How Incumbents Win Re-Election

I think you might find political consultant Louis Perron’s advice to the Biden campaign at RealClearPolitics interesting. Here’s a snippet:

On paper, and judging by official numbers and indicators, the economy is doing fine. Large parts of the electorate, however, do not feel the Bidenomics (yet). What should he do? Blow his own horn and propagate that the economy is doing well, or showcase how he feels the pain?

The answer depends on timing. The more time there is available, the more an incumbent should fight to change the public perception and mood. After all, an incumbent president or prime minister has a unique ability to affect the media. This, however, has to be done very carefully, in the right tone, and in sync with where people are emotionally at the current moment. For Joe Biden, the main opportunity to do this starts with the State of the Union speech, and the window of opportunity will close at the convention. After that, he will be left with step number four.

That is, vulnerable incumbents need to go on the counter-offense and rip apart the challenger. As different as they may be with respect to policy, this is the strategy by which George W. Bush and Barack Obama won reelection. The rationale goes like this: You may not like what you have, but at least you know what you have, and the alternative is a big risk, and it’s likely that things will get worse. In that respect, Donald Trump is a gift from heaven for Joe Biden, and it’s noteworthy to me that Biden purposely and consistently makes it a point to run against Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans.

I suspect that the Biden campaign will find some of his advice extremely difficult to accomplish, particularly his advice about mobilizing the base. The problem is that the interests of different components of President Biden’s base, e.g. white suburban college-educated voters and urban black voters, are diametrically opposed. IMO some of the base is expendable while some is not. So, for example, for President Biden I (along with Ruy Teixeira and John Judis) think that he doesn’t need to reach out to white suburban college-educated voters but does need to reach out to urban black voters. That is further complicated since those who contribute to or work in campaigns tend to come from the former group so it necessarily looms larger than it should.