A conventional presidential run between a challenger and an incumbent has one overarching message: Stability vs. change. If the public wants change, it goes for the challenger (Reagan over Carter). If the public wants stability, it goes for the incumbent (Reagan over Mondale). The message of the challenger is always things are broken and I will come in and fix them. The message of the incumbent is: I’m the steady hand on the tiller. 

In 2020, challenger Joe Biden successfully combined the two. He was the change candidate, simply because voting him in would change the occupant in the White House. But he was also, crucially, the candidate who promised stability. Trump had an unsteady hand on the tiller as president; he, the veteran pol who’d seen it all and been at Obama’s side, would chart a course through COVID. And he won.

In 2024, Trump is running once again as the change candidate, as he did in 2016. This is clearly the mode he’s most comfortable with; 2020 required him to defend his government’s actions and he just isn’t effective as a message-deliverer when he’s not on the attack. He tried to differentiate between his choices (good government) and the evils of the deep state that worked for him (bad conspiracy), but that case was counterintuitive and confusing to ordinary people.

There’s a claim, seemingly indisputable, that being an incumbent is a powerful advantage. But is it, really? Consider the fact that in the past 11 elections, four incumbents have won their second terms. They were Reagan, Clinton, GW Bush, and Obama. But three have lost: Carter, George HW Bush, and Trump. Incumbency makes it easier to get through the process leading to an election contest in November, to be sure. But past success is no guarantee of future returns.

But say incumbency provides a very small leg up, all things being equal. Something happened yesterday. Trump became both the challenger and the incumbent. He’s the only person in 112 years to run for the office having held it and lost it before. As challenger, he can dedicate his time to carving up the Biden administration. But he also gets to talk about his own record as president—and absent the emotions generated by his behavior during the first pandemic in a century, his “you never had it so good” message apparently resonates somewhat, and not just with Trumpy Republicans.

Challenger. Incumbent. Now to those we can add this: Maybe Trump is now the candidate…of stability. I know, I know. He’s a disruptor and wants to do all kinds of radical things, like expelling 15 million people from the United States. He can’t keep himself from ruining his own chance at giving the greatest convention speech in history. He’s Donald Trump. He was the unstable candidate in 2020.

How can he be the stable candidate now?

Oh, simple. He’s been the dominating figure in Republican politics for almost nine years. He has been the presumptive Republican nominee for 2024 since January 2023, so he’s not only a known commodity from his own time in office (and his celebrity beforehand), he provides political continuity of a shockingly high order.

And what of his rivals? Biden began to show his failings 18 months ago. People on his side who dared point it out were thrashed about the face and neck until they cried uncle. He’s spent the past ten months managing a policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza so inconstant and self-contradictory that it made observers more politically seasick than any shlep unfortunate enough to have to stand on the ferkokteh pier he had installed off Gaza. Before the June debate, he insisted he was fine but every piece of film footage demonstrated he was not. To which his partisans responded that the videos had been edited falsely. After the debate, he gave a press conference in which he did not drool, and again, his partisans responded that he had come through.

Meanwhile, non-delusional Democrats were watching poll data suggesting he was sinking like that ferkokteh pier and understanding their chance of keeping Trump out of the White House was looking like my chance of getting a pitch past Shohei Ohtani. So they began the stab-in-the-back leaks about the donors going crazy and the private polls being awful and issuing public statements about how Biden would need to do whatever he needed to do. Barack Obama told George Clooney to publish the op-ed saying Biden had lost his cookies. Nancy Pelosi was making phone calls. The Biden team kept saying this internal revolt wasn’t real, he was in it to win it, he was going forward. And then, one minute before he quits, his own team is informed he’s leaving.

This is political instability. In fact, it’s a kind of instability we literally have never seen before at the national level. Oh, we’ve seen Democrats drive their own from office; Andrew Cuomo was, and so was Al Franken. But a president who had already secured his party’s nomination? That’s new. The world’s oldest political party decided to play a game of 52 Pick-Up with its own future and America’s. Maybe it was necessary. Maybe it’ll work. But the one thing is ain’t is a sign of stability.

So Trump is now a three-fer. He’s the closest thing we have to an incumbent president now—and the candidate of change. And Kamala Harris has some major work to do to overcome the instability that has emanated from her party during the most unstable moment in American politics since the Florida recount.