There is some survivorship bias in your pre 1992 data, I think. Both Johnson and Truman elected not to run again because of their unpopularity. Their potential second runs are not counted in the data, yet they almost certainly would drag the incumbency advantage down had they run.
We’ve had 45 presidents not counting Biden…that’s always seemed like too small a sample size to draw conclusions from. Eyeballing everything there does seem to some incumbency bias (2004 sticks out because his approval started declining in January 2005 never to return) but an incumbent can be beat.
I love the balancing act between the left constantly acting like the entire economy is a total abysmal tire fire for all workers constantly who are all one bad government policy for total destitution...and then them defending Biden due to the strong economic figures.
This is the biggest problem with mainstream news outlets. They pushed the party line over and above what was in any way objective from 2016-to 2020. Now, no one believes anything they say. And, believe it or not, that includes their liberal readers. Highly-educated liberals know when they are being sold a bill of goods. They just don't care when they feel it benefits them. Now that they know for a fact they were lied to during this time period (especially Covid), they distrust even their own papers. Credibility and trust are two things the government and the media really couldn't afford to lose. It would be nice to see some self-correction, but I won't hold my breath.
It was and is impressive just how quickly Americans went from trusting to distrusting everything they heard from the news, science, college, courts, government. All they ever needed really was more voices telling them to not trust things.
Nate I love your writing, but this feels like a pretty big strawman.
Nobody claims that the incumbency advantage means “the incumbent always wins.” It just means “the incumbent performs better than a non-incumbent of the same party would.”
Now maybe that’s also no longer true (though I doubt it - just look at how much more eager candidates are to run for “open” seats vs challenging an incumbent). But simply showing the results of presidential elections doesn’t prove it.
One would argue that Trump was a great case of incumbency advantage. Economy temporarily in the tank (mostly exogenous reasons but still), opposing candidate tailormade to appeal to swing voters, a lot of bad personal baggage... and he eventually outperformed polls and expectations up to an almost draw.
It also doesn’t explain how primary voters are also preferring the incumbent (or in the GOP’s case, the ex-incumbent) nominee by large margins, or how there’s enough hate from both sides for either party to radically change. During the Yellow Journalism Era (roughly from 1896-1932), there were elections where both parties put up progressive candidates (like in 1908), and both parties up up conservative candidates (like in 1924).
I'm still curious whether the neuroticism is correlated with said characteristics or if they are being encouraged by a particular worldview (ie, does dwelling on identity politics incite neuroticism, or are neurotics more likely to dwell on identity). I suspect the only way to tell would be to see if folks with those same characteristics were more neurotic throughout history or if it is a new phenomenon.
I'll tell you what though: as a young conservative growing up in the early 2000s, I don't think I heard anyone EVER mention have a sense of general anxiety. Sure you'd be scared of a coming test/work thing, someone might be a worry-wart, etc., but I didn't have vast swaths of my friends-group running around with general anxiety. Was that because it was the 2000s, or was it because we were a more conservative culture?
Anyone here who's in their late 30s but grew up more liberal than me: was "anxiety" a thing in your friend-group?
Maybe it has to do with 9/11?? Bush/Cheney would get approval rating bumps every terrorist attack and every major military “victory” like capturing Saddam. So you can look at a graph of Bush’s approval rating and Google the month and year of the spikes and sure enough a major global event will have taken place. Contrast that with Obama and only hit 56% approval when OBL was killed because the right wing echo chamber downplayed the event.
I'm somewhere in my 40s. My friends/family are liberal but do not identify as lgbtq. We have a lot of depression and anxiety, and afaik, have always had issues. I would say the same about my teens and 20s friends.
Hard to say how new anything is, of course there are lots of stories of depression and anxiety in Victorian literature.
But I could buy that it's growing, and I vaguely suspect it's more to do with modern lifestyles than ideology. Not enough time spent hunting wooly mammoths or whatever.
That's what I'm wondering! I would think it would be lifestyle related as well, but the links that Nate posted clearly show that it's at least correlated with liberal political markers. But then, a lot of my guesses toward the causes (social media/tiktok use, etc.) weren't around for our generation, so if it holds that far back then my guess is probably wrong (or at least not sufficient to explain the correlation).
It's probably important to clarify in the research whether depression and anxiety are different--I didn't see whether depression has any correlation or if that's evenly spread across demographics, or if it's more conservative, etc.
Maybe, there's a whole lot of other things I associate with politics. Family size, faith, mental labor, reading, tech usage, city/rural, race, age/generation, gender, sexuality, divergent views, etc.
Looking at the link, the difference before 2012 looks pretty smallish. And depression started growing steadily for everyone since then, which sure could be a sign of social media adoption.
Yeah. Interestingly, it seems from the slowboring quoted report that depression has, at least as far back as 2005, tended to affect liberals more often, and that increase holds during the big tick upward in 2014, but all four demographic slices were heavily pushed upward after that point (social media?), although it started hitting liberal girls much earlier.
If the social-media theory is right, it could be because they're early adopters.
My circle had people who were experiencing anxiety and had no words for it, which I think is an interesting middle ground to what you are describing. No one was saying “I have anxiety” but I can think of several of them that were, nonetheless, feeling anxious. Most of these people would now (in their late 30s) use the term to describe themselves.
That is interesting. Of course both your and my experiences are only anecdotal evidence, but they point to something that sounds possibly generally true but that was maybe unrecognized (undiagnosed?) until more recently.
Alternative theory: imagine that candidate vote share is a product of the partisan environment of the district and relative "candidate quality". Candidate quality includes likability, scandals or lack thereof, willingness to abandon unpopular national party positions, ability to secure money for local alfalfa farmers etc. Incumbent advantage could be mostly a product of candidate quality: the fact that the guy got elected in the first place is a positive indicator of candidate quality.
The rising partisanship we've seen over the last twenty years has meant that candidate quality matters less (e.g. I will vote Democrat unless the Democrat in my district kills someone with an axe) and since most of incumbent advantage is a secondary correlate of candidate quality, incumbent advantage has diminished.
Another implication: unpopular figures are bad not because they lose their own districts (MTG will never lose that part of Georgia for example) but because they cause occasional voters across the country to turn against your party.
I remember Democrats screeching in 2019 about nonsense like MUH MULTIPLE OBS MUH INCOME INSEEEQUALITY!!! When wage growth was high, inflation was non-existent, and the majority of Americans approved of Trump's handling of the US economy, now the same deranged liberals try and defend Biden with 33% inflation since 2021? with high gas prices ever increasing food prices and rent? with a mortgage rate hike, making buying a new house completely unaffordable? Democrats are the biggest hypocrites on the planet; they have no actual policies on the economy. It's "D" man, good, "R" man, baad.
I think that there’s one of two simple answers: (1) voters in the world today are generally more unhappy*, and thus want change; or (2) voters in the world today are generally more happy**, and thus want change.
*blame climate change, algorithms, inequality, or anything else neither incumbents or successful challengers have done much about for 40+ years
**unhappy, but definitely with more access to more stable, secure jobs, tech, better health, ie all the benefits of progress, including unprecedented optionality, which can be maddening and can condition us to always seek change, including on Election Day
Nate, wouldn't the overall negativity you write about indicate a defeat for Trump in 2024 ? Isn't he despised more than Biden ? If young people get most of their news from social media and combine that will their purported concerns about actual policy [abortion, racial justice, climate change] AND if they actually vote in larger numbers than they have in the past...won't all this negativity result in a postive outcome ? [maga defeat].
I think the small sample size for these data pretty much limits this discussion and conclusion. Where we saw strong incumbent performance, we had very strong/popular candidates, and when we had weak POTUS candidates, we saw poorer incumbent performance.
You just can’t compare Reagan, Obama and even B Clinton to the other incumbents who ran in recent decades. Their skill and popularity (not to mention the 3d party stuff for BC elections) really destroys this theory.
Nate seems to only engage with vibeseccion discourse through people like Will Stancil. Even though I’m sure he’s aware people like Claudia Sahm have been writing about this for months. It’s not just Dem cheerleaders on Twitter
Isn’t it consistent for our friend Illway Ancilstay to be a polemicist on other issues? He believes in the power of media to control opinion and wants it to push opinion in his preferred direction.
He believes it too strongly though: while media is powerful, I don’t think it can convince anyone of anything at any time in any context, the way he seems to claim.
The right wing echo chamber combined with a tribal mentality can “convince” people of many things for a little while. So in 2000 the right wing echo chamber wasn’t that powerful but it convinced Republicans that Elian Gonzalez should remain with his American kidnappers instead of the judicial system most likely sending him back to his father. And then a few years later after the right wing echo chamber grew much more powerful it convinced people that invading Iraq was necessary in the aftermath of 9/11. So tribalism is a big factor because on some level the people consuming propaganda derive satisfaction from their tribe winning elections.
"if you didn’t preface every reference to Donald Trump by calling him a fascist or some other epitaph."
I think the word you're looking for is "epithet", though it may end up being his epitaph as well.
There is some survivorship bias in your pre 1992 data, I think. Both Johnson and Truman elected not to run again because of their unpopularity. Their potential second runs are not counted in the data, yet they almost certainly would drag the incumbency advantage down had they run.
We’ve had 45 presidents not counting Biden…that’s always seemed like too small a sample size to draw conclusions from. Eyeballing everything there does seem to some incumbency bias (2004 sticks out because his approval started declining in January 2005 never to return) but an incumbent can be beat.
44 POTUS not counting Biden ... #s 22 and 24 was the same guy
I love the balancing act between the left constantly acting like the entire economy is a total abysmal tire fire for all workers constantly who are all one bad government policy for total destitution...and then them defending Biden due to the strong economic figures.
>it would cost $20 billion to build apartments for every homeless person in America
False.
Also even if true 60% of them would be wrecked and uninhabitable within a year. SF itself spends more than a billion a year.
This is the biggest problem with mainstream news outlets. They pushed the party line over and above what was in any way objective from 2016-to 2020. Now, no one believes anything they say. And, believe it or not, that includes their liberal readers. Highly-educated liberals know when they are being sold a bill of goods. They just don't care when they feel it benefits them. Now that they know for a fact they were lied to during this time period (especially Covid), they distrust even their own papers. Credibility and trust are two things the government and the media really couldn't afford to lose. It would be nice to see some self-correction, but I won't hold my breath.
It was and is impressive just how quickly Americans went from trusting to distrusting everything they heard from the news, science, college, courts, government. All they ever needed really was more voices telling them to not trust things.
Nate I love your writing, but this feels like a pretty big strawman.
Nobody claims that the incumbency advantage means “the incumbent always wins.” It just means “the incumbent performs better than a non-incumbent of the same party would.”
Now maybe that’s also no longer true (though I doubt it - just look at how much more eager candidates are to run for “open” seats vs challenging an incumbent). But simply showing the results of presidential elections doesn’t prove it.
One would argue that Trump was a great case of incumbency advantage. Economy temporarily in the tank (mostly exogenous reasons but still), opposing candidate tailormade to appeal to swing voters, a lot of bad personal baggage... and he eventually outperformed polls and expectations up to an almost draw.
It also doesn’t explain how primary voters are also preferring the incumbent (or in the GOP’s case, the ex-incumbent) nominee by large margins, or how there’s enough hate from both sides for either party to radically change. During the Yellow Journalism Era (roughly from 1896-1932), there were elections where both parties put up progressive candidates (like in 1908), and both parties up up conservative candidates (like in 1924).
I'm still curious whether the neuroticism is correlated with said characteristics or if they are being encouraged by a particular worldview (ie, does dwelling on identity politics incite neuroticism, or are neurotics more likely to dwell on identity). I suspect the only way to tell would be to see if folks with those same characteristics were more neurotic throughout history or if it is a new phenomenon.
I'll tell you what though: as a young conservative growing up in the early 2000s, I don't think I heard anyone EVER mention have a sense of general anxiety. Sure you'd be scared of a coming test/work thing, someone might be a worry-wart, etc., but I didn't have vast swaths of my friends-group running around with general anxiety. Was that because it was the 2000s, or was it because we were a more conservative culture?
Anyone here who's in their late 30s but grew up more liberal than me: was "anxiety" a thing in your friend-group?
Maybe it has to do with 9/11?? Bush/Cheney would get approval rating bumps every terrorist attack and every major military “victory” like capturing Saddam. So you can look at a graph of Bush’s approval rating and Google the month and year of the spikes and sure enough a major global event will have taken place. Contrast that with Obama and only hit 56% approval when OBL was killed because the right wing echo chamber downplayed the event.
I'm somewhere in my 40s. My friends/family are liberal but do not identify as lgbtq. We have a lot of depression and anxiety, and afaik, have always had issues. I would say the same about my teens and 20s friends.
Hard to say how new anything is, of course there are lots of stories of depression and anxiety in Victorian literature.
But I could buy that it's growing, and I vaguely suspect it's more to do with modern lifestyles than ideology. Not enough time spent hunting wooly mammoths or whatever.
That's what I'm wondering! I would think it would be lifestyle related as well, but the links that Nate posted clearly show that it's at least correlated with liberal political markers. But then, a lot of my guesses toward the causes (social media/tiktok use, etc.) weren't around for our generation, so if it holds that far back then my guess is probably wrong (or at least not sufficient to explain the correlation).
It's probably important to clarify in the research whether depression and anxiety are different--I didn't see whether depression has any correlation or if that's evenly spread across demographics, or if it's more conservative, etc.
Maybe, there's a whole lot of other things I associate with politics. Family size, faith, mental labor, reading, tech usage, city/rural, race, age/generation, gender, sexuality, divergent views, etc.
Looking at the link, the difference before 2012 looks pretty smallish. And depression started growing steadily for everyone since then, which sure could be a sign of social media adoption.
Yeah. Interestingly, it seems from the slowboring quoted report that depression has, at least as far back as 2005, tended to affect liberals more often, and that increase holds during the big tick upward in 2014, but all four demographic slices were heavily pushed upward after that point (social media?), although it started hitting liberal girls much earlier.
If the social-media theory is right, it could be because they're early adopters.
My circle had people who were experiencing anxiety and had no words for it, which I think is an interesting middle ground to what you are describing. No one was saying “I have anxiety” but I can think of several of them that were, nonetheless, feeling anxious. Most of these people would now (in their late 30s) use the term to describe themselves.
That is interesting. Of course both your and my experiences are only anecdotal evidence, but they point to something that sounds possibly generally true but that was maybe unrecognized (undiagnosed?) until more recently.
Alternative theory: imagine that candidate vote share is a product of the partisan environment of the district and relative "candidate quality". Candidate quality includes likability, scandals or lack thereof, willingness to abandon unpopular national party positions, ability to secure money for local alfalfa farmers etc. Incumbent advantage could be mostly a product of candidate quality: the fact that the guy got elected in the first place is a positive indicator of candidate quality.
The rising partisanship we've seen over the last twenty years has meant that candidate quality matters less (e.g. I will vote Democrat unless the Democrat in my district kills someone with an axe) and since most of incumbent advantage is a secondary correlate of candidate quality, incumbent advantage has diminished.
Another implication: unpopular figures are bad not because they lose their own districts (MTG will never lose that part of Georgia for example) but because they cause occasional voters across the country to turn against your party.
As if people in California wouldn’t elect an axe murderer before they’d elect a Republican. 😂
It's not that extreme. It depends what type of axe.
Or they would elect and reelect a Terminator before they elected a Democrat.
That was a particular moment, against a widely-considered-corrupt democrat, with a very purple republican.
Who ended up really abusing his power there at the end.
Seen more as incompetent than corrupt, I'd say.
Yes, I think you're right. Better word.
I remember Democrats screeching in 2019 about nonsense like MUH MULTIPLE OBS MUH INCOME INSEEEQUALITY!!! When wage growth was high, inflation was non-existent, and the majority of Americans approved of Trump's handling of the US economy, now the same deranged liberals try and defend Biden with 33% inflation since 2021? with high gas prices ever increasing food prices and rent? with a mortgage rate hike, making buying a new house completely unaffordable? Democrats are the biggest hypocrites on the planet; they have no actual policies on the economy. It's "D" man, good, "R" man, baad.
I think that there’s one of two simple answers: (1) voters in the world today are generally more unhappy*, and thus want change; or (2) voters in the world today are generally more happy**, and thus want change.
*blame climate change, algorithms, inequality, or anything else neither incumbents or successful challengers have done much about for 40+ years
**unhappy, but definitely with more access to more stable, secure jobs, tech, better health, ie all the benefits of progress, including unprecedented optionality, which can be maddening and can condition us to always seek change, including on Election Day
Nate, wouldn't the overall negativity you write about indicate a defeat for Trump in 2024 ? Isn't he despised more than Biden ? If young people get most of their news from social media and combine that will their purported concerns about actual policy [abortion, racial justice, climate change] AND if they actually vote in larger numbers than they have in the past...won't all this negativity result in a postive outcome ? [maga defeat].
I think the small sample size for these data pretty much limits this discussion and conclusion. Where we saw strong incumbent performance, we had very strong/popular candidates, and when we had weak POTUS candidates, we saw poorer incumbent performance.
You just can’t compare Reagan, Obama and even B Clinton to the other incumbents who ran in recent decades. Their skill and popularity (not to mention the 3d party stuff for BC elections) really destroys this theory.
PS, good to see my eight grade social studies teacher had better images of what yellow journalism was than AI
I found this from another post, but this isn't a trend I knew about before. Is this widely reported elsewhere or did I just miss it?
Nate seems to only engage with vibeseccion discourse through people like Will Stancil. Even though I’m sure he’s aware people like Claudia Sahm have been writing about this for months. It’s not just Dem cheerleaders on Twitter
Isn’t it consistent for our friend Illway Ancilstay to be a polemicist on other issues? He believes in the power of media to control opinion and wants it to push opinion in his preferred direction.
He believes it too strongly though: while media is powerful, I don’t think it can convince anyone of anything at any time in any context, the way he seems to claim.
The right wing echo chamber combined with a tribal mentality can “convince” people of many things for a little while. So in 2000 the right wing echo chamber wasn’t that powerful but it convinced Republicans that Elian Gonzalez should remain with his American kidnappers instead of the judicial system most likely sending him back to his father. And then a few years later after the right wing echo chamber grew much more powerful it convinced people that invading Iraq was necessary in the aftermath of 9/11. So tribalism is a big factor because on some level the people consuming propaganda derive satisfaction from their tribe winning elections.
Footnote 3 😵 Nate you're hilarious.