Former President Donald Trump’s biggest obstacle as he tries to reclaim the White House is history.
Over the past century, starting with Republican President Calvin Coolidge’s 1924 win, sitting chief executives have won 12 times, while only five presidents have lost reelection, including Trump, in 2020, against Democratic President Joe Biden.
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Up Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C., reelection rates for members of Congress are even higher. Take the GOP “wave” years of 1994 and 2010, when Republicans won the House majority, reelection rates were still 90% and 85.4%, respectively. And when House Democrats won back the majority in 2006, 94.1% of incumbents were reelected. When they did it in 2018, the House incumbent reelection rate was 91%.
In short, it’s tough to beat a sitting officeholder. But not impossible, as Switzerland-based political consultant Louis Perron explains in his important, useful, and highly informative book Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections (Radius Book Group). It’s an accessible but detailed expert guide to the nuts and bolts of successfully challenging incumbents — officeholders who, by definition, enjoy advantages such as strong name recognition, along with ready access to donors since they’re currently in positions to move the levers of governments in supplicants’ favor.
Perron offers his reflections on beating incumbents through hard-earned experience. He’s spent plenty of time in Washington, D.C., learning the tricks of the trade, and earned a Ph.D. in political science at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Fluent in English, German, and French, his clients globally have included presidents, vice presidents, mayors, and others in Germany, Brazil, the Philippines, and beyond.
Challenger opportunities abound in 2024
The 2024 election cycle offers a plethora of chances to knock off incumbents. Trump is favored to be the Republican presidential nominee in a rematch against Biden. In the Senate, Republican efforts to win the majority are focused on defeating Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Jon Tester (D-MT). Democrats are looking to flip the House by defeating, among others, 17 Republicans holding seats that Biden would have won in 2020.
Keeping his book focused on broader strategies and tactics, without mentioning this kind of upcoming race, Perron offers several valuable lessons on how this could all play out, including these tips.
A challenger must consider at the outset of their campaign the vulnerability of the incumbent.
This is a key question for structuring a campaign against the sitting officeholder.
When voters consider reupping an incumbent for another term in office, “They render a verdict on the performance they’ve observed during the past years,” Perron writes. “They can decide whether they want to renew the contract and keep the incumbent on the job or not.”
How to develop a winning message for a challenger.
Hold an incumbent’s feet to the fire.
“If a majority of voters truly are unhappy with the status quo, it is important to actively tie the status quo to the incumbent candidate,” Perron writes. “You have to make sure the incumbent’s policies and decisions are perceived as the cause of the discontent about the status quo.”
Perron points to a prominent example in presidential campaign history. “When Ronald Reagan ran to unseat incumbent president Jimmy Carter in 1980, he famously asked voters, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?’' It makes sense to frame an election using a question like this, as it is meant to say that all voters who thought that they were no better off should vote for the challenger, Ronald Reagan.”
Moreover, “It’s important not to let the incumbent blame something or someone else for it. You also shouldn’t sound like you’re criticizing the country and its people. Voters don’t like to hear that.”
Move beyond traditional Left and Right
Whatever your views of Trump’s fitness for office, his political dexterity is undeniable. Part of his 2016 success against Democratic rival Hillary Clinton was his instinct for appealing to working-class voters, a traditional constituency of the other party. Following, in a sense, the “Putting People First” campaign of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, in his winning 1992 campaign over an incumbent White House resident, Republican George H.W. Bush.
“When Bill Clinton ran for president, one of the challenges he was facing was that his party, the Democrats, was seen as too liberal. As a result, he positioned himself as a ‘new Democrat,’ more centrist than the national party leadership, and tried to move beyond the traditional dichotomy of left versus right,” Perron writes.
The next Democratic president, Barack Obama, did this, too, in his way, emphasizing the slightly vague notion of “hope and change.”
Trump both challenger and quasi-incumbent
The budding 2024 presidential race may offer an inverted notion of shadow and incumbent. Trump, after all, would be only the second former president to return to power, along with Democratic Grover Cleveland in his 1885-89 and 1893-97 terms in office.
And for Trump, publicity, good or bad, is like oxygen for most people. So, he’s likely to dominate news headlines, as has happened in his early rounds of political shadowboxing against Biden.
The incumbent, for his part, is all too happy to cede the spotlight as long as possible. At age 81, one serious slip-up in front of cameras could do serious damage, or even doom, his reelection prospects, to the point that Biden’s White House staff has had him entering Air Force One on a lower deck to use shorter stairs, minimizing chances for a slip-up climbing or descending the presidential plane.
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Trump also is trying to use his legal troubles as an advantage in his campaign, allowing him to paint both law enforcement and the judicial system as part of a massive conspiracy against him. Facing a cumulative 91 felony counts over four trials, Democrats, too, think Biden will benefit from the attention Trump draws over his legal woes.
It’s all unprecedented political territory. And as author Perron notes, campaigns have to be prepared to throw out their game plan when needed and scramble to adjust to changed circumstances. Yet there's plenty of planning they can do. In the presidential race, and contests further down the ballot, campaign strategists for challengers would be wise to, far ahead of November 2024, read Perron's step-by-step guide to take on incumbents at any level of government.