Nov 14, 2024 By Brad Hundt 3 min read

Barrels full of ink were spilled, millions upon millions of dollars were spent and hours upon hours of volunteer work were spent knocking on thousands of doors and getting in touch with thousands of voters.

And the final result of the 2024 presidential election could well have been baked in from the beginning.

That’s one of the takeaways a panel of experts on U.S. politics offered Tuesday night at a forum on the election that just ended at the California campus of PennWest University. Given the chronically low approval ratings President Biden has had for much of his term, it would have been a marked departure from America’s typical voting behavior if Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, had managed to pull off a win against former President Donald Trump in this year’s election.

Biden’s approval ratings have lately been hovering around 40%, and with an unpopular president in the White House “it’s almost impossible for (an incumbent) or someone else (from the same party) to win an election,” according to Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University outside Atlanta.

There’s a very strong correlation between presidential approval and which party wins the White House, and this was the seventh presidential election “to follow that pattern consistently,” Abramowitz added.

Abramaowitz was joined in the discussion by Amber Gaffney, a professor of psychology at California State University-Humboldt; Lou Jacobson, a journalist with the online site PolitiFact; and Curtis Edmonds, a Ph.D. candidate at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University. The forum, named after the late political science professor Melanie Blumberg, was moderated by Jon Delano, the senior political correspondent with Pittsburgh’s KDKA-TV.

“The key to what happened is you had a Democratic president who was deeply unpopular,” Gaffney explained.

Jacobson pointed out that not only was the defeat of Harris and the Democrats a predictable event within the framework of American politics, but it fits a worldwide pattern that has seen incumbent parties turfed out amid the messy, inflation-fueled aftermath of COVID-19. Britain’s Conservative Party was shellacked this summer, and incumbent parties in New Zealand and South Africa were similarly cast out. Given their rock-bottom approval ratings, governments in Germany and Canada are likely to fall when voters in those countries go to the polls next year.

But if the news has been bad for Democrats over the last week or so, it could have been worse, the panelists noted. Another Republican presidential nominee might well have won the popular vote by six or seven points, Abramowitz said, but Trump’s baggage kept the race tight.

“This was a very close election,” he added. “One of the closest national elections since World War II. This was not a landslide by any means.”

And there is reason for Democrats to hope their fortunes will improve in the election cycles ahead, according to Abramowitz. He believes Democrats will take the majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026, and the party has “a pretty good shot” at reclaiming the White House in 2028.”

Jacobson agreed. He noted that the presidency, House and Senate have collectively flipped 16 times since 2000.

“Voters are fickle,” he said.