread “esteles” as “estellas” and thus written “stars” instead of “trails.” Thanks to reader Barry Cusack for the correction.]

Gallup survey of potential migrants, asking where they would prefer to move. The USA is top for 21%, followed by Canada and Germany at 6%.

Is the USA the favorite destination for migrants?

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When a conversation in this country turns critical about the USA, someone may interject that foreigners want to move here more than anywhere else. I have heard that point made quite a few times over the years.

It is not exactly false. The Gallup World Poll purports to be a representative global sample. It asks whether you would like to move to another country and, if so, which one you would most prefer. The USA is the most popular destination, at 21%, followed by Canada and Germany, at 6%, and France and Australia, at 5%.

But there are other ways to slice the data. One is to adjust for population size. The USA is almost 13 times as populous as Australia, but only 4.2 times as popular as the first choice for potential migrants. If you imagine that migrants could allocate themselves to the countries of their choice, then Australia would draw many more immigrants per capita than the USA. In fact, migration involves many factors apart from the potential migrants’ preferences, but 30% of Australian residents are actually foreign-born, versus 13.6 of US residents.

Likewise, 3.5 times more potential migrants would go to the USA than to Canada, but the US is 8.7 times more populous than Canada. And in reality, 23 percent of Canadians are foreign-born, versus 13.6 percent of US residents.

Another way to analyze the data is to combine countries. Gallup does not provide statistics on the popularity of smaller European countries, such as Belgium, whose actual immigrant population is 17.2% (i.e., higher than that of the USA). But if you combine the EU countries that Gallup lists, they total 20%, just shy of the USA’s 21%. I imagine that adding the other EU countries would make Europe more popular than the United States in aggregate. To be sure, some European migration is among the EU countries, but why shouldn’t that count?

Another interesting tidbit is that 10% of US and Canadian residents (combined) would prefer to migrate away from their countries. That is actually a higher rate than in Asia.

People who consider migrating tend to want to move to places where there is capital, demand for labor, and no war. Some countries that meet these standards rank unusually low as the preferred destinations for migrants, Japan being the most prominent example. But most of America’s counterparts would attract at least as many immigrants on a per-capita basis as we do, and many actually have more foreign-born residents.

Meanwhile, the countries that draw the most migrants are mostly not democratic, social-democratic, or liberal. Not counting micro-states, six of the eight sovereign nations that have the highest proportions of migrants are monarchies in the Persian Gulf (the other two being Luxembourg and Singapore). They are not necessarily preferred destinations–they register on the global poll but fall behind NATO members and Australia–but they do meet the criteria of capital and domestic peace, and they let people in.

See also: American exceptionalism; American exceptionalism, revisited; and anxieties about American exceptionalism

Reformation propaganda (note #2 from the Levine library)

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This post is one of a series about books that my father left to me and that now line my office shelves at Tufts. More on how that happened is here.

In a folio volume of almost 2,000 dense pages, informally known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, John Foxe describes the persecutions of true-believing Christians since Roman times. Most of the book is devoted to its own period, when the persecutors were Catholics. This narrative helped create a sense of Protestantism as distinct from Roman Catholicism, and of England as a Protestant nation. It influenced and supplied some illustrations for my book The Anachronist.

Foxe’s Booke was a massive undertaking. It required the vast collaborative labor of collecting the names and stories of tortured and executed Protestants from across Europe. Foxe published numerous editions as new names arrived, and many copies were sold.

I have the 1576 edition, a great block of Gothic text with numerous engravings, most of which depict Protestants being tried or killed by Catholics. Here, for example, is the image on p. 1468, which shows “The talk between M[r] Bradford, and two Spanish Friers.”

John Bradford (1510–1555) was a Protestant clergyman who was burned by the government of Mary Tudor. The image shows him in his cell in the Tower of London, being interrogated by Spaniards. Queen Mary–“Bloody Mary” to Protestants–had married King Phillip II of Spain and brought England back into the Roman Church. However, by the time Foxe published an edition of his Booke in England, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth was “our gracious Lady now reigning,” and Spain was the hated enemy. This is an image of foreign treachery as well as Roman Catholic intolerance.

I thought of it last spring when I saw a painting in the Carthusian monastery of Granada, Spain. Painted in the early 1600s, it shows Thomas Cromwell condemning four Catholic clergy to death for their faith. He is likely sitting in an imagined Tower of London. That is where John Bradford met the Spanish friars under Queen Mary and where Cromwell had his own head chopped off (meriting a heroic account in Foxe’s book).

Juan Sánchez Cotán, Historia de los mártires de Inglaterra. Tres priores y un monje de Santa Brígida juzgados por C[r]onwel, Granada, Spain, via villadeorgaz.es

This painting hangs in the refectory, where the monks would dine, as part of a series entitled “The History of the Martyrs of England” by Juan Sánchez Cotán. Its didactic purpose was to remind the Spanish friars of Granada that Protestant Englishmen were their persecutors and foes.

The two images have some iconographic and stylistic similarities, although the “Gaoler” in the English print looks Mannerist (with his elongated body), and the Spanish painting is baroque.

Most of the specific stories that both sides collected were probably true. Each side interpreted the persecutions of their own co-religionists as clear evidence that their enemy was cruel. There is perhaps a lesson here about selection bias …

See also Coryat’s Crudities (note #1 from the Levine library); twenty-five thousand books to Bosnia; and my father’s books are going to James Madison’s desk at Montpelier.