Understanding the Trump landslide

Trump in Arizona, June 2024. Photo by 

Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

As with many Canadians (and Americans) these days, my starting point for reading the daily news day is social media site, X. The site owner, Elon Musk, maintains a free speech policy one cannot find anywhere else. The advantage of that to me is that, after an hour or so, I can get both an overview of the news and a short list of stories to follow up for possible mention on my blog. 

Yesterday, though, all I could find was one story that everyone wanted to post about, the 2024 American election result. It was not just that the Republicans won, but the size of their win. Not only did Donald Trump take the presidency; his party also took control of both houses of Congress. That is hyuge (as the new president would say) in the American system, where the Presidency and Congress (the executive and legislative branches) are formally independent. Let me emphasize its hyugeness by repeating it in its own paragraph. 

( A ) In 2024, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House. 

It seems that everyone on earth, or at least everyone on X, wants to talk about nothing else; and everyone has their own theory of why (A) occurred. One theory that I could not find anywhere on X was my own. I would like more people to know of my theory – not just because it was mine, but because it allowed me to predict (A) four years ago. Indeed, I offered my prediction at the time as a test of my theory: (A) happening would not prove my theory correct, but the failure of (A) to happen would have falsified this version of it. 

I wrote up my theory, and made my prediction, back in November 2020, in an article called " US election results are more of the same ." I was commenting on the fact that: 

( B ) in 2020, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House.

Checking back, I also discovered that: 

( C ) In 2016, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;

( D ) In ​​2008, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House;  

( E ) In 2000, the Republicans won the Presidency, the Senate, and the House; and 

( F ) In 1992, the Democrats won the Presidency, the Senate and the House. 

To sum up: For the entire millennium so far, every incumbent president has been replaced by a challenger from the other party, in a repudiation of the incumbent's party. This repudiation has been total, with the challenger's party taking control of Congress as well as the White House. 

Those are facts. Are they just a coincidence or is there a theory that explains them? The theory that I have come up with goes like this: 

The first part follows from Ludwig von Mises' theory of interventionism. Mises taught that, while intervention was meant to be a compromise between minimal and total government, it would always tend toward the total. Each government intervention would have new, unintended consequences, new problems which had to be solved by yet more intervention. In that way, government would grow. But (and this is my own idea at this point), as government increased, so would the problems it created. It would tend to become a bigger, more commending government trying to perform ever more functions; but it would also increasingly tend to fail at performing any of those functions well. It would increasingly tend to fail at even its core functions of courts, police, and national defense. Given enough time, it would become both a totalitarian state and a failed state. 

Long before that point is reached, the government would be failing to satisfy the needs of an increasing number of voters. Ironically, the more it tried to do, the more voters people it would fail to satisfy; as a government grows through interventionism, so does the number of dissatisfied voters. Those voters would give up on the party system to some degree. Some reject the system only slightly, becoming nominally independent but still retaining some loyalty to their old party. Others reject it completely and become non-voters. In between are the true independents, dissatisfied voters who reject and will vote to throw out either party. As their numbers grow, true independents increasingly determine the outcome of elections; and as they tend to vote against incumbent government, those incumbents will be totally repudiated at regular intervals. 

While the interval is regular, it is not independent of human agency. It can and has changed.  Currently it is four years (A-C), but before that it was eight (C-F). Since that change coincided with the first election of Donald Trump, it is fair to speculate that his first election is the main reason for the speed-up. Since his election, both parties have become increasingly negative. Negative campaigning has existed since the beginning of American democracy, but since Trump's election both parties have taken negativity to a whole new level. 

In the past the negativity of political campaigns began and ended with political campaigns. members of both parties were able to coexist socially outside political life. Today, though, politics and its negativity, never ends. Partisans of both parties have come to see the other party as intrinsically evil, good only to be destroyed. The challenger party does little more than point to the failures of the incumbent regime. The incumbent party increasingly dismisses the challengers' criticisms as "playing politics" and does nothing to correct them. As a result, the all-important true independents – who can confirm the flaws for themselves, as well as their failure to be corrected – are increasingly unsatisfied, increasingly likely to defect to the challengers at the earliest opportunity. They have become motivated by anti-incumbency. 

This election has confirmed that four-year interval. However, since Trump remains a player it does not tell us whether the interval stays at four years or reverts to eight following his retirement. Based on the data, there is no way to predict that, for now. All that can be predicted is that in four years' time both parties will once again march into battle as if marching to Armageddon; and in that election the Democrats will win. However, how long that Democratic president will stay in office cannot be answered at this time. 

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