This year’s newly reset presidential race features a former president running against a sitting vice president, but don’t expect to hear either candidate dwell on their existing power.
“We got a fight ahead of us, and we are the underdogs in this race,” Kamala Harris, the presumptive Democratic nominee, said this weekend at a fundraiser.
Meanwhile, the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, speaks about how he is a victim. “I’m being indicted for you,” he said at a recent rally in Michigan. In 2022, he said he had been “harassed, investigated, defamed, slandered, and persecuted like no elected leader in American history.”
These visions are separated by a fundamental difference in their view of the political system. An underdog is someone who is currently losing a fair competition but can win it with hard work; a victim has been unfairly wronged. What connects them, though, is an impulse to be seen as insurgent outsiders. This is a vivid illustration of the antiestablishment fervor that courses through American politics. Not long ago, incumbency was the greatest advantage any politician could hold.
In Time magazine last year, the political scientist Lee Drutman laid out some reasons incumbency is no longer the edge it once was: “Unrelenting media scrutiny; a bruising political environment; pervasive anti-politician bias; and above all, a spiraling hyper-partisan doom loop of animosity and demonization that imposes a harsh starting ceiling on any president’s approval.”
Or just check the vibes. Gallup regularly asks Americans whether they’re satisfied with the direction of the country, and the measure hasn’t topped 50 percent since December 2003. It’s only passed 40 percent once since 2005. (That was in February 2020. You may recall what happened the following month.) In 2020, Joe Biden won the presidency in part by promising to restore normalcy, but by this year, Americans wanted change. In a May New York Times/Siena College poll, nearly seven in 10 people said the political and economic system needed major reform or a total overhaul. No one wants to be seen as the avatar of the status quo in such an environment.
Harris is probably right to label herself the underdog, at least in electoral terms. Though some polls since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee have shown her tied or even ahead of Trump, the Republican has led the race for months. (One sign of the calcification of American politics is that Harris’s ascendance to the top of the Democratic ticket was simultaneously shocking and insufficient to move polls by more than a couple of points.)
But the framing also serves to distance Harris from the unpopular administration in which she serves. Biden and other Democrats argue that he has been an underrated president, but that hardly matters if most voters don’t agree. By painting herself as an insurgent, Harris can try to shake off the despair and ennui that have plagued much of the party in recent months. Doesn’t everyone love an underdog? Harris’s messaging tells Democrats that they shall, or at least can, overcome. That is appealing to American progressives, who see themselves as perpetually fighting to change the nation for the better.
Trump’s approach comes from the opposite direction: a sense among him and his supporters that they used to control the country and no longer do. Eight years ago, this took the form of a vague nostalgia for yesteryear. Since 2020, it has been compounded by the more specific loss of the presidential election. That defeat has provided an answer to the question posed by “Make America Great Again.” When was America great before? In the moment just before COVID-19 struck.
Trump used to tell his supporters that control of the country was rightly theirs but had been taken away from them—perhaps (as he said explicitly) by corporations, elites, and Democrats, or perhaps (more implicitly) by racial and ethnic minorities. Now he sees himself personally as a victim, with the rightful control of the White House taken from him in an election that he still insists, against all evidence, was stolen. In fact, voters rejected him.
Each of these narratives has flaws. As I have written, it takes a special sort of chutzpah for a billionaire former president to present himself as an outsider. Trump also acted like a sort of incumbent during the GOP primary, even wresting control of the Republican National Committee before he’d clinched the nomination. As for Harris, she’s the No. 2 official in the sitting administration, and her party has held the White House for most of the past two decades. If the Democratic nominee is an underdog, it’s because of dissatisfaction with Democratic governance. But both candidates are following a certain logic: If voters don’t like who you are, you might as well run as something else.
