We Don’t Know Where We Are in the Political Cycle

E veryone in American politics lives by the clock. The political clock is remorseless, and it is rarely defeated. But how do you follow the clock when you can’t tell what time it is?

Perhaps the single most powerful and enduring force in America’s two-party political system is its cyclical nature. Political enthusiasts love to talk about realignments, and permanent majorities, and demographics as destiny. But professionals know that our system far more often follows a predictable metronomic pattern: Power swings toward one party, but as soon as they get it, they begin alienating parts of their coalition and energizing disparate elements in the opposition camp, causing things to swing back in the other direction. This thermostatic response produces certain recognizable patterns in elections:

• In presidential years, congressional and other down-ballot races tend to follow the winner of the presidential race.
• In the two years after a presidential election, the presidential out-party’s voters are angrier, while the in-party’s voters are more complacent; this tends to cause midterm woes, especially in the governors’ races in Virginia, New Jersey, and the following year in the Midwest and in the House. This typically produces “wave” dynamics in which Senate elections break after mid-September — usually against the in-party, unless the president has high approval ratings.
• In general, down-ballot races are heavily dictated by presidential approval, and the increasing nationalization of our politics has only exacerbated this tendency. Approval ratings are typically enough to reverse the dynamic in favor of the in-party only in the case of a first-term foreign policy crisis, as in 2002 (post-9/11) or 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis weeks before the midterm), or in the case of a generational event such as the Great Depression wiping out Republicans even further in 1934.
• The midterm cyclical reaction against the in-party has made it exceptionally difficult for modern parties to maintain unified government for long periods. Since the end of the Second World War, a party has held a federal trifecta (control of the White House, Senate, and House) for eight years only once, that being the Democrats from 1961-68 (again, with the help of the 1962 reversal of the wave dynamic). The reaction to what the 1960s Democrats delivered was so powerful that the party lost five of the next six presidential elections, including four Electoral College landslides and the short leash given to Jimmy Carter in 1976.
• In spite of the harsh midterm winds, presidents tend to get reelected. While incumbency can be overrated, in the years between 1896 and 2016, incumbents won 15 out of 20 general elections, and American voters kicked an incumbent party out of office only once (with Carter in 1980) without giving the party eight years to deliver.
• After eight years, however, party coalitions get exhausted. That’s why, in “post-incumbent” elections — i.e., four years after an incumbent is reelected — there’s an enormously powerful and longstanding tendency, still visible in 2016, of voters to shift from the in-party to the out-party.

All of these cyclical trends can be affected by leadership, by political decision-making, by external events, and by demographics. They are trends, not prophecies. But their gravitational pull is as immutable as the laws of nature.

So, if the cyclical clock is so powerful, where in the cycle are we? Because those cyclical dynamics were broken when Donald Trump lost reelection in 2020 (after Republicans losing the House in 2018 and alongside them losing the Senate in January 2021), and then voters threw the Democrats out after four years, as well (after they lost the House in 2022 and alongside them losing the Senate in 2024).

That raises a very big question: Is the cycle broken? Have we now exited the long era of presumptive two-term presidencies? Or were the 2020 and 2024 elections just a unique set of circumstances brought on by the pandemic and its aftermath, and exacerbated by Trump’s volatile personality and Joe Biden’s decrepitude? We will not truly know the answer until we have been through another presidential election or two, which is a long time to ask political actors and prognosticators to wait to adjust their models and behavior.

A lot of commentators seem to assume, and a lot of politicians are showing by their behavior that they assume, that we are in something resembling a conventional second term, with the tide irresistibly moving against Republicans. Nate Silver asks, “Is Trump a lame duck,” and devotes a whole section to his newsletter to why “that second-term thing really makes a difference” and why “Second-term ratings usually slope downward.” Here at National Review, my colleagues sound similar notes. Jim Geraghty sees that “The Epstein Fight Shows Trump Inching Closer to Lame Duck Status,” Jeff Blehar finds Republicans “Contemplating a Post-Trump World,” and Noah Rothman argues that “Conservatives Shouldn’t Be Late to the Fight over the GOP’s Post-Trump Identity.”

Now, there are rational arguments for why we should treat Trump as a second-term president who is exposed to second-term dynamics. The most obvious one is that Donald Trump is, after all, in his second presidential term. He is constitutionally barred from running for another when he is 82 years old in 2028. That means that Trump, for all of his force of personality, is bound to face a diminishing role in American politics in general and the Republican Party’s direction and fortunes going forward. He’s not going away any time soon, but he is apt to find his ability to control events and political outcomes lessens with each passing month.

Trump has also faced some of the other hurdles common to second-term presidents, such as the diminishing quality of the people working for him (some of which has been self-inflicted). On the other hand, he hasn’t lost his capacity to drive headlines, nor have the Democrats (having only recently held power) yet made the traditional second-term out-party adjustment of becoming more pragmatic and less hysterical — an adjustment that tends to follow losing two elections in a row.

Trump has not faced the problem of George W. Bush in 2005 or Barack Obama in 2013 of undue hubris in pushing a legislative agenda on the basis of an over-reading of his mandate, but he has certainly pushed things far and fast with his uses of executive power.

A major advantage of first-term over second-term presidents is that new presidents — especially those elected in good part in reaction to economic discontent — are usually given a year to deflect a lot of blame to their predecessor, whereas second-termers have nowhere to hide. Trump has, to a considerable extent, squandered that advantage already by his aggressive use of tariffs, which made him publicly responsible for cost-of-living complaints far earlier than would otherwise have been the case.

The one precedent we have — Grover Cleveland — points to treating Trump as a second-termer. Everything went wrong for Cleveland when he returned to office, and he ended up wholly repudiated by insurgents in his party while the electorate flipped to elect a new, two-term Republican president.

Republican prospects for 2026 look grim right now no matter whether we think of this as a first or second term. My list from June of reasons why 2026 might not be so bad is much less plausible now than it was then. But whether we are on a glide path to a 2008-style denouement to the Trump presidency (or at least an ending that looks like 2016 did for Democrats), or to the two-term Republican control of the White House that is needed for the party to remake the executive branch is as yet unknowable, and won’t really start to become clear until we are well into 2027 (although a major disaster for Senate Republicans, along the lines of what happened to Senate Democrats in 2014, would be a big warning light). I’m not optimistic — but we shouldn’t trick ourselves into thinking we know just yet where we are in the cycle.