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Edexcel A Level Politics (9PL0/01) — UK Politics, Topic 1.1: Democracy and Participation

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“Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”

Edmund Burke, Speech to the Electors of Bristol, 3 November 1774

Edmund Burke was the MP for Bristol in the late eighteenth century (a port city that was then one of the largest constituencies in England).

In this speech, delivered just after his election, Burke argued that an MP should not simply do whatever the majority of constituents instructed.

Instead, an MP should use their own judgement about what is genuinely in the national or constituency interest, even where this conflicts with the wishes of the people who elected them.

This is often called the trustee model of representation, and it sits at the heart of representative democracy as it developed in the United Kingdom.

This page tests how far Burke’s claim still describes UK democracy today, given how far direct democracy, in which citizens decide issues themselves rather than leaving the decision to their representatives, has grown since 1974.

What is democracy?

Democracy comes from the Greek words demos (people) and kratos (power or rule), and means, broadly, “rule by the people”.

Beyond that broad idea, however, democracy is what political scientists call a contested concept: there is no single agreed model of how “the people” should actually rule.

The United Kingdom, like most modern democracies, is best understood as a hybrid: overwhelmingly a representative democracy for day-to-day government, but one that has, since 1975, made growing use of direct democracy for a narrow range of major constitutional questions.

Key terms Democracy: a system of government in which political power ultimately rests with the people, whether exercised directly or through elected representatives. Legitimacy: the extent to which a government, decision or political system is widely accepted by the public as rightful or valid, often because it results from a fair, open process such as an election or referendum. Direct democracy: a system in which citizens make political decisions themselves, most commonly by voting in a referendum, rather than leaving the decision to elected representatives. Representative democracy: a system in which citizens elect representatives (in the UK, Members of Parliament, or MPs) to make political decisions on their behalf between elections. Referendum: a public vote in which the electorate is asked to decide a single issue directly, usually by answering yes or no to a specific question. Mandate: the authority a government or representative gains, typically by winning an election on a manifesto (a public statement of policy intentions), to carry out its stated policies. Trustee model: the view, associated with Edmund Burke, that a representative should use their own judgement to act in what they consider the best interests of their constituents, even against those constituents’ express wishes. Delegate model: the view that a representative should act strictly according to the wishes of those they represent, with little or no room for independent judgement.

Features of direct democracy

Direct democracy has its roots in Ancient Athens, where, from around the fifth century BCE, male citizens (a minority of the population, since women, slaves and foreigners were excluded) attended the ekklesia (a public assembly held roughly forty times a year) to vote directly on laws and major decisions such as war and peace.

There was no equivalent of an MP: citizens governed themselves in person, taking turns to hold office by lot.

The United Kingdom has no equivalent standing assembly, and no constitutional requirement to hold a referendum on any particular issue: Parliament (which, under the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, is the supreme legal authority in the UK) decides if, when and on what a referendum is held.

Referendums have therefore been used sparingly, almost always to decide major constitutional questions such as membership of international organisations or the transfer of powers to devolved bodies, rather than everyday policy.

Year	Referendum	Result	Turnout
1975	UK membership of the European Economic Community (EEC)	67.2% Yes (to remain)	64.0%
1997	Scottish devolution (a Scottish Parliament, including tax-varying powers)	74.3% Yes to a Parliament; 63.5% Yes to tax powers	60.4%
1997	Welsh devolution (a National Assembly for Wales)	50.3% Yes	50.1%
2011	Voting system for the House of Commons (Alternative Vote)	67.9% No (32.1% Yes)	42.0%
2014	Scottish independence	55.3% No (44.7% Yes)	84.6%
2016	UK membership of the European Union (“Brexit”)	51.9% Leave	72.2%

^{Figures from the Electoral Commission and House of Commons Library research briefings on each referendum.}

Check your understanding 1. In your own words, define direct democracy and representative democracy. Try to include: who actually makes the decision in each system, and what a citizen does differently in each one. 2. Look carefully at the turnout column in the table above. Compare the 2014 Scottish independence referendum (84.6%) with the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum (42.0%). Suggest two reasons why so many more people voted in 2014 than in 2011. 3. Find the sentence above that explains what “advisory” means for the 2016 EU referendum. In your own words, explain the difference between a referendum being legally binding and being advisory.

Features of representative democracy

Representative democracy is the dominant model of government in the UK. Rather than voting on individual laws, citizens elect an MP for each of the 650 parliamentary constituencies using First Past the Post (FPTP, a system in which the candidate with the most votes in a constituency wins the seat, even without an overall majority of votes cast).

The party, or parties, able to command a majority in the House of Commons then forms the government and governs on the basis of the mandate it won from its general election manifesto.

Because elections are held infrequently, at most every five years, representative democracy in the UK has developed several further mechanisms that allow voters some ongoing influence over their representatives between elections, without going as far as a full referendum on every issue.

Mechanism	How it works	Example
General elections	Voters elect an MP for their constituency using FPTP; the governing party’s manifesto forms its mandate to govern.	Elections must be held at least every five years under the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Act 2022; the next is due by 15 August 2029.
Recall of MPs Act 2015	Allows constituents to sign a recall petition if their MP is suspended from the Commons for 10 or more sitting days, or convicted of an offence; a by-election follows if at least 10% of the electorate sign.	Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) was recalled in 2023 after 14.7% of constituents signed the petition, following a breach of Covid-19 rules; Peter Bone (Wellingborough) was recalled the same year after 13.2% signed, following a suspension for bullying and sexual misconduct.
E-petitions	Petitions on the UK Parliament and government website reaching 10,000 signatures receive a government response; those reaching 100,000 are considered for a Commons debate by the Petitions Committee.	The Petitions Committee continued to schedule debates on petitions that passed the 100,000 threshold into 2026.
Select committees	Cross-party groups of backbench MPs scrutinise a government department, questioning ministers and civil servants and publishing reports.	For example, the Treasury Committee questions the Chancellor of the Exchequer following each Budget.

^{Figures from the House of Commons Library, the Electoral Commission and the UK Parliament Petitions Committee.}

Check your understanding 1. Explain, in your own words, the difference between the trustee model and the delegate model of representation. Hint: think about whose judgement counts most, the MP’s or the constituents’. 2. Using the table above, pick two mechanisms (for example the Recall of MPs Act 2015 and e-petitions) and describe, in one sentence each, how they let voters influence their MP between general elections. 3. Look at the paragraph just above the table. Explain, in your own words, why representative democracy in the UK is based on “periodic” elections rather than continuous voting.

Comparing direct and representative democracy

Direct democracy and representative democracy are often presented as opposites, but the two sections above show that the UK actually combines elements of both. Before looking at what separates them, it is worth being clear about what they have in common.

Similarities

Both systems ultimately claim their legitimacy from popular consent: a representative’s mandate comes from being elected by the people, while a referendum result claims to be the direct, unmediated expression of the people’s will. Both currently operate side by side in the UK, rather than as rivals, since it is always an elected, representative Parliament that decides whether and when a referendum takes place. Both also depend on the same practical machinery to function: the same electoral register, polling stations and vote count used at a general election are reused whenever a referendum is held.

Differences

Beyond these similarities, direct democracy and representative democracy differ sharply in how they work in practice, and in their respective strengths and weaknesses.

Criterion	Direct democracy	Representative democracy
Legitimacy of the decision	Very high for the specific issue decided: the outcome is the unmediated will of the people, e.g. the 2016 referendum result was treated as a decisive mandate for Brexit despite a majority of MPs favouring Remain.	Legitimacy comes from the whole package of policies in a mandate, renewed only periodically, at most every five years.
Practicality in a large modern state	Impractical for day-to-day government: most citizens lack the time or specialist information to vote on every issue facing a state of tens of millions of people.	Practical: a relatively small number of full-time representatives can specialise, scrutinise detailed legislation and respond quickly.
Protection of minorities	Risk of the tyranny of the majority (a phrase associated with the philosopher John Stuart Mill, describing the danger that a simple majority can override minority interests), since a binary yes/no question leaves no room for compromise.	Representatives can build coalitions, amend legislation and take minority interests into account during debate and committee scrutiny.
Participation and turnout	Highly variable: from 84.6% (Scottish independence, 2014) to 42.0% (Alternative Vote, 2011), depending on how salient the question is.	More consistent, though declining over time: 59.7% at the 2024 general election, the lowest turnout since 2001.
Quality of decision-making	Voters decide a simplified binary choice, sometimes on a technical issue, such as the specific voting system offered in 2011.	Representatives can take expert advice, hold inquiries and amend proposals in detail before deciding.

^{Turnout figures from the Electoral Commission and the House of Commons Library.}

• Direct democracy generates strong legitimacy for a single decision, but the 42.0% turnout at the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum shows that a referendum does not automatically produce higher participation than a general election.
• Representative democracy protects minorities and allows for detailed, expert scrutiny of legislation in a way a binary referendum question cannot, but the falling turnout at general elections, 59.7% in 2024, raises questions about how strong its own claim to legitimacy still is.
• The most persuasive referendums, judged by turnout, have been on existential constitutional questions (Scottish independence, EU membership) rather than on technical process questions (the Alternative Vote), suggesting direct democracy works best when an issue genuinely divides public opinion and feels significant to voters.

On balance, the evidence suggests the UK operates a predominantly representative democracy that borrows selectively from direct democracy at moments of high constitutional significance.

The 84.6% turnout in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, nearly 25 percentage points above the 2024 general election turnout of 59.7%, shows that direct democracy can generate a level of legitimacy and engagement that representative democracy currently struggles to match, but only when the question is one voters see as genuinely decisive for their future, which is precisely why referendums remain the exception rather than the rule in the UK.

Check your understanding 1. Give two similarities between direct democracy and representative democracy, using the “Similarities” paragraph above to help you. 2. Choose one row from the comparison table (for example “Practicality in a large modern state”) and explain, in your own words, what it tells you about a strength of representative democracy. 3. Using the figures in the table, describe how turnout in referendums compares with turnout in general elections. Use at least one figure from the table to support your answer.

The case for reform

Even though the UK operates a stable hybrid of direct and representative democracy, critics argue that the current balance leaves a democratic deficit, meaning many voters feel they have too little real influence over decisions taken in their name between elections. Concerns often cited include falling general election turnout, only 59.7% in 2024, the lowest since 2001, and the narrow, infrequent way referendums are used. These concerns have produced a range of reform proposals, some aiming to extend direct democracy further, others aiming to strengthen representative democracy itself.

Key term Democratic deficit: a perceived shortfall in the legitimacy or accountability of a political system, often used to describe concerns that citizens have too little real influence over decisions between elections.

Reform proposal	What it would involve	Example or evidence
Citizen-initiated or binding referendums	Allowing referendums to be triggered directly by a large public petition, and/or making results legally binding rather than advisory, closer to the Swiss model of direct democracy.	An e-petition campaign (petition 738118 on the UK Parliament petitions site) has called for citizens to be able to call binding referendums directly, rather than relying on Parliament to decide when a referendum happens.
Reforming how referendums are run	Stricter, clearer rules on referendum campaign spending and online campaigning, so that referendum campaigns are run more fairly.	The Independent Commission on Referendums (UCL Constitution Unit, 2018) made almost 70 recommendations for reform after reviewing the 2016 EU referendum, arguing that referendums should be more clearly embedded within representative democracy rather than treated as a rival to it.
Citizens’ assemblies (deliberative democracy)	A group of randomly selected citizens, reflecting the make-up of the wider population, meets over several weeks to be briefed by experts and reach recommendations on a single issue.	Climate Assembly UK (2020) brought together 108 randomly selected citizens, commissioned by six House of Commons select committees, to recommend how the UK should reach net zero.
Widening and modernising the representative franchise	Lowering the voting age and modernising voter registration, so more citizens have a say in choosing their representatives.	The Representation of the People Bill, introduced in February 2026, proposes extending the vote to around 1.7 million 16- and 17-year-olds and introducing automatic voter registration.

^{Sources: UK Parliament Petitions website; UCL Constitution Unit; UK Parliament; House of Commons Library.}

Check your understanding 1. Name two reform proposals from the table above that would give citizens more direct control over decisions, and one that instead reforms representative democracy. 2. Explain, in your own words, what is meant by a citizens’ assembly. Use Climate Assembly UK as your example. 3. Explain, in your own words, why the Independent Commission on Referendums recommended that referendums be more closely embedded within representative democracy, rather than treated as a completely separate system.

Returning to Burke

Burke’s claim in 1774, that a representative owes constituents judgement rather than obedience, remains broadly true of the UK constitution in 2026.

Parliament alone decides whether and when to hold a referendum, and no petition, however large, can change the law without MPs voting for it.

What has changed since Burke’s time is the density of mechanisms, from the Recall of MPs Act 2015 to the 100,000-signature threshold for a Commons debate, that keep an MP’s judgement under closer and more continuous public scrutiny than the five-yearly election Burke himself faced.

Reform proposals such as citizen-initiated referendums and citizens’ assemblies would push the UK further still towards the delegate model, but, as the Independent Commission on Referendums itself concluded, most current proposals still work by embedding direct democracy more closely within representative democracy, rather than replacing it.

The result is not a shift from representative to direct democracy, but a representative democracy that has, gradually and unevenly since 1975, opened narrow but real channels for the direct democracy Burke’s Bristol electors did not have.

^{How the USA’s system of state-level ballot initiatives and referenda compares with the UK’s more restricted, Parliament-controlled approach is developed further in the Component 3A comparative materials on histpology.co.uk.}

Check your understanding 1. In your own words, summarise Burke’s argument about how a representative should behave. Use the quote at the very start of this section to help you. 2. Identify one feature covered in this section that moves the UK towards the delegate model, and one feature that keeps the UK a predominantly representative democracy. 3. Write a short paragraph (around 4–5 sentences) summarising, in your own words, the difference between direct democracy and representative democracy in the UK. Use at least two examples from this section.

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Topic 2.1 (Edexcel 3A.5.1, Electing the president and Congress, and 3A.5.2, Financing US elections; AQA 3.2.1.5, The electoral process and direct democracy)

The activities below accompany the Presidential Elections in the USA pages on histpology.co.uk: the presidential election process, primaries and national conventions, the Electoral College, incumbency, campaign finance, and the 2020 and 2024 case studies. Work through each set of activities alongside the page it refers to, using the tables and key terms in that article as your evidence base. The final section brings the topic together and includes exam-style practice.

Each activity is labelled with the Assessment Objective (AO, the skill the exam board is testing) it mainly targets: AO1 (knowledge and understanding), AO2 (analysis) or AO3 (evaluation). Some activities draw on more than one objective, in which case both are given. Each task also carries a suggested time, to help with planning independent study or lesson time. Rows shaded in peach are optional stretch and extension activities, for students who want to push their evaluation skills further.

Topic overview: Elections in the USA: Overview (https://histpology.co.uk/electoral-systems-in-the-usa-an-overview)

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A. The presidential election process

These activities go with ‘Presidential Election Cycle’, covering the constitutional rules, the informal timeline built up around them, and where the 2028 race currently stands.

Read this article: Presidential Election Cycle (https://histpology.co.uk/presidential-election-cycle)

No.	Activity	Task	Focus
A1	Constitution or convention?	The article distinguishes between what the Constitution requires and what has developed through party practice and state law. Sort the following into the two categories, giving a one-sentence reason for each: the four year term, the Electoral College itself, the invisible primary, national party conventions, the safe harbour deadline, and the rules on faithless electors. (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO1: recall and categorisation
A2	Mapping the marathon	Using the timeline and glossary sections, build your own annotated timeline running from the invisible primary through to inauguration day. For each stage, write a one-line definition in your own words rather than copying the glossary directly. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO1: organisation and definition
A3	The 2028 field	Using ‘Current position in the cycle (July 2026)’, write a briefing of around 150 words naming the leading contenders in each party and explaining why the picture is clearer on one side than the other. Then explain how the November 2026 midterm elections might reshape the field. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO2: application and prediction
A4	Five times the count went wrong	The article states that the Electoral College outcome has diverged from the national popular vote result on five occasions. Research all five elections, then choose one and explain, using the constitutional mechanics described in the article, exactly how and why the divergence happened. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO1/AO2: research and explanation
A5	Stretch: Is the process fit for purpose?	The invisible primary is governed almost entirely by party practice and campaign finance law rather than by the Constitution itself. Drawing on the constitutional requirements and current position sections, evaluate whether this largely unregulated, two-year process serves American democracy well, or whether it hands too much early influence to donors and party insiders before a single voter has had a say. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO3: evaluation (stretch)

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B. Primaries and national conventions

These activities go with ‘The Primary System in United States Elections’ and ‘National Nominating Conventions in the USA’, which cover how the parties actually choose their presidential candidate.

Read this page: The Primary System in United States Elections (https://histpology.co.uk/the-primary-system-in-united-states-elections)

Read this page: National Nominating Conventions in the USA (https://histpology.co.uk/national-nominating-conventions-in-the-usa)

No.	Activity	Task	Focus
B1	Closed, open, or semi-closed?	Using the table of primary types, explain the difference between closed primaries, semi-closed primaries and open primaries, and give a real example of a state that uses each. Then explain, in your own words, what is meant by ‘raiding’ and why it is a particular risk in open primaries. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO1: recall and explanation
B2	The money primary	Explain what is meant by the invisible primary, and why strong early fundraising and polling tend to attract still more of both, making the process self-reinforcing. (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO1/AO2: explanation
B3	Two parties, two rulebooks	Compare the Republican and Democratic Party rules on delegate allocation, including the 15 March threshold for winner-take-all Republican contests and the Democratic Party’s proportional system throughout. Then explain how these different rules helped produce a Republican contest settled within six weeks in 2024, while the Democratic nomination took a very different path. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO2: comparison and explanation
B4	Nominated without a vote	Explain how Kamala Harris became the 2024 Democratic nominee without contesting a single primary. Then evaluate what this reveals about the limits of the primary system as a guarantor of direct democratic choice, using the contrast between the millions of primary votes cast and the small number of delegates who ultimately chose the nominee. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO2/AO3: explanation and evaluation
B5	From King Caucus to prime-time launch	Using the National Nominating Conventions article, explain why conventions before 1968 were genuine deliberative contests, and how the McGovern-Fraser Commission reforms changed their function afterwards. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO1/AO2: explanation
B6	Still worth having?	Complete a case-for and case-against table on whether national nominating conventions still matter, using the fall in television audiences from around 70 million in 1952 to around 18 to 20 million in 2024 as one piece of evidence. Then write a short paragraph reaching your own reasoned judgement. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO2/AO3: analysis and judgement
B7	Stretch: Trump v Trump, primaries edition	In April 2016, Donald Trump called the primary process ‘a rigged, disgusting dirty system’ after unbound delegate rules in Colorado favoured Ted Cruz. In May 2016, after winning the nomination, he said, ‘Now I don’t say it anymore because I won.’ Using evidence from both articles, evaluate whether this kind of shifting rhetoric undermines otherwise legitimate criticisms of how candidates are chosen. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO3: evaluation (stretch)

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C. The Electoral College

These activities go with ‘The Electoral College in the USA’, which sets out its origins, mechanics, controversies and possible reforms.

Read this article: The Electoral College in the USA (https://histpology.co.uk/the-electoral-college-in-the-usa)

No.	Activity	Task	Focus
C1	From compromise to controversy	In your own words, explain why the Electoral College was described as a compromise at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. What were the two alternatives it was chosen instead of, and why was each rejected? (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO1/AO2: knowledge and explanation
C2	How many electors, and why?	Draw a flowchart or diagram showing how a state’s number of electors is calculated, how most states allocate them, how Maine and Nebraska differ, and what happens if no candidate reaches 270 votes. (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO1: knowledge and understanding
C3	Faithless but not free	Research the Supreme Court case Chiafalo v Washington. Explain what the Court ruled, and why the ruling matters for how much discretion a faithless elector actually has once appointed. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO1/AO2: research and explanation
C4	Strengths, weaknesses, judgement	Complete your own strengths and weaknesses table for the Electoral College using the ‘Evaluating its significance today’ section. Then write a short paragraph reaching a reasoned judgement, referring to the September 2024 Gallup finding that 58 per cent of Americans favour replacing the system, and to why most states have still not joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO2/AO3: analysis and judgement
C5	Should the US scrap the Electoral College?	In pairs or small groups, hold a structured discussion using the ‘Possible reforms’ section. One side should argue for reform (for example, a national popular vote), the other for keeping the current system. Each side must use at least two pieces of evidence from the article. (Allow around 20 minutes, in pairs or small groups.)	AO2/AO3: analysis and evaluation
C6	Stretch: The road not taken	Using the ‘Possible reforms’ section, take the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and evaluate, using evidence about which states have joined and why, why it has stalled short of the 270 electoral votes needed to take effect. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO2/AO3: evaluation (stretch)

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D. Incumbency

These activities go with ‘Incumbency in US Presidential Elections’, which examines how far already holding office shapes a candidate’s chances.

Read this article: Incumbency in Presidential Elections (https://histpology.co.uk/incumbency-in-us-presidential-elections)

No.	Activity	Task	Focus
D1	Defining the advantage	In your own words, define incumbency advantage. Using the ‘Defining incumbency and its advantage’ section, list at least three separate reasons why it exists. (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO1: definition and recall
D2	Success and failure	Using the case study sections, build your own comparison table featuring at least two incumbent presidents who won re-election and two who lost. For each, note the main factors behind the outcome. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO2: comparison
D3	A president in all but name?	Using the ‘Quasi-incumbency problem: 2024’ section, explain what is meant by quasi-incumbency. Then evaluate whether Kamala Harris’s position as a quasi-incumbent in 2024 helped or hindered her campaign, and why. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO2/AO3: explanation and evaluation
D4	The open seat	Explain why the Twenty Second Amendment guarantees that the presidency is contested as a genuinely open seat roughly every eight years. Using the material on the 2028 cycle, discuss how the absence of an incumbent might change the way candidates campaign. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO2: explanation and application
D5	Stretch: How much does incumbency really matter?	Drawing together the historical record, the case studies in success and failure, and the 2024 quasi-incumbency problem, reach your own overall, evidenced judgement on how significant incumbency really is in the modern era. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO3: evaluation (stretch)

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E. Campaign finance

These activities go with ‘Campaign Finance’, which traces the rising cost of running for president, where the money comes from and goes, and how reform has repeatedly reopened new channels for spending.

Read this page: Campaign Finance (https://histpology.co.uk/us-presidential-election-campaign-finance)

No.	Activity	Task	Focus
E1	Charting the cost	Using the table showing total spending by election year, describe the overall trend since 1976. Identify the largest single jump in spending between two elections and explain the context given for it. (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO2: data interpretation
E2	Follow the money	Using the table on where campaign money comes from, sort the different sources into those that are legally capped and those that are not. Explain, in your own words, why this distinction exists. (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO1/AO2: categorisation
E3	Where does it go?	Using the table on campaign spending categories, identify the largest category of spending and explain why campaigns prioritise it over the others listed. (Allow around 10 minutes.)	AO2: data interpretation
E4	From FECA to now	Build your own reform timeline covering at least four milestones drawn from the ‘Analysing and evaluating campaign finance reform’ table, including the Federal Election Campaign Act 1974 and Citizens United v FEC. For each, note what it did and what its outcome was. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO1: chronological organisation
E5	PAC, Super PAC, hybrid PAC	Using the case study on Political Action Committees (PACs), explain the difference between a connected PAC, a Super PAC and a hybrid PAC. Use the Future Forward example, which raised over $950 million backing Kamala Harris in 2024, to illustrate the scale a hybrid PAC can reach. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO2: comparison and application
E6	Is money decisive?	Kamala Harris and allied groups raised roughly $2 billion in 2024 against about $1.45 billion for Donald Trump, and lost. Using this figure alongside the article’s conclusion, argue both for and against the claim that money determines the outcome of presidential elections, then reach your own reasoned judgement. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO3: evaluation and judgement
E7	Stretch: Has anything changed since?	Research one campaign finance development that has occurred since this article was written, then assess how far it supports or challenges the article’s own metaphor that ‘money, like water, will always find an outlet’. (Allow around 25 minutes.)	AO1/AO3: research and evaluation (stretch)

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F. Case studies: the 2020 and 2024 elections

These activities go with ‘2020 and 2024 US Presidential Elections’, which sets the two most recent contests side by side.

Read this page: 2020 and 2024 US Presidential Elections (https://histpology.co.uk/2020-and-2024-us-presidential-elections)

No.	Activity	Task	Focus
F1	Two timelines side by side	Using the separate timelines for 2020 and 2024, build a single parallel timeline that lines up comparable moments from each cycle, such as the party conventions and the final result. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO2: comparison
F2	Common threads	Using ‘Comparing the two cycles’, identify the features shared by both elections, including an unexpected shock event, doubts raised about a candidate’s fitness for office, and the reforms tested after 2020. For each, give specific supporting evidence from both years. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO2: synthesis
F3	Briefing for an outsider	Write a short briefing, of around 200 words, explaining the 2024 election to someone with no prior knowledge of the US political system. You must correctly use at least five key terms defined elsewhere on the site, for example Electoral College, invisible primary or Super PAC. (Allow around 25 minutes.)	AO1: knowledge and understanding
F4	Stretch: Which cycle mattered more?	Evaluate which of the 2020 and 2024 elections posed the greater test of the resilience of the US electoral system, using specific evidence from both cycles to support your answer. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO3: evaluation (stretch)

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G. Bringing it together

These synoptic activities draw on the whole of Topic 2.1 and are best attempted once you have completed sections A to F.

Read this page: Presidential Elections in the USA (topic hub) (https://histpology.co.uk/electoral-systems-in-the-usa)

No.	Activity	Task	Focus
G1	Trump v Trump	In 2012, Donald Trump called the Electoral College “a disaster for a democracy”. In 2016, he called it “actually genius”. Using at least three specific pieces of evidence from sections A to E, decide which verdict the evidence better supports, and explain why he might have changed his mind. (Allow around 20 minutes.)	AO3: synoptic evaluation
G2	Exam practice	Plan and write a timed essay on one of the following questions, using a simple for / against / judgement grid before you start. Edexcel: ‘Evaluate the view that the Electoral College is no longer fit for purpose.’ AQA: ‘Evaluate the extent to which campaign finance rules constrain who can become president.’ (Allow 40 to 45 minutes, in line with your exam board’s essay timing.)	AO1/AO2/AO3: extended essay
G3	The 2028 cycle so far	As of July 2026, the country is at the very start of the 2028 cycle. Drawing on sections A, B and D, write a short prediction of how the primaries, incumbency, money and the Electoral College are likely to shape the race over the next two years, making clear which of your claims are evidence-based and which are speculation. (Allow around 15 minutes.)	AO2: application and prediction
G4	Stretch: The strongest possible case	Construct the strongest possible case for the argument that, in American presidential elections, money matters more than the formal rules. Draw on evidence from every section above. Then write a short paragraph setting out the best evidence against your own case. (Allow around 25 minutes.)	AO2/AO3: synthesis and evaluation (stretch)

A fuller comparison between the US system and the UK’s general election process is developed elsewhere on histpology.co.uk.

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All published Edexcel (9PL0) and AQA (7152) question papers and mark schemes (not including 2026)

In this page we bring together every Edexcel (specification 9PL0) and AQA (specification 7152) A-level Politics exam question that has asked about congressional elections in the USA (elections to the House of Representatives and the Senate). It should help you see exactly what has been asked before, how many marks each question was worth, and how the two exam boards differ in how often they test this topic.

In writing this page, every published question paper and mark scheme was checked, going back to when the current specifications began in 2018, plus each board’s specimen paper. Congressional elections form part of a wider topic (Edexcel calls it “US democracy and participation”; AQA calls it “Democracy and participation”), so the search also picked up questions where incumbency (the advantage held by a sitting politician who is running for re-election) could be used as part of the answer, even though it was not the main focus of the question. These are included below too, but clearly labelled as related rather than directly on the topic.

This page is designed to be read alongside two other histpology.co.uk pages: Congressional elections in the USA, which covers the structure of Congress and how House and Senate elections actually work, and Congressional Midterm Elections, which covers the theories behind why the president’s party usually loses seats at a midterm. Both are useful background before attempting the practice questions in Section 4 below.

Exam series checked: Edexcel Paper 3A, summer 2019, October 2020, November 2021, summer 2022, summer 2023 and summer 2024; AQA Paper 2, the pre-2019 specimen paper, summer 2019, November 2020, November 2021, summer 2022, summer 2023 and summer 2024. Series not located within the scope of this search (for example November 2019, November 2022, November 2023 and summer 2025) were not checked and may contain further relevant questions not recorded here.

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1. Edexcel A-level Politics (9PL0), Paper 3A: Comparative Politics – USA

Congressional elections form part of the “US democracy and participation” content within Edexcel’s Paper 3A. Across the exam series checked, the topic has been tested through the extended Section C essay (30 marks), where candidates choose two questions from three on offer, rather than through the compulsory Section A or B questions.

Table 1: Edexcel Paper 3A question directly on congressional elections (of six series checked)

Series	Question	Marks	Question text
Summer 2019	Q3(c)	30	‘Evaluate the view that the procedures for electing US presidents and members of Congress are not fit for purpose. You must consider this view and the alternative to this view in a balanced way.’

• Congressional elections are most often set as one of three optional 30-mark essays in Section C, so a well-prepared candidate could in principle avoid it entirely, unlike the compulsory Section A and B content.
• Where the topic is examined directly, as in the summer 2019 essay, the mark scheme rewards discussion of incumbency, the cost of campaign finance, and the two-year election cycle for the House of Representatives, which forces members to campaign almost continuously.
• No other series checked set a question with congressional elections as its central focus; the closest was the November 2021 Section C essay on voting behaviour in Congress, which is not included in Table 1 above because its main focus is how members vote once elected rather than how they are elected. Its mark scheme does, however, credit answers that link voting patterns to members “protecting their chances of re-election”, so it is worth skimming as background reading.

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2. AQA A-level Politics (7152), Paper 2: Government and Politics of the USA and Comparative Politics

AQA’s specification places congressional elections within the “Democracy and participation” content of Paper 2, alongside presidential elections and direct democracy. Unlike Edexcel, no question set across the seven series checked took congressional elections, incumbency or midterm elections (elections held two years into a presidential term, when the entire House and around a third of the Senate face re-election) as its explicit subject. Table 2 lists the only two series, out of the seven checked, where congressional-election content was creditable in any form at all; the pre-2019 specimen paper and the November 2020, November 2021, summer 2023 and summer 2024 series tested unrelated content and are omitted here.

Table 2: AQA Paper 2 series in which congressional-election content was creditable (of seven series checked)

Summer 2019	Q1 (9)	‘Explain and analyse three reasons why the USA might be described as having a two-party system.’ Indicative content credits first-past-the-post in congressional elections as one accepted reason.
Summer 2022	Q1 (9)	‘Explain and analyse three factors that can influence voting behaviour in the US.’ Mark scheme allows credit for incumbency “either in terms of presidents or Congress”.

• Across the seven AQA series checked, no live question took congressional elections as its central focus; the closest was the campaign finance and party funding comparison set in summer 2024, which concentrated on funding rather than on the mechanics of House and Senate elections and is not included in Table 2 above.
• Where congressional-election material has been credited, as in the two series shown, it has been as one acceptable strand within a broader Section A question worth at most three marks of the nine available, since candidates need only develop three points to reach the top level.
• This pattern suggests congressional elections and incumbency are, on the evidence of the series checked, an under-examined part of AQA’s specification relative to Edexcel, where the topic anchored a full 30-mark essay in 2019. Teachers may wish to flag it as a plausible focus for a future Section B extract question or Section C essay.

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3. Comparing the two boards

Edexcel has shown that congressional elections can sustain a full essay in its own right, evident in the summer 2019 paper, whereas AQA’s assessment record across the same period shows the topic being absorbed into wider questions on voting behaviour and the two-party system rather than examined as a discrete title.

For revision purposes, this means Edexcel candidates have direct past-paper precedent to draw on, while AQA candidates are better served preparing congressional elections and incumbency as supporting material for the broader questions on voting behaviour, the two-party system and campaign finance that AQA has, in practice, preferred to set.

Given that AQA has not yet dedicated a live question to the topic in the series surveyed, students should not assume it is a low-priority area: unexamined specification content of this kind is, if anything, more likely to appear in a future series.

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4. Practice questions written in each board’s style

Sections 1 and 2 show that published questions dedicated to congressional elections are scarce, particularly for AQA. The three questions below for each board are original practice questions devised for this resource, not published examination material. Each is written to match the wording, mark allocation and rubric conventions of genuine questions surveyed above, and is built around content already covered in the accompanying study notes: incumbency, redistricting (the periodic redrawing of congressional district boundaries, sometimes to favour one party, known as gerrymandering when done deliberately) and the tendency for midterm elections to run against the sitting president’s party.

Edexcel (9PL0), Paper 3A

Section	Marks	Question text	Format
Section A	12	Examine the extent to which incumbency benefits members of the US Congress and Members of Parliament in the UK.	Comparative examine
Section B	12	Analyse how the process for redrawing congressional district boundaries in the USA differs from the process for redrawing parliamentary constituency boundaries in the UK. In your answer you must consider the relevance of at least one comparative theory.	Analyse + theory
Section C	30	Evaluate the view that midterm congressional elections are best understood as a referendum on the performance of the sitting president. You must consider this view and the alternative to this view in a balanced way.	Evaluate, balanced

What a strong answer would include

• Incumbency, Section A: explain the US advantage (name recognition, constituency casework, franking privileges, PAC donations flowing to sitting members, favourable district boundaries) and the UK equivalent (a personal vote built up over time, but weaker resources and no direct equivalent of franking); compare by weighing structural factors, House incumbents face election every two years but rarely lose, against the stronger pull of national swings on UK MPs.
• Redistricting, Section B: explain packing and cracking and how they reduce the number of genuinely competitive districts; use structural theory to contrast the US, where state legislatures usually control redistricting, with the UK’s more standardised Boundary Commission process; illustrate with contrasting examples, such as an independent commission state (California) against a state where the legislature draws the map (Texas).
•  Midterms as referendum, Section C: use the pattern in your midterm election study notes, the president’s party has lost House seats in nearly every midterm since 2000, to support the referendum view; balance this against the 2002 exception (Bush’s approval after 9/11) and against local factors such as incumbency and candidate quality; reach a judgement rather than just listing both sides.

AQA (7152), Paper 2

Section	Marks	Question text	Format
Section A	9	Explain and analyse three reasons why incumbent members of Congress are usually re-elected.	Explain and analyse three
Section A	9	Explain and analyse three ways in which redistricting can influence the outcome of elections to the House of Representatives.	Explain and analyse three
Section C	25	‘Midterm congressional elections are decided more by national political trends than by the record of individual candidates.’ Analyse and evaluate this statement.	Analyse and evaluate

What a strong answer would include

• Incumbency, Section A: give three distinct, developed reasons, for example name recognition and constituency service, the financial advantage incumbents hold with PACs and interest groups, and favourable redistricting; support each with the House’s consistently high re-election rate (regularly above 90 per cent) from your study notes.
• Redistricting, Section A: again give three developed points, for example packing, cracking and the creation of safe seats that push the meaningful contest into the primary election, which tends to favour more ideologically extreme candidates; a named state example for each point will help move answers into the top level.
• Midterms and national trends, Section C: agree using presidential approval ratings and the “six-year itch” pattern; disagree using cases where a strong or weak individual candidate outperformed or underperformed the national trend; remember AQA’s 25-mark essays are marked partly on synoptic links, so bring in party unity or campaign finance where relevant, and close with a clear, justified conclusion rather than a summary of both sides.

These are offered as a starting point for timed practice or homework rather than a substitute for the genuine past papers in Sections 1 and 2, and have not been through either board’s standardisation process, so should be marked against the generic level descriptors each board publishes for questions of the same length and command word, reproduced in the mark schemes cited in the Sources section below.

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Sources

Primary sources (exam board question papers and mark schemes)

Pearson Edexcel, Mark Scheme (Results) Summer 2019, GCE Politics (9PL0) Paper 3A, and question paper P59408A, https://mmerevise.co.uk/app/uploads/2022/01/Edexcel-A-Level-JUN2019-Politics-Paper-3A-MS.pdf and accompanying question paper.

Pearson Edexcel, Mark Scheme (Results) October 2020, GCE Politics (9PL0) Paper 3A, https://mmerevise.co.uk/app/uploads/2022/01/Edexcel-A-Level-October-2020-Politics-Paper-3A-MS.pdf.

Pearson Edexcel, Mark Scheme (Results) November 2021, A Level Politics (9PL0) Paper 3A, https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/A-Level/Politics/2017/Exam-materials/9PL0_3A_rms_20211216.pdf.

Pearson Edexcel, Mark Scheme (Results) Summer 2022, GCE Politics (9PL0/3A) Comparative Politics – USA, https://cdn.savemyexams.com/uploads/2023/04/9pl0-3a-rms-20220818-markscheme-alevel-paper3a.pdf.

Pearson Edexcel, Mark Scheme (Results) Summer 2024, GCE Politics (9PL0) Paper 3A, https://qualifications.pearson.com/content/dam/pdf/A-Level/Politics/2017/Exam-materials/9pl0-3a-rms-20240815.pdf.

AQA, A-level Politics 7152/2 specimen question paper, Paper 2 Government and Politics of the USA and Comparative Politics, https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/politics/AQA-71522-SQP-CR.PDF.

AQA, Mark Scheme, A-level Politics 7152/2, June 2019, https://mmerevise.co.uk/app/uploads/2022/01/AQA-A-Level-JUN2019-Politics-Paper-2-MS.pdf.

AQA, Question Paper, A-level Politics 7152/2, June 2020 (November 2020 series), https://mmerevise.co.uk/app/uploads/2022/01/AQA-A-Level-NOV2020-Politics-Paper-2-QP.pdf.

AQA, Question Paper, A-level Politics 7152/2, November 2021, https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/sample-papers-and-mark-schemes/2021/november/AQA-71522-QP-NOV21.PDF.

AQA, Mark Scheme, A-level Politics 7152/2, June 2022, https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/sample-papers-and-mark-schemes/2022/june/AQA-71522-MS-JUN22.PDF.

AQA, Politics Answers and Commentaries, A-level (7152) Paper 2, marked answers from June 2022, https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/resources/politics/AQA-71522-EX.PDF.

AQA, Mark Scheme, A-level Politics 7152/2, June 2023, https://filestore.aqa.org.uk/sample-papers-and-mark-schemes/2023/june/AQA-71522-MS-JUN23.PDF.

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Edexcel A-level Politics, Paper 3: Comparative Politics (USA) | also relevant to AQA Paper 2: Government and Politics of the USA

“If we do it, we will never lose the midterms, and we will never lose the general election, because we will have produced so many different things for our people, for the people, for the country, that it would be impossible to lose.”

President Donald Trump made this claim to Republican lawmakers in May 2026, months before voters went to the polls in the November 2026 midterm elections. It is a bold prediction to test, because the political science on midterm elections is unusually consistent: the president’s party has lost House seats in nearly every midterm election of the last 90 years, regardless of who is in the White House.

This page uses that historical pattern, the competing explanations for it, and the evidence available (as of July 2026) on the 2026 elections themselves, to test whether Trump’s prediction holds up, and to reach a reasoned judgement on how far midterm elections really are beyond a president’s control. We will re-visit Trump’s claim at the foot of this page and this page itself will be updated after the 2026 mid-terms.

1. What are midterm elections, and why do they matter?

Midterm elections take place two years into a president’s four-year term. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives and a third of the 100 Senate seats are contested, but the presidency itself is not on the ballot. This makes midterm elections, in effect, a national verdict on a sitting president delivered without the president standing for re-election.

Midterm elections matter constitutionally and politically. A president who loses control of one or both chambers of Congress faces divided government (a situation in which one party holds the presidency while the other controls one or both chambers of Congress), which can block their legislative agenda, block appointments to the federal judiciary and executive branch, and expose the administration to congressional investigation. The clearest example is 2018: Democrats retook the House, used their new subpoena and committee powers to investigate President Trump’s conduct, and voted to impeach him in December 2019, something that would have been constitutionally impossible without their midterm victory.

Key terms Midterm elections: congressional elections held two years into a president’s four-year term, when all House seats and about a third of Senate seats are contested but the presidency is not. Coattail effect: the tendency of candidates from the president’s party to win extra seats because of the president’s own popularity at the top of the ticket in a presidential election year; midterms remove this effect entirely. Generic ballot: an opinion poll question asking voters which party, rather than which named candidate, they intend to support in their local congressional race, e.g. “Democrats 46%, Republicans 43%”; used as a rough national proxy for the House popular vote. Divided government: a situation in which one party controls the presidency while the other controls one or both chambers of Congress, a common outcome of midterm elections.

Check your understanding 1. Explain why the absence of the coattail effect makes midterm elections structurally different from presidential-year congressional elections. 2. Using the 2018 example, explain one way in which losing a midterm election can constrain a president even though the presidency itself was not contested.

2. The historical pattern: the president’s party almost always loses

Since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency, the president’s party has lost House seats in nearly every midterm election bar two: 1998 and 2002. Averaged across the 22 midterm elections between 1934 and 2018, the president’s party has lost 28 House seats and four Senate seats. The table below sets out the results since 1994, the point at which the modern, highly nationalised pattern of midterm politics (beginning with the Republican Revolution) took shape.

1994	Clinton	Dem	−54	−8	The Republican Revolution, led by Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America; Republicans took both chambers for the first time since 1953.
1998	Clinton	Dem	+5	0	First midterm gain for a president’s party since 1934. Backlash against Republican pursuit of the Lewinsky impeachment, combined with a strong economy and Clinton approval above 60%.
2002	G. W. Bush	Rep	+8	+2	Post-9/11 national security environment pushed Bush’s approval above 60%; only the second president since 1934 (after FDR) to gain seats in both chambers at a midterm.
2006	G. W. Bush	Rep	−31	−6	Iraq War unpopularity and Bush’s sixth year in office (the Six-year itch); Democrats retook both chambers, 232–203 in the House.
2010	Obama	Dem	−64	−6	Tea Party wave; backlash against the Affordable Care Act and the 2009 stimulus. Largest House loss for either party since 1948.
2014	Obama	Dem	−13	−9	Obama’s sixth year (the Six-year itch again); low approval amid the Ebola and ISIS news cycles; Republicans took the Senate.
2018	Trump	Rep	−40	+2	Referendum on Trump’s first two years; Democrats retook the House and later impeached Trump (December 2019).
2022	Biden	Dem	−9	+1	Smallest midterm loss for a president’s party in 20 years, widely attributed to backlash against the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson ruling overturning the constitutional right to abortion.

^{Source: House and Senate seat changes, 1994–2022, compiled from Ballotpedia and Britannica election results.}

The two genuine exceptions, 1998 and 2002, share a common feature: both occurred when presidential approval was unusually high (above 60%), driven by extraordinary national circumstances (impeachment and the aftermath of 11 September 2001 respectively) rather than by normal political conditions. This points to presidential approval, not the mere fact of being a midterm, as the underlying variable that really explains the pattern.

Check your understanding 1. Identify and explain two features shared by the 1998 and 2002 midterms that made them exceptions to the usual pattern. 2. Using the table, compare the scale of losses in 2010 and 2022. What does the difference suggest about the relationship between a president’s approval rating and the size of their party’s midterm losses?

3. Explaining the pattern: competing theories

Political scientists offer several, overlapping explanations for why the president’s party so reliably loses ground at midterms.

Key terms Surge and decline theory: developed by the political scientist Angus Campbell, the idea that turnout and enthusiasm “surge” for the president’s party in a presidential election year because of the coattail effect, then “decline” at the following midterm as many less-engaged, short-term voters stay home, leaving a more oppositional electorate. Six-year itch: the tendency for a president’s party to suffer even heavier midterm losses in the sixth year of a presidency (the second midterm of a two-term presidency) than in the first midterm, as accumulated grievances and “time for a change” sentiment build. Incumbency advantage: the electoral benefit sitting members of Congress enjoy from name recognition, campaign funding and constituency casework, which normally makes midterms less volatile at the level of an individual district than the national swing alone would suggest.

Evaluating the coattail effect

Because the Coattail effect is the mechanism that produces the initial “surge” in surge and decline theory, it is worth evaluating separately how strong that surge still is. Split-ticket voting, where a district backs a presidential candidate from one party and a House candidate from another, is the clearest evidence of coattails at work, and it has collapsed over the last fifty years.

Year	Split-ticket districts	Share	Note
1972	190 of 435	44%	High-water mark of candidate-centred, locally-focused congressional voting.
1988	145 of 435	33%	Split-ticket voting still common before the nationalisation of American politics.
2012	26 of 435	6%	Sharp fall as partisan polarisation hardens under Obama.
2016	35 of 435	8%	Small uptick, but still historically low.
2020	16 of 435	4%	Lowest share on record; near-total alignment between the presidential and House vote by district.
2024	16 of 17 flipped districts matched the presidential winner	n/a	Trump’s coattails were, in Brookings’ phrase, “short”: Republican House gains came mainly from a collapse in Democratic turnout rather than new voters drawn in by Trump himself.

^{Source: Pew Research Center (2016); Axios (2022); The Downballot and Brookings analysis of 2024 results.}

Two patterns stand out, and they point in slightly different directions:

• The near-disappearance of split-ticket districts, from 44% in 1972 to under 4% in 2020, shows that voters increasingly treat their House vote as an extension of their presidential vote. This suggests that national partisan identity, rather than an individual president’s personal appeal, is now the main force aligning presidential and congressional results, a more structural explanation than the Coattail effect implies.
• Even so, the strength of that alignment does not mean presidents actively pull new voters down-ballot. In 2024, Republican House candidates gained relatively little from an increase in their own vote, and far more from a 6.6 million fall in the Democratic vote compared with 2020; ticket-splitting persisted at the margins, with 19.7% of Black voters who backed Trump nonetheless voting for the Democratic House candidate, against only 3.6% of Harris voters crossing over the other way.
• This matters directly for 2026: if the Republican “surge” in 2024 was already shallow, resting on Democratic turnout collapse rather than a genuine coattail pull towards Trump and congressional Republicans together, then the equivalent “decline” facing Republicans in 2026 may be smaller in raw vote-share terms than the historical pattern in Section 2 would suggest. This is cold comfort for Republicans in practice, however, because their 3-seat House majority leaves almost no cushion against any decline at all, however modest.

On balance, the coattail effect is a weaker explanation for 2026 than surge and decline theory or presidential approval. Split-ticket voting’s collapse shows that district-level results now track national partisanship closely, but the 2024 evidence suggests this is closer to a permanent, polarised alignment between two committed electorates than to presidents actively expanding their party’s support down the ballot, reinforcing why a small number of genuinely competitive, newly gerrymandered districts, rather than a broad coattail wave in either direction, are likely to decide control of the House in November 2026.

Referendum theory holds that voters use the midterm election to pass judgement on the president’s performance, even though the president is not on the ballot. A 2014 Gallup poll found that 52% of registered voters said their vote was intended to send Barack Obama a message, and of that group, around 32 percentage points wanted to send a message of opposition against only 20 of support, evidence that midterm voting behaves like a national verdict on the presidency rather than a series of local judgements on individual House members.

The strongest single predictor is presidential approval itself. Gallup’s analysis of midterms since 1946 found that presidents with approval below 50% saw their party lose an average of 37 House seats, compared with an average loss of only 14 seats for presidents above 50% approval, a stark illustration of why 1998 and 2002 (both above 60% approval) broke the usual pattern.

The Six-year itch is a more specific version of the same logic. Since the Second World War, the president’s party has lost an average of around 15 House seats at a first midterm but around 48 at a second-term (sixth-year) midterm; the pattern is clearer in the Senate than in the House, and some political scientists question whether it is a distinct effect at all rather than simply presidents’ approval ratings naturally eroding over two terms. This matters for 2026: because Trump’s two terms were non-consecutive (2017–2021, then 2025–), November 2026 is technically his first midterm of this presidency, analogous to 2018 rather than to a classic sixth-year itch election, even though six years have now passed since he first took office.

Check your understanding 1. Explain, in your own words, the difference between surge and decline theory and referendum theory as explanations for midterm losses. 2. Using the split-ticket voting data, evaluate whether the Coattail effect or partisan polarisation better explains why presidential and House results have converged since 1972. 3. Evaluate the claim that presidential approval rating is the single most important factor in explaining the scale of a president’s party’s midterm losses. Use figures from this section to support your answer.

4. Turnout: who actually shows up?

Part of the explanation for midterm volatility lies in who turns out to vote. Midterm turnout is consistently far lower than presidential-year turnout, and the electorate that does turn out tends to be older, more partisan and more likely to be motivated by opposition to the sitting president.

Year	Election type	Turnout	Notes
2018	Midterm	49%	Highest midterm turnout since 1914, driven by high engagement on both sides in the first Trump-era midterm.
2020	Presidential	66%	Highest turnout rate for any US national election since 1900.
2022	Midterm	46%	Exceeded every midterm since 1970, though still 20 percentage points below the 2020 presidential turnout.
2024	Presidential	64%	Second-highest presidential turnout on record, tied with 1960.

^{Source: Pew Research Center, “Voter turnout in US elections, 2018–2022” and “Voter turnout in the 2020 and 2024 elections” (2025).}

Even accounting for the unusually high turnout of the 2018 and 2022 midterms, the pattern holds: average presidential-year turnout from 1972 to 2024 was around 58%, against average midterm turnout of around 41%, a 17-point gap. Because the voters who drop off between a presidential year and the following midterm are disproportionately less partisan, low-propensity voters, the electorate that remains is skewed towards the more committed and often more oppositional voters of the party out of power, reinforcing the losses predicted by surge and decline theory.

5. Gerrymandering, redistricting and the 2026 map

One complicating factor for 2026 is that the electoral map itself has changed since the last election. Congressional districts are normally redrawn only once a decade, after the census, but a wave of mid-decade redistricting (redrawing outside the normal ten-year cycle) began in summer 2025 when Trump asked Texas Republicans to redraw their map to create additional Republican-leaning seats.

This is constitutionally possible because of the Supreme Court’s 2019 ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, which held that claims of excessive partisan gerrymandering (the deliberate drawing of district boundaries to advantage one party) present a “political question” beyond the reach of the federal courts, leaving state legislatures largely free to gerrymander for partisan advantage so long as they do not breach separate protections against racial discrimination.

State	Driving party	Projected impact	Status
Texas	Republican	Up to 5 seats	New map passed by the legislature in 2025, targeting Democratic-held districts; subject to ongoing federal litigation.
Missouri	Republican	1 seat	New map passed in autumn 2025 as part of the same push.
North Carolina	Republican	1–2 seats	New map passed October 2025.
Ohio	Republican	1–2 seats	New map approved by the state redistricting commission in October 2025.
California	Democrat	Up to 5 seats	Counter-map approved by California voters in a November 2025 ballot measure, in direct response to the Texas move.
Utah	Democrat	1 seat	Court-ordered redraw produced a more competitive map.
Virginia	Democrat	Up to 3 seats (pending)	New Democratic-favourable map awaiting final approval as of mid-2026.

^{Source: Ballotpedia, “Redistricting ahead of the 2026 elections”; Democracy Docket redistricting tracker (2026).}

Nationally, this leaves Republican-led states pursuing roughly nine additional Republican-leaning seats (concentrated in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio) against a Democratic counter-push of a similar magnitude concentrated in California, Utah and potentially Virginia. The practical effect is that, for the first time in the modern redistricting era, both parties have partially redrawn the battlefield mid-cycle in direct response to each other, meaning the 2026 result will reflect not only the underlying national mood but also which side’s redistricting gamble pays off in court and at the ballot box.

Gerrymandering is treated here only as it affects the 2026 midterm result. A fuller evaluation of gerrymandering as a question of representation, including how well Congress reflects the electorate and the case for reform, follows in the later study notes on the functions of Congress.

Check your understanding 1. Explain why Rucho v. Common Cause made the 2025–2026 mid-decade redistricting wave constitutionally possible. 2. Using the table, evaluate whether the redistricting battle is likely to help or hinder the Republican Party’s chances of retaining the House in 2026.

6. Case study: the November 2026 midterms

Going into the 2026 midterms, Republicans hold a narrow 218–214 House majority (with three vacancies) and a 53–47 Senate majority (counting the two independents who caucus with Democrats). This means Democrats need a net gain of only three House seats and four Senate seats to win control of each chamber respectively, while Republicans can afford to lose no more than two seats in either chamber.

Indicator	Figure	As of	Interpretation
Trump approval	38–40%	late July–August 2026 (Gallup, Silver Bulletin)	Firmly in the “below 50%” band that Gallup associates with an average 37-seat House loss for the president’s party.
Generic ballot	Democrats +3 to +7	July–August 2026 (Decision Desk HQ, other trackers)	Consistent, if variable, Democratic lead; comparable in scale to the leads seen before the 2018 and 2006 Democratic wave years.
2026 shutdowns	Two shutdowns, Jan–Feb and Feb–Apr 2026	resolved by 30 April 2026	Both stemmed from disputes over federal immigration enforcement following the killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection agents; contributed to a decline in Trump’s approval.
Forecast models	Democratic gain of roughly 20–35+ House seats; Senate a toss-up leaning Republican	mid-2026 model projections (USPollingData.com)	A modelled projection, not a certainty; the Senate map (which states are up) structurally favours Republicans regardless of national mood.

^{Source: Gallup, Silver Bulletin, Decision Desk HQ and USPollingData.com polling and forecast trackers, accessed 1 August 2026; figures are subject to change before polling day in November 2026.}

It is worth being precise about what this evidence can and cannot show in August 2026.

Approval ratings and generic ballot polling are strong historical predictors of the direction and rough scale of midterm losses, but they are not the result itself, and forecast models built from them carry real uncertainty, particularly for the Senate, where the specific seats being contested in any given cycle can matter more than the national mood.

What the evidence does show clearly is that every major indicator, approval, the generic ballot, and the precedent of two damaging government shutdowns, points in the same direction: towards a difficult midterm for the president’s party, consistent with the historical pattern rather than an exception to it.

Check your understanding 1. Using the table, explain why the Senate is described as a “toss-up leaning Republican” even though Trump’s approval rating is low. 2. “Polling evidence in August 2026 makes a Republican defeat in November 2026 a certainty.” To what extent do you agree with this statement? Use evidence from this section in your answer.

7. Evaluation: how far are midterms beyond a president’s control?

The evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction. In 80 years of midterm elections since Franklin D. Roosevelt, only two presidents (Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002) have avoided losing House seats, and both did so only because of extraordinary, short-lived circumstances that pushed their approval above 60%. Trump’s approval in 2026, at 38–40%, sits squarely within Gallup’s “unpopular president” band, associated historically with an average House loss of 37 seats, more than enough to end Republican control of the chamber given their three-seat margin.

The Democratic generic ballot lead of 3–7 points in mid-2026 is consistent with, rather than contradicting, this historical pattern; leads of this size preceded both the 2006 and 2018 Democratic wave elections. Set against this, the Six-year itch literature and the two 2026 government shutdowns both point towards accumulated, rather than fresh, discontent, exactly the conditions historically associated with larger, not smaller, midterm losses.

The genuine complicating factor is redistricting. Because roughly nine Republican-leaning seats have been engineered in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina and Ohio, partly offset by a similar number of Democratic-leaning seats in California, Utah and potentially Virginia, the relationship between national vote share and seats won is less predictable in 2026 than in a normal, map-stable midterm such as 2010 or 2018.

This means that even if Democrats win the national popular vote for the House by a margin similar to 2018 (roughly 8–9 points), the number of seats that changes hands could diverge more than the historical pattern alone would predict, in either direction, depending on which side’s redrawn maps hold up in court and at the ballot box.

Weighing this evidence, Trump’s claim that Republicans “will never lose the midterms” in 2026 runs directly against 80 years of precedent, an approval rating in the range historically associated with a roughly 37-seat loss, and a consistent Democratic generic ballot lead. It is very difficult to reconcile with the evidence available in August 2026. What is genuinely uncertain, and what the historical pattern alone cannot settle, is not whether Republicans will lose ground but how much ground they will lose, given that the 2025–2026 redistricting wave means the 2026 map is not the same map that produced the historical pattern in the first place.

The nearest UK equivalent, using local and by-elections as a barometer of a governing party’s mid-term popularity (for example the May 2025 local elections), is developed in more detail elsewhere on histpology.co.uk.

Where this page began . . .

“If we do it, we will never lose the midterms, and we will never lose the general election, because we will have produced so many different things for our people, for the people, for the country, that it would be impossible to lose.”

Tested against the evidence available as this page was written, in early August 2026, Trump’s May 2026 claim does not hold: historical precedent, Trump’s own approval rating, and a consistent Democratic generic ballot lead all point towards Republican losses in November 2026, in line with the pattern that has held in 36 of the last 38 midterm elections.

The genuinely open question, deliberately left unresolved by a single opinion poll or historical average, is whether the unprecedented mid-decade redistricting fight of 2025–2026 will cushion the scale of those losses enough to let Republicans cling on to one or both chambers of Congress, a live test of the historical pattern that only the November 2026 results themselves can finally settle.

Check your understanding 1. Drawing on the whole document, construct a two-paragraph answer to the question: “Explain and evaluate the extent to which US congressional midterm elections are a referendum on the sitting president.” 2. Identify one piece of evidence in this document that supports Trump’s May 2026 prediction, and one that contradicts it. Which do you find more persuasive, and why? 3. To what extent has mid-decade redistricting weakened the usefulness of historical midterm patterns as a predictive tool? Use specific figures from Section 5 in your answer.

Sources

Primary sources

Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019).

Secondary sources

Axios, “The number of districts that split tickets for Congress and president is plummeting” (2022).

Ballotpedia, “Redistricting ahead of the 2026 elections” (2026).

Ballotpedia, “United States Congress elections, 2026” (2026).

Britannica, “United States midterm elections” (2026).

Brookings, “President-elect Trump’s short coattails” (2024).

Congressional Research Service, “The 2025 (FY2026) Government Shutdown: Economic Effects”, Congress.gov, R48832 (2026).

Decision Desk HQ, “Where the polls stand as Decision Desk HQ launches its 2026 forecast” (2026).

Democracy Docket, “Live Redistricting Tracker” (2026).

Gallup, “Midterm Seat Loss Averages 37 for Unpopular Presidents” (2018).

Pew Research Center, “Split-ticket districts, once common, are now rare” (2016).

Pew Research Center, “Voter turnout in US elections, 2018–2022” (2023).

Pew Research Center, “Voter turnout in the 2020 and 2024 elections: A detailed analysis” (2025).

The Conversation, “For 80 years, the president’s party has almost always lost House seats in midterm elections…” (2026).

The Downballot, “The Downballot’s 2024 presidential results for all 435 House districts” (2024).

USPollingData.com, “2026 Midterm Elections Forecast” (2026).

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The United States Congress is the national legislature (law-making body) established under Article I of the Constitution. Congress is bicameral, meaning it is divided into two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Senate. This structure was the outcome of the Great Compromise (also called the Connecticut Compromise) of 1787, which reconciled the competing demands of larger states, who wanted representation based on population, and smaller states, who wanted equal representation regardless of size. The two chambers differ significantly in their size, term length and basis of representation, and elections to each follow a different rhythm. Understanding these differences is essential background before considering how congressional election campaigns are fought and funded.

Key terms Bicameral: having two legislative chambers. In Congress, these are the House of Representatives and the Senate. Single-member plurality system: an electoral system (also known as first-past-the-post) in which the candidate with the most votes in a district wins the seat outright, even without an overall majority. Midterm election: a congressional election held halfway through a president’s four-year term, when the presidency itself is not on the ballot.

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The structure of Congress

Congress’s two chambers differ sharply in size, term length and the way they represent the population. The House of Representatives is the larger chamber and is meant to reflect the population directly, while the Senate gives every state, however small, an equal voice. This balance between population-based and state-based representation remains the defining feature of Congress’s structure.

Feature	House of Representatives	Senate
Number of members	435 voting members, plus six non-voting delegates from US territories and Washington, DC	100 members
Basis of representation	Population: seats allocated between states by apportionment and redrawn after each census	Equal representation: two senators per state, regardless of population
Length of term	Two years; the whole House is re-elected at every congressional election	Six years, staggered across three classes, so roughly one-third of seats are contested at each election
Current composition (August 2026)	218 Republicans, 214 Democrats, 3 vacancies	53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, 2 independents who caucus with the Democrats
Presiding officer	Speaker of the House: Mike Johnson (Republican, Louisiana)	President of the Senate: Vice President JD Vance (a largely ceremonial role); day-to-day floor management by Majority Leader John Thune (Republican, South Dakota)
Minimum age and citizenship	At least 25 years old; a US citizen for at least seven years	At least 30 years old; a US citizen for at least nine years

Figures on party composition and leadership verified as of August 2026; see Congress.gov and Ballotpedia in Sources.

Check your understanding 1. Explain what is meant by describing Congress as bicameral. 2. Why do the House of Representatives and the Senate use different bases of representation? 3. To what extent does the Senate’s six-year, staggered term serve a different purpose from the House’s two-year term?

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The election process

House elections use a single-member plurality system: each of the 435 districts elects one representative, and the candidate with the most votes wins the seat outright, even without an overall majority. Senate elections work on the same basis, but statewide, since each state elects its own senators individually. Before the general election in November, candidates must first win their own party’s nomination, usually through a primary election held earlier in the year. How district boundaries themselves are drawn, and the disputes this creates, is covered separately in a later section on electoral issues.

Check your understanding 1. Outline the stages a candidate goes through to be elected to the House of Representatives. 2. Explain the difference between a primary election and a general election.

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The election cycle and midterm elections

Congressional elections are held on a fixed day, the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, in every even-numbered year. Every second cycle coincides with a presidential election; the cycle in between is a midterm election, so called because it falls midway through the president’s four-year term. All 435 House seats are contested at every cycle, alongside roughly a third of Senate seats. The table below shows which party held the presidency, and which party controlled each chamber, at every congressional election since 2000.

Year	Election type	President in power	House control (after election)	Senate control (after election)
2000	Presidential election	Bill Clinton (Democrat)	Republicans, 221–212 (2 independents)	Split 50–50 (Republicans controlled via Vice President Dick Cheney’s tie-breaking vote)
2002	Midterm election	George W. Bush (Republican)	Republicans, 229–205 (1 independent)	Republicans, 51–49 (48 Democrats plus 1 independent caucusing with Democrats)
2004	Presidential election	George W. Bush (Republican)	Republicans, 232–202 (1 independent)	Republicans, 55–45 (44 Democrats plus 1 independent caucusing with Democrats)
2006	Midterm election	George W. Bush (Republican)	Democrats, 233–202	Democrats, 51–49 (49 Democrats plus 2 independents caucusing with Democrats)
2008	Presidential election	George W. Bush (Republican)	Democrats, 257–178	Democrats, 59–41 (57 Democrats plus 2 independents caucusing with Democrats)
2010	Midterm election	Barack Obama (Democrat)	Republicans, 242–193	Democrats, 53–47 (51 Democrats plus 2 independents caucusing with Democrats)
2012	Presidential election	Barack Obama (Democrat)	Republicans, 234–201	Democrats, 55–45 (53 Democrats plus 2 independents caucusing with Democrats)
2014	Midterm election	Barack Obama (Democrat)	Republicans, 247–188	Republicans, 54–46 (44 Democrats plus 2 independents caucusing with Democrats)
2016	Presidential election	Barack Obama (Democrat)	Republicans, 241–194	Republicans, 52–48 (46 Democrats plus 2 independents caucusing with Democrats)
2018	Midterm election	Donald Trump (Republican)	Democrats, 234–201	Republicans, 53–47
2020	Presidential election	Donald Trump (Republican)	Democrats, 222–213	Split 50–50 (Democrats controlled via Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote)
2022	Midterm election	Joe Biden (Democrat)	Republicans, 222–213	Democrats, 51–49
2024	Presidential election	Joe Biden (Democrat)	Republicans, 220–215	Republicans, 53–47
2026	Midterm election	Donald Trump (Republican)	Not yet known (election on 3 November 2026)	Not yet known (election on 3 November 2026)

Final seat counts after each election, verified via Ballotpedia and Wikipedia; figures can shift slightly after special elections and party switches. See Sources.

• In every midterm election shown except 2002, the president’s party lost House seats; in four of these seven midterms, 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022, this cost it control of the chamber outright.
• The Senate has been decided by the narrowest possible margin, a 50–50 split resolved only by the Vice President’s tie-breaking vote, twice in this period, after the 2000 and 2020 elections.
• 2002 remains the only midterm election since 2000 in which the president’s party, the Republicans under George W. Bush, gained seats in both chambers, a result widely linked to Bush’s high approval ratings after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.

The reasons why the president’s party so often loses ground at a midterm election, illustrated by the results above, are analysed in more detail in a separate section.

Check your understanding 1. Using the table, identify which type of election, presidential or midterm, produced the largest swing against the president’s party. 2. Explain why the same party does not always control the presidency, the House and the Senate at the same time. 3. Explain what is meant by a midterm election, and why 2026 is a midterm year.

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Sources

Primary sources

US Constitution, Article I.

Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution (1913).

Secondary sources

Ballotpedia, “United States Congress elections, 2026”.

Ballotpedia, “Election results” pages for the 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2024 U.S. Congress elections.

Congress.gov, Congressional Research Service, “Membership of the 119th Congress: A Profile”.

Pew Research Center, “Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout Advantage” (2023).

Pew Research Center, “Democrats Made Gains From Multiple Sources in 2018 Midterm Victories” (2020).

Wikipedia, “107th” through “119th United States Congress” (used for cross-checking party composition figures).

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“The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Donald Trump wrote this on Twitter on 6 November 2012, the day after Barack Obama’s re-election. Four years later, having lost the popular vote but won the presidency himself, he took the opposite view.

“The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”

Donald Trump, tweet, 15 November 2016

Trump’s reversal is a useful way into Presidential elections in the USA, because it captures a pattern that recurs across every strand of the topic: how a rule looks tends to depend on whether it currently favours you. The same pattern appears in how campaigns fund themselves, in how incumbents defend their record, and in how the parties argue over reforming the Electoral College itself. This page draws the topic’s separate strands, the structure of American elections, the Electoral College, campaign finance and incumbency, into a single fifteen-minute read, using the 2020 and 2024 elections and the early stages of the 2028 cycle as running examples throughout. It closes by returning to Trump’s two tweets to test whether his 2016 verdict still holds up in 2026.

1. The Structure of US Presidential elections

Before looking at the Electoral College in detail, it helps to see where the presidency sits within the wider American electoral system. The Constitution creates only the presidency directly; every other office below is a separate contest with its own electoral system, several of which shape the path to the White House long before the general election itself.

Level	Electoral system used	Relevance to the presidency
Local government	Mostly plurality (first past the post); a growing number of cities, for example New York, use ranked-choice voting	Traditional entry point for a political career and local party organisation
State legislatures	Single-member plurality in most states	Control congressional redistricting, shaping House competitiveness
Governorships	Plurality in most states; majority run-off in Georgia and Louisiana	A common launch pad for presidential candidacies
US House of Representatives	Single-member plurality, except Maine and Alaska, which use ranked-choice voting	Midterm results are widely read as a referendum on the president
US Senate	Statewide plurality; run-off in Georgia; ranked-choice voting in Maine and Alaska	Senate control shapes a president’s ability to legislate and confirm appointments
Presidential nomination	Primaries and a small number of caucuses; delegates allocated proportionally or winner-take-all depending on state and party	Determines each party’s nominee before November
Presidential general election	The Electoral College: 538 electors, winner-take-all in 48 states and Washington DC, congressional district method in Maine and Nebraska	An indirect election in which the national popular vote does not determine the outcome, as in 2000 and 2016

Source: adapted from AQA 7152 (3.2.1.5) and Edexcel 3A.5.1 specification content.

• The Constitution supplies only the skeleton of this process: Article II establishes the presidency, a four year term and the Electoral College, while the Twelfth Amendment (1804), Twentieth Amendment (1933) and Twenty Second Amendment (1951) fix how electors vote, when a term begins, and how many terms a president may serve.
• Everything that fills the gap is party practice rather than law: the invisible primary, the sequence of primaries and caucuses, and the national conventions appear nowhere in the constitutional text.
• As of July 2026, the country is in the invisible primary for 2028, roughly twenty seven months before polling day, with the shape of the field still heavily dependent on this coming November’s midterm elections.

Key terms Electoral College: the body of 538 electors, allocated by state, that formally elects the president and vice president rather than voters doing so directly. Invisible primary: the informal period of fundraising, positioning and organisation before any candidate formally declares a campaign. Delegate: a party representative who formally nominates a candidate at a national convention, having been allocated through primaries or caucuses. Faithless elector: an elector who votes contrary to their state’s popular result; rare, and now closely restricted by law.

Check your understanding 1. Using the table, explain why control of state legislatures matters to the presidential race even though state legislators are not on a presidential ballot. 2. “The primaries and caucuses that decide each party’s nominee are constitutional requirements.” Explain why this statement is inaccurate. 3. Suggest one reason why the 2026 midterm elections are being treated as significant for the 2028 presidential race, even though the presidency itself is not being contested.

2. The Electoral College: mechanics and controversy

The Electoral College was devised at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as a compromise between direct popular election, distrusted by many delegates as vulnerable to demagogues, and selection by Congress, which risked making the president dependent on the legislature. Winning requires an absolute majority, 270 of the 538 votes, allocated to each state according to its total congressional delegation, so even the smallest states receive at least three. Forty eight states and Washington DC award all their electors to whichever candidate wins the state; Maine and Nebraska instead split most of their votes by congressional district, a method that gave Kamala Harris a single electoral vote from Nebraska’s 2nd district in 2024 even as she lost the state overall.

Because electors are pledged rather than directly bound by the Constitution, faithless electors, who break from their state’s result, remain a theoretical possibility: seven did so in 2016, the most since 1972, though the underlying result was unaffected. The Supreme Court closed off much of this gap in Chiafalo v Washington (2020), ruling unanimously that states may legally require, and punish breaches of, elector pledges.

The system has produced five elections in which the Electoral College outcome diverged from the national result: in 1876, 1888, 2000 and 2016 the College winner lost the national popular vote, and in 1824 no candidate secured a College majority at all, so the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams despite Andrew Jackson leading in both measures.

In 2000, Bush v Gore ended a 36-day Florida recount battle by a final margin of just 537 votes, handing George W. Bush a 271 to 266 College win despite Al Gore’s half-million vote popular lead.

In 2016, Donald Trump won the College while losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost three million votes. After Trump’s 2020 defeat, his campaign organised slates of 84 self-styled “alternate” electors across seven states who signed certificates falsely declaring he had won, a scheme that fed directly into the Capitol breach of 6 January 2021 and prompted the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, which clarified the vice president’s purely ceremonial role in certification. In 2024, by contrast, Trump won both the College, 312 to 226, and the popular vote, 49.8 per cent to 48.3 per cent, the first Republican to win the popular vote since 2004.

Strength	Weakness
Reflects the USA’s federal structure, guaranteeing every state a voice	Small states are over-represented: a Wyoming voter’s weight is around 3.6 times a Californian’s
Winner-take-all sustains a stable two-party system	The same mechanism can turn a narrow win into a landslide, or hand the presidency to the popular-vote loser, as in 2000 and 2016
Confines contested counts to a small number of close states, producing swift, decisive results	Concentrates campaigning on a shrinking number of swing states, leaving most voters with limited influence
No alternative has attracted the sustained, cross-party consensus needed to replace it	The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact holds 18 states and DC, 222 of the 270 votes needed, but reform has stalled largely along partisan lines

Source: Gallup (September 2024); Pew Research Center (2024); Ballotpedia.

• Public opinion has shifted since the 1968 near-consensus for change: a September 2024 Gallup poll found 58 per cent of Americans favoured electing the president by national popular vote against 38 per cent preferring the current system, with a Pew Research survey putting support for change at around 65 per cent, and the partisan gap now standing at roughly 80 per cent of Democrats against 46 per cent of Republicans.
• Party self-interest tracks this divide closely: every state that has joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has been Democratic-leaning, and in 2025 Maine’s Republican-controlled House voted 76 to 71 to withdraw from it, only for the Democratic-controlled Senate to block the repeal 18 to 16.

Check your understanding 1. Explain, using named examples, how the Electoral College’s winner-take-all method can produce a result different from the national popular vote. 2. Using the evaluation table, assess whether the Electoral College still serves the purpose the Framers intended in 1787. 3. Why might a state’s decision to join, or leave, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact depend more on party advantage than constitutional principle?

3. Money in American elections

In 2003, the Supreme Court heard McConnell v Federal Election Commission, a challenge to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002. In upholding most of the Act, Justices Stevens and O’Connor observed that “money, like water, will always find an outlet”, a line that has come to summarise the whole history of American campaign finance: whenever the rules on political money have tightened, new channels have generally opened to let money flow by other means.

Modern rules date from the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1974, passed after Watergate, which introduced contribution limits, disclosure and voluntary public funding. Buckley v Valeo (1976) upheld those limits but struck down mandatory spending caps, establishing that spending on political speech is itself a form of protected speech.

Presidential campaign spending has grown from $66.9 million in 1976 to $5.5 billion in 2024, with two turning points: candidates from 2000 onwards increasingly declined public funding, whose spending caps became a disadvantage once private fundraising could outstrip it, and Citizens United v FEC (2010), together with SpeechNow.org v FEC (2010), allowed unlimited independent spending and created the Super PAC. Barack Obama became the first major-party nominee to decline public funding for the general election in 2008; no nominee from either party has accepted it since.

Key terms Hard money: donations raised and spent within federal contribution limits and disclosure rules; an individual may currently give up to $3,500 to a candidate’s campaign committee per election. Soft money: money raised and spent outside those limits for generic party-building activity, banned by BCRA in 2002. PAC (Political Action Committee): an organisation, often linked to a business or trade union, that pools donations to give directly to candidates, capped by law at $5,000 per candidate per election, a limit unchanged since 1974. Super PAC: an independent group that may raise and spend unlimited sums, provided it does not coordinate directly with a candidate’s campaign. Hybrid PAC: also called a Carey Committee, running two accounts side by side: one a capped PAC, the other an unlimited Super PAC.

Year	Reform or ruling	Effect
1974	Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA)	Created the FEC; introduced contribution limits, disclosure and voluntary public funding
1976	Buckley v Valeo	Upheld contribution limits and disclosure but struck down mandatory spending limits as a First Amendment violation
2002	Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA)	Banned national parties from raising soft money; upheld the following year in McConnell v Federal Election Commission
2010	Citizens United v FEC and SpeechNow.org v FEC	Allowed unlimited independent spending by corporations, unions and individuals, creating the Super PAC
2014	McCutcheon v FEC	Struck down the aggregate limit on how much a donor may give across all candidates and committees combined
2014	Congress ends convention public funding	Left only unused primary matching funds and a general election grant no nominee has claimed since 2008
2026	NRSC v FEC	Struck down federal limits on party spending coordinated with its own candidates, overturning a 2001 precedent; decided 30 June 2026 by a 6–3 majority

Source: FEC.gov, OpenSecrets, Ballotpedia, Brennan Center for Justice.

• Each closed channel has reopened elsewhere: soft money after Buckley v Valeo, tax-exempt “527” groups after BCRA, such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which raised over $25 million against John Kerry in 2004, and Super PACs and undisclosed “dark money” after Citizens United v FEC, and now unlimited coordinated party spending after NRSC v FEC.
• In 2024, Future Forward, a hybrid PAC backing Kamala Harris, raised over $950 million, more than the combined cost of every presidential election held between 1976 and 1996, while Make America Great Again Inc., a Super PAC backing Donald Trump, raised $410.5 million; the businessman Elon Musk alone gave an estimated $277 million to Trump-aligned groups.
• Money is not decisive on its own: Harris and allied groups raised roughly $2 billion in 2024 against about $1.45 billion supporting Trump, and still lost; Hillary Clinton outspent Trump in 2016 and lost too, suggesting money is closer to a necessary than a sufficient condition for a competitive campaign.

Check your understanding 1. Explain what the phrase “money, like water, will always find an outlet” means, using one example from the timeline. 2. To what extent does the 2024 case study (Future Forward and Make America Great Again Inc.) suggest that the legal label attached to an outside spending group matters less than its scale? 3. Using named examples, evaluate the claim that “US presidential elections are decided by whoever spends the most.”

4. Incumbency: a significant but conditional advantage

Incumbency advantage, the electoral benefit an officeholder derives simply from already holding office, rests on retrospective voting theory: the idea that voters judge an incumbent chiefly on the record of the preceding term, treating the election as a periodic referendum on the sitting administration rather than a forward-looking choice between programmes. Since George Washington established the norm of a voluntary two-term limit, 28 incumbents have stood for re-election; 18 won and 10 lost, a success rate of roughly two in three. Grover Cleveland remains the only president to lose a re-election bid, in 1888, and later regain the office, giving the United States its only non-consecutive presidency before Donald Trump’s return in 2025.

Advantage	Disadvantage
Name recognition and free media coverage: Obama’s official activities in 2012 routinely led the news, coverage Romney had to buy	Blame for events beyond their control: Carter blamed for the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, Trump for Covid-19 and recession in 2020
Easier fundraising and a united party, sparing a contested primary: Obama in 2012, Bush in 2004	Heavy media scrutiny cuts both ways: Biden’s faltering 27 June 2024 debate crystallised doubts about his fitness and led to his withdrawal
Executive experience and the rally round the flag effect: Bush’s 2004 campaign benefited from the residual effect of 11 September	A fundraising advantage does not guarantee victory: Bush senior entered 1992 well-funded yet lost to Clinton amid recession
Voter risk-aversion favours the known quantity: Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” campaign	Primary challenges can weaken a surviving incumbent: Ford in 1976 and Carter in 1980 both survived challenges, then lost in November

Source: historical election results compiled from the National Archives and 270toWin.

The advantage transfers poorly to same-party successors who have not themselves held the presidency, a quasi-incumbency problem visible across Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Al Gore in 2000, Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Kamala Harris in 2024, all of whom lost; the sole modern exception is George H. W. Bush’s 1988 victory. Harris entered the race as a quasi-incumbent after Joe Biden withdrew on 21 July 2024, running a compressed fifteen-week campaign that tried to combine continuity with the Biden administration and distance from its least popular positions, a balancing act several commentators judged incoherent; she lost all seven swing states and the popular vote.

Term limits guarantee that, roughly every eight years, the presidency is contested as a genuinely open seat, as in 2000, 2008, 2016 and, in practical terms, 2024. Structural advantage is also no protection against a large enough shock: Hoover in 1932, Ford in 1976, Carter in 1980, Bush senior in 1992 and Trump in 2020 each lost despite the usual incumbency advantages, undone by depression, stagflation, recession or pandemic respectively. The six year itch, the tendency for a president’s party to suffer heavy congressional losses in the sixth year of a two-term presidency, as in 2014 and 2018, shows that incumbency at the top of the ticket offers little protection further down the ballot, a pattern the 2026 midterms will test again.

Check your understanding 1. Explain what is meant by “retrospective voting” and how it links to incumbency advantage. 2. Using named examples, explain why incumbency advantage transfers poorly to a quasi-incumbent such as a sitting vice president. 3. “Incumbency guarantees re-election.” Using the historical record (18 wins from 28 attempts), evaluate this claim.

5. Bringing it together: 2020 and 2024

The 2020 and 2024 cycles show every strand above operating together in a single contest. In 2020, Donald Trump was a true incumbent, benefiting from the fundraising and unified-party advantages incumbency usually confers, yet the rally round the flag effect conspicuously failed to appear amid the Covid-19 pandemic; Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 and the popular vote by 51.3 per cent to 46.8 per cent, on turnout of around 66.6 per cent, the highest in over a century. Trump’s subsequent legal challenges and the fake electors scheme exposed real gaps in the certification process, later closed by the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, passed after the Capitol was breached on 6 January 2021.

In 2024, incumbency worked differently again. Biden’s withdrawal left Harris as a quasi-incumbent, and despite Future Forward’s record-breaking operation on her behalf, she lost all seven swing states, becoming the third Democratic vice president in a row to fail in this position. Trump’s 312 to 226 College win, and his win of the popular vote for the first time by a Republican since 2004, meant the certification on 6 January 2025, with Harris herself presiding as vice president, passed off peacefully, a marked contrast with four years earlier.

• Both cycles were shaped by unexpected outside shocks: the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, an assassination attempt and a late candidate substitution in 2024.
• Both raised serious questions about a candidate’s fitness for office: Trump’s conduct and legal jeopardy in 2020, Biden’s age and capacity in 2024.
• The reforms passed after 2020, chiefly the Electoral Count Reform Act, appear so far to have held, though it remains an open question whether this reflects a genuine restoration of democratic norms or simply Trump’s 2024 victory removing his own incentive to contest the result.

6. The Presidential Election system now: the 2028 cycle

As of July 2026, the country sits at the very start of the 2028 cycle, in the invisible primary phase, around twenty seven months before polling day. On the Republican side, Vice President JD Vance remains the clear frontrunner in primary polling, at around 48 per cent among likely Republican primary voters in one recent survey, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio has recently overtaken him as favourite on prediction markets such as Kalshi, having trailed by around 25 points a year earlier, a reminder that an early polling lead is not the same as a settled nomination. On the Democratic side, no comparable frontrunner has emerged: Kamala Harris leads several polls of prospective primary voters, with Gavin Newsom, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pete Buttigieg all drawing measurable support.

Trump himself remains constitutionally barred from a third term under the Twenty Second Amendment, notwithstanding his own repeated suggestions to the contrary, including musing about a “Trump 2028” cap and a mooted plan to run as vice president alongside Vance before assuming office again; Trump has himself acknowledged the text is “pretty clear” that he is “not allowed to run.” The 2026 midterm elections, contesting the full House, roughly a third of the Senate and numerous governorships, will offer the first real test of whether the six year itch reasserts itself against the Republican Party, and will shape the field considerably before any 2028 candidate formally declares.

Evaluating the system as a whole

Taken together, these five strands support a single, cautious conclusion: the American electoral system’s formal, constitutional architecture has changed remarkably little since 1787 and 1804, while the informal system built around it, party primaries, campaign money and the conventions of incumbency, has absorbed most of the pressure for change instead. The Electoral College has survived over two centuries of criticism and two elections this century in which it diverged from the popular vote, not because reformers lack a workable alternative, but because reform requires either a constitutional supermajority no Congress has assembled, or a state-by-state compact that has stalled at 222 of the 270 votes it needs, with party self-interest, visible even in Trump’s own reversal from “disaster” to “genius”, blocking further progress in either direction. Campaign finance shows the same pattern in a different register: fifty years of reform since FECA have repeatedly relabelled the channels through which political money flows, from soft money to 527 groups to Super PACs to, as of 30 June 2026, unlimited coordinated party spending under NRSC v FEC, without ever succeeding in reducing the total amount moving through them.

Does Trump’s 2016 verdict still hold in 2026? On the Electoral College, the honest answer is that it has not yet been tested against him again: 2024 delivered him both the College and the popular vote together, so his “genius” verdict has not had to survive a second reversal of fortune, and there is little in the historical record, seven presidents have called the system a disaster only after losing under it, to suggest he would not flip back if 2028 or 2032 produced a College result at odds with the popular vote for a Republican candidate. On the money side, the picture is more clear-cut: the Stevens and O’Connor line has, if anything, been reinforced rather than tested since 2003, most recently by a Supreme Court that struck down one of the last remaining federal spending limits a month before this document was written. The water, in short, is still finding its outlet, and so, self-interest allowing, is Donald Trump’s own judgement of the rules that govern it.

Check your understanding 1. Using evidence from at least two sections of this document, assess how far Donald Trump’s changing verdicts on the Electoral College illustrate a wider pattern in this topic. 2. “The US electoral system is essentially unreformable.” Evaluate this claim, drawing on both the Electoral College and campaign finance sections. 3. Looking ahead to 2028, explain which of the concepts covered in this document, incumbency, quasi-incumbency, the invisible primary, or campaign finance, you consider most likely to shape the outcome, and why.

A fuller comparison with the UK’s capped, disclosed system of party funding and its first-past-the-post electoral system is developed elsewhere on histpology.co.uk.

Sources

Primary sources

U.S. Constitution, Article II and Amendments XII, XX, XXII and XXV  https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

3 U.S. Code § 15, Counting electoral votes in Congress (Cornell LII)  https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/3/15

Chiafalo v Washington, 591 U.S. ___ (2020)  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/591/19-465/

Bush v Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000)  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/531/98/

Buckley v Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976)  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/424/1/

McConnell v Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003)  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/540/93/

Citizens United v FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010)  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/558/310/

SpeechNow.org v FEC, 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010)  https://www.fec.gov/legal-resources/court-cases/speechnoworg-v-fec/

McCutcheon v FEC, 572 U.S. 185 (2014)  https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/572/185/

Carey v FEC, 791 F. Supp. 2d 121 (D.D.C. 2011)  https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/2146537/carey-v-federal-election-comn/

NRSC v FEC, 609 U.S. ___ (2026)  https://www.fec.gov/updates/supreme-court-finds-limits-on-coordinated-party-expenditures-unconstitutional-in-nrsc-v-fec-609-us-____2026/

Secondary sources

Federal Election Commission, campaign finance statistics and historical reports  https://www.fec.gov/data/

OpenSecrets, “Cost of Election”  https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/cost-of-election

OpenSecrets, “Dark Money Basics”  https://www.opensecrets.org/dark-money/basics

Ballotpedia, Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), legislative history  https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_Election_Campaign_Act

Congress.gov, legislative history of the DISCLOSE Act, the For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote Act  https://www.congress.gov/

Brennan Center for Justice, research and analysis on campaign finance and FEC enforcement  https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/reform-money-politics

Bipartisan Policy Center, “Trends in Campaign Financing, 1980–2016”, Zachary Albert  https://bipartisanpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Trends-in-Campaign-Financing-1980-2016.-Zachary-Albert..pdf

National Archives, U.S. Electoral College results by year  https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college

270toWin, presidential election results by year  https://www.270towin.com/

Pew Research Center, “Behind Biden’s 2020 Victory”  https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/

Pew Research Center, “Voter turnout in the 2020 and 2024 elections”  https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voter-turnout-2020-2024/

Gallup, “Americans Still Favor Replacing Electoral College System”, September 2024  https://news.gallup.com/poll/651353/americans-favor-replacing-electoral-college-system.aspx

Wikipedia, “2020 United States presidential election”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidential_election

Wikipedia, “2024 United States presidential election”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidential_election

Protect Democracy, “Understanding the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022”  https://protectdemocracy.org/work/understanding-the-electoral-count-reform-act-of-2022/

V. O. Key Jr, The Responsible Electorate: Rationality in Presidential Voting, 1936 to 1960 (1966)

Douglas A. Hibbs, ‘Bread and Peace Voting in US Presidential Elections’, Public Choice (2000)  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1005292312412

Ray C. Fair, Predicting Presidential Elections and Other Things (Stanford University Press)  https://fairmodel.econ.yale.edu/index1.htm

Newsweek and Zogby Analytics, polling on 2028 presidential contenders, July 2026  https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-aoc-gavin-newsom-2028-poll-12194158

CNBC, “Rubio odds for GOP 2028 nominee close to overtaking Vance on Kalshi”, June 2026  https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/01/rubio-odds-for-gop-2028-nominee-close-to-overtaking-vance-on-kalshi.html

Federal News Network, “Checking in on Presidential Election Odds for 2028”, July 2026  https://federalnewsnetwork.com/prediction-markets/2026/07/checking-presidential-election-odds-2028/

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“Money, like water, will always find an outlet”

In 2003, the Supreme Court heard the case of McConnell v Federal Election Commission, a challenge to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) of 2002, a law that had tightened the rules on political donations and campaign advertising. In the joint opinion of Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor, upholding most of the Act, the Court observed:

“Money, like water, will always find an outlet.”

This single line has become one of the most quoted phrases in the study of American campaign finance (the raising and spending of money to fight elections). It captures a pattern that runs through the whole history of the subject: whenever the federal government has tightened the rules on political money, whether after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, after the BCRA of 2002, or after later Supreme Court rulings, new channels have generally opened up to let money flow into politics by other means. The tables below set out the scale of this money, where it has come from, and what it has been spent on.

The rising cost of running for president

Modern rules on presidential campaign finance date from the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) of 1974, passed in the wake of Watergate (in which illegal corporate donations to Richard Nixon’s campaign played a central part). FECA introduced limits on contributions, required public disclosure of donations, and created a system of public funding for candidates who agreed to spending limits in return. Since then, the cost of presidential elections has grown enormously, particularly after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v FEC (2010), which allowed corporations, trade unions and wealthy individuals to spend unlimited sums independently of a candidate. Note that figures before 2008 mostly cover candidates’ own spending under the old public funding limits, while figures from 2008 onwards include the much larger sums spent independently by parties and outside groups, so the two periods are not directly comparable. None of the figures below are adjusted for inflation (the general rise in prices over time).

Election year	Approximate total spending	Context
1976	$66.9 million	First election held under FECA 1974. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were the first nominees to run under the new system, each accepting a $21.8 million general election grant instead of raising money privately
1980	$92.3 million	Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter; independent candidate John Anderson later qualified for a retroactive public grant of over $4 million after winning more than 5% of the vote
1984	$103.6 million	Reagan’s landslide re-election victory over Walter Mondale; both campaigns operated under the public funding system’s spending limits
1988	$210.7 million	Sharp rise driven partly by television advertising, including the notorious “Willie Horton” attack adverts targeting Michael Dukakis, funded not by the Bush campaign itself but by an independent group, the National Security PAC
1992	$192.2 million	Independent candidate Ross Perot spent an estimated $65 million of his own fortune challenging George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton
1996	$239.9 million	Bill Clinton and Bob Dole both accepted public funding for the general election; Ross Perot, running again for the Reform Party, qualified for a $29 million public grant based on his strong 1992 showing
2000	$343.1 million	George W. Bush became the first modern candidate to decline primary matching funds, freeing his campaign from the spending limits attached to them
2004	$1.02 billion	First presidential contest to pass $1 billion, and the last covered mainly by candidate committees, party conventions and public funds; Democrats Howard Dean and John Kerry joined Bush in turning down public funding so as to avoid its spending limits
2008	$2.4 billion	Figures from this point onwards include parties and outside spending alongside candidates. Barack Obama declined public funding for the general election; John McCain accepted the grant, worth around $84 million, becoming the last major-party nominee to do so
2012	$2.6 billion	First election after Citizens United v FEC (2010); rapid growth of Super PACs, including Restore Our Future backing Mitt Romney and Priorities USA Action backing Obama
2016	$2.4 billion	Donald Trump put around $66 million of his own money into his primary campaign against Hillary Clinton, before relying more heavily on donor funding in the general election
2020	$5.7 billion	The most expensive presidential race to that point, driven by record small-donor fundraising through platforms such as ActBlue and WinRed, alongside record outside spending
2024	$5.5 billion	Kamala Harris’s campaign raised over $1 billion within about three months of entering the race after Joe Biden withdrew in July 2024, the fastest any presidential campaign has reached that total

Figures are approximate and drawn from Federal Election Commission (FEC) and OpenSecrets data; see sources below.

The pattern in the table is hard to miss, and comes down to a small number of turning points:

• Spending crept upwards gradually across the last quarter of the twentieth century, staying under $350 million as late as 2000.
• It then leapt after 2000, once leading candidates began turning down public funding altogether: public money came with strict spending caps attached, so a candidate confident of raising more privately had every incentive to opt out.
• Barack Obama took this furthest in 2008, becoming the first major-party nominee to decline public funding for the general election itself; no nominee from either major party has accepted it since.
• The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v FEC pushed the total higher still from 2012 onwards, by allowing Super PACs to raise and spend without limit alongside the official campaigns.

Check your understanding 1. Using the table, explain why the figures for total spending look so different before and after 2008. 2. Identify two named candidates from the table who financed part of their own campaign from personal wealth. 3. “The public funding system created in 1974 has essentially collapsed.” Find one piece of evidence in the table that supports this claim, and one detail that complicates it.

Where does the money come from?

Presidential campaigns are funded from a mixture of sources, and the balance between them has shifted considerably since the 1970s, particularly away from public funding and towards outside spending by independent groups.

Source	What it means	Notes
Small individual donors	Ordinary supporters giving modest sums, often online (typically under $200 in total)	Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign pioneered large-scale online small-donor fundraising; Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns built on this, reporting an average donation of around $27
Large individual donors	Wealthier individuals giving close to the legal maximum permitted per candidate	Remains the largest source of money given directly to candidates themselves, for example an individual giving the current maximum of $3,500 to Donald Trump’s or Kamala Harris’s 2024 campaign committee
Political Action Committees (PACs)	Organisations, often linked to businesses, trade unions or interest groups, that pool members’ donations to give to candidates	Contributions are capped by federal law at $5,000 per candidate per election, for example from a corporate PAC or a trade union PAC such as the AFL-CIO’s
Super PACs and other outside groups	Independent groups that may raise and spend unlimited sums on adverts and campaigning, provided they do not coordinate directly with a candidate	Made possible by the Citizens United v FEC and SpeechNow.org v FEC rulings of 2010; in 2024, Future Forward (backing Kamala Harris) and Make America Great Again Inc. (backing Donald Trump) each spent hundreds of millions of dollars independently
Party committees	National and state party organisations, such as the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee	Fund both direct spending and spending coordinated with a candidate, such as each committee’s support for its own presidential ticket
Public funding	Matching funds for primary candidates and grants for the general election, financed by a voluntary checkbox on federal tax returns	Effectively abandoned by major-party candidates since 2008; John McCain remains the last nominee to accept a general election grant, worth around $84 million
Candidate self-funding	Money that candidates give to their own campaigns from personal wealth	Notable examples include Ross Perot (1992), Donald Trump, who put around $66 million into his 2016 primary campaign, and Michael Bloomberg (2020)

Figures and definitions drawn from OpenSecrets and FEC guidance; see sources below.

Two trends sit side by side here, pulling in opposite directions:

• Online fundraising has made small donations far more significant than they were even a decade ago, letting candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama build large war chests from millions of modest contributions.
• At the same time, an ever smaller number of extremely wealthy donors have gained outsized influence through Super PACs. In the 2024 election, for example, the businessman Elon Musk alone gave an estimated $277 million to Donald Trump and allied Republican groups, more than the entire cost of some full presidential elections in the 1980s.
• Public funding, the system Congress built after Watergate to prevent exactly this kind of dependence on wealthy backers, has been left far behind by both trends.

Check your understanding 1. In your own words, explain the difference between hard money and soft money. 2. Explain how a Super PAC is legally different from a Political Action Committee (PAC). 3. Why might a candidate end up more dependent on a single Super PAC than on thousands of small donors, even if the small donors give more money in total?

What is the money spent on?

Campaigns divide their spending across several broad categories, although candidates are not required to report disbursements in a single standard format, so exact national totals for each category are difficult to establish precisely.

Category of spending	What it covers	Notes
Advertising (television, radio and digital)	Adverts bought to reach voters through broadcast media, streaming services and online platforms	Usually the single largest category of spending in a modern presidential campaign
Staff and consultants	Salaries and fees for campaign managers, communications teams, strategists and pollsters
Field operations	Canvassing, phone banks and data operations used to identify and turn out supporters on election day	Often referred to informally as the “ground game” or get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort
Polling and research	Surveys and opposition research used to guide campaign strategy and messaging
Fundraising costs	Expenses involved in raising money itself, such as events, direct mail and digital fundraising platforms
Administration and overheads	Office costs, travel, technology and legal or compliance costs, including ensuring the campaign follows Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules

Categories are illustrative and based on standard accounts of how presidential campaigns allocate spending; see sources below.

Whatever its source, most of this money ends up being spent on reaching voters rather than on running the campaign itself:

• Television advertising has traditionally taken the largest single share of campaign spending.
• Digital advertising has narrowed the gap considerably since the 2010s, as campaigns have followed voters onto social media and streaming platforms.
• Behind the adverts sits a much larger, less visible operation: hundreds of paid staff, pollsters and local organisers, whose task is to turn persuasion on a screen into votes cast on election day.

Taken together, the three tables above help to explain why the Stevens and O’Connor line has proved so durable:

• Each attempt to close off a route for political money (the FECA limits of 1974, the BCRA restrictions of 2002) has, sooner or later, been followed by the opening of a new one, whether that is the abandonment of public funding or the rise of the Super PAC.
• It is this recurring pattern of regulation and circumvention (finding a legal way around a rule) that we turn to next, alongside the legislation and court rulings that have shaped it.

Check your understanding 1. List three categories of campaign spending, giving one concrete example of each. 2. Explain why “regulation and circumvention” is a useful phrase for summarising the history of US campaign finance so far.

Analysing and evaluating campaign finance reform, 1974 to the present

The problem set out by Justices Stevens and O’Connor is, at heart, a clash between two goals that the American constitutional system has never fully reconciled. The first is the wish to limit the corrupting influence, or the appearance of corrupting influence, that large sums of money can have over elected officials, the concern that drove Congress to act after the Watergate scandal. The second is the First Amendment’s protection of free political speech, which the courts have repeatedly interpreted as covering not just what a candidate or donor says, but how much they are permitted to spend saying it. Reformers have spent fifty years trying to restrict the first without falling foul of the second, and, as the timeline below shows, each new rule has tended to produce a new way around it. Four terms recur throughout this story:

Key terms Hard money: donations that are raised and spent within the contribution limits and disclosure rules set out in federal election law. For example, an individual may currently give up to $3,500 to a presidential candidate’s official campaign committee per election (so $7,000 across the primary and general election combined), a limit the FEC adjusts periodically for inflation. Soft money: money that was raised and spent outside these federal limits, typically donated to a political party for generic “party-building” activity, such as voter registration drives or general advertising, rather than to a named candidate. For example, before this practice was banned by BCRA in 2002, a corporation could give an unlimited sum directly to a national party committee. Political Action Committees (PACs): organisations, often linked to a business, trade union or interest group, that pool contributions from their members in order to donate directly to candidates. Contributions from PACs to a candidate remain capped by federal law, currently at $5,000 per candidate per election, a limit that has not risen since 1974. Super PACs: independent expenditure-only committees that may raise and spend unlimited sums from individuals, corporations and trade unions, provided they do not coordinate directly with a candidate’s campaign. For example, groups such as Priorities USA Action and Make America Great Again Inc. have each spent tens of millions of dollars independently supporting their preferred presidential candidate, with no legal ceiling on the total.

Year	Reform attempt	What it did	Outcome
1974	Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) Amendments	Created the FEC (Federal Election Commission); introduced contribution limits, spending limits and disclosure rules; set up voluntary public funding for primaries, conventions and the general election	Passed directly in response to the Watergate scandal; key parts struck down two years later
1976	Buckley v Valeo (Supreme Court)	Upheld contribution limits, disclosure and voluntary public funding, but struck down mandatory spending limits and limits on independent expenditure and candidates’ self-funding	Established that spending money on political speech is itself a form of speech, protected by the First Amendment
1979	Further FECA amendments and FEC rulings	Simplified disclosure requirements; allowed parties to raise unlimited “soft money” for generic party-building activity	Soft money grew from about $19 million in 1980 to roughly $487 million by 2000
2002	Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA, “McCain-Feingold”)	Banned national parties from raising or spending soft money; restricted corporate and trade union funding of “electioneering communications” shortly before an election	Upheld, in large part, the following year
2003	McConnell v Federal Election Commission (Supreme Court)	Upheld BCRA’s soft money ban and its restriction on electioneering communications	Source of the “money, like water” quotation; later substantially overturned
2004	Rise of 527 groups	Nominally independent, tax-exempt groups such as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth raised large sums by avoiding explicit “vote for” or “vote against” language	Swift Boat Veterans alone raised over $25 million to campaign against Senator John Kerry
2010	Citizens United v FEC (Supreme Court)	Ruled that corporations and trade unions may spend unlimited sums independently of a candidate, as a form of protected political speech	Overturned the electioneering communications restriction upheld in McConnell
2010	SpeechNow.org v FEC (Court of Appeals, DC Circuit)	Struck down limits on contributions to groups that only make independent expenditures	Created the Super PAC, alongside Citizens United
2010 and 2012	DISCLOSE Act (proposed)	Would have required disclosure of large donors funding independent political adverts	Blocked twice by Senate filibuster (59–41 in 2010; 51–44 in 2012)
2014	McCutcheon v FEC (Supreme Court)	Struck down the aggregate limit on the total amount an individual could give across all candidates and committees combined	Limits on how much a donor may give to any single candidate remained in place
2014	Congress ends convention public funding	Redirected the public money previously used to fund party nominating conventions towards paediatric medical research	Left only primary matching funds and the general election grant, both largely unused by then
2019 and 2021	For the People Act (H.R.1)	Would have created a voluntary small-donor matching system and stronger donor disclosure rules	Passed the House of Representatives twice; failed a Senate cloture vote 50–50 in 2021
2021	Freedom to Vote Act	A narrower bill including donor disclosure rules and public financing for House of Representatives campaigns	Failed a Senate procedural vote, 49–51
1996 onwards	State and city-level alternatives (Maine, Arizona, New York City, New York State)	“Clean Elections” and small-donor matching schemes provide full or matching public funding outside the federal system	Show that reform remains possible below the federal level, even where federal reform has stalled
2026	NRSC v FEC (Supreme Court)	Struck down federal limits on how much a political party may spend in coordination with its own candidates, overturning FEC v Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (2001)	Decided 30 June 2026; parties may now spend without limit alongside their candidates, though limits on contributions to parties themselves remain in place

Dates, case citations and figures drawn from Ballotpedia, Justia, Oyez, FEC.gov, the Brennan Center for Justice, OpenSecrets and Congress.gov; see sources below.

Check your understanding 1. Explain the significance of Buckley v Valeo for later attempts to regulate campaign spending. 2. Choose one reform from the timeline and explain how it was later undermined or worked around. 3. Why has the Federal Election Commission (FEC) struggled to enforce campaign finance law effectively?

Case study: PACs, Super PACs and hybrid PACs in recent presidential elections

The Key terms box above defines Political Action Committees (PACs), Super PACs and, implicitly, a third and less familiar vehicle: the hybrid PAC, also called a Carey Committee after the 2011 court case that created it (Carey v FEC). A hybrid PAC runs two separate bank accounts side by side, one that behaves exactly like a connected PAC, giving limited sums directly to a candidate, and one that behaves exactly like a Super PAC, raising and spending without limit provided it stays independent of the campaign. Comparing all three side by side, across three different presidential elections, shows how far outside spending has grown since Citizens United v FEC and how little the precise legal label now seems to matter:

Type	Legal position	Example (presidential election)	Scale
Connected PAC	May give directly to a candidate’s campaign, but capped at $5,000 per candidate per election, a limit that has not risen since 1974	A corporate or trade union PAC giving the maximum $5,000 to a presidential candidate’s campaign committee	Individually small; there are thousands of registered PACs, but none may give a candidate more than the cap
Super PAC	May raise and spend unlimited sums, but only independently of a candidate, with no direct contributions and no coordination	Restore Our Future (pro-Romney) and Priorities USA Action (pro-Obama), 2012	Restore Our Future spent $142.1 million; Priorities USA Action spent $65.2 million
Super PAC	As above	Make America Great Again Inc. (pro-Trump), 2024	Raised $410.5 million and spent around $376.9 million, including $251.7 million opposing Kamala Harris directly
Hybrid PAC (Carey Committee)	Runs two separate bank accounts: one operating as a capped connected PAC, the other as an unlimited Super PAC	Future Forward (pro-Harris), 2024	Raised over $950 million and spent around $517 million on the presidential race, the largest single-candidate outside group in US history

Figures drawn from FEC filings as reported by OpenSecrets, the Brennan Center for Justice and Ballotpedia; see sources below.

Three points stand out from this comparison:

• The gap between a connected PAC and the other two vehicles has widened enormously since 1974: a connected PAC’s $5,000 cap has not moved in fifty years, while Super PACs and hybrid PACs now each raise and spend hundreds of millions of dollars per election.
• The legal distinction between a Super PAC and a hybrid PAC made little practical difference to the scale of spending in 2024: Make America Great Again Inc. (a pure Super PAC) and Future Forward (a hybrid PAC) both ran operations costing several hundred million dollars, each dominant on its side of the race.
• Both leading 2024 campaigns became dependent on a single outside group of this kind, funded in turn by a small number of very large donors, such as Timothy Mellon’s $150 million gift to Make America Great Again Inc., which is itself the pattern that concerned Congress when it first legislated in 1974.

Check your understanding 1. Explain the difference between a Super PAC and a hybrid PAC. 2. Using the case study, assess how far the legal distinction between different types of outside group actually limits the amount of money reaching a presidential election.

Judged against its own original aims, this history supports two quite different conclusions, and A-level students are expected to weigh both rather than simply pick one:

Reform has largely failed to control money in politics

• Each rule has closed one channel only for the money to reopen another: soft money after Buckley v Valeo, 527 groups after BCRA, and Super PACs and “dark money” (political spending whose ultimate donor is not disclosed) after Citizens United and SpeechNow.org.
• The public funding system Congress designed in 1974, meant to reduce candidates’ dependence on private donors, has been turned down by every major-party nominee since 2008, and Congress itself ended convention funding altogether in 2014.
• The FEC, the very body created in 1974 to enforce these rules, is a six-member commission split evenly between the two parties and needs four votes to act; researchers have found that around 40 per cent of its enforcement votes deadlocked between 2017 and 2020.
• More recent attempts at reform, including the DISCLOSE Act and the For the People Act, have repeatedly failed to pass Congress, generally along party lines.

The system may be working broadly as the Constitution requires

• Since Buckley v Valeo (1976), the Supreme Court has consistently treated spending on political speech, though not direct contributions, as protected by the First Amendment, on the grounds that limiting how much a person or group may spend restricts their ability to communicate a political message.
• Direct contribution limits, which the Court views as posing the clearest risk of corruption, remain in place and have not been struck down by any of the rulings above.
• Disclosure requirements, upheld in both Buckley v Valeo and Citizens United v FEC, mean that most political spending, dark money being the significant exception, is publicly recorded.
• On this reading, the answer to persistent loopholes is not more restriction, which the courts are likely to strike down again, but better disclosure, so that voters can judge the influence of money for themselves.

On balance, the case study above tips the argument towards the first interpretation. Future Forward alone raised over $950 million in 2024, more than the combined cost of every presidential election held between 1976 and 1996. This suggests that the precise legal label attached to a channel for political money, hard money, soft money, a connected PAC, a Super PAC or a hybrid PAC, matters less in practice than the underlying principle established in Buckley v Valeo: that spending money on political speech is constitutionally protected, and is therefore extremely difficult to cap. Fifty years of reform have repeatedly succeeded in relabelling the channels through which political money flows, and in forcing more of it into the open through disclosure, but they have not yet succeeded in reducing the total amount flowing through them.

The internet and campaign finance

The internet has changed campaign finance in two directions at once. On one hand, it has widened participation by letting candidates raise very large sums directly from ordinary supporters, bypassing the traditional PAC and major-donor networks described above. On the other, it has opened a new and less regulated channel for exactly the kind of undisclosed spending that reformers have tried to close off since 1974.

• Online fundraising platforms now handle small-dollar giving at a scale unimaginable a generation ago. In the 2024 cycle, the Democratic platform ActBlue processed around $3.8 billion in donations, and the Republican equivalent, WinRed, around $1.7 billion, figures that dwarf the entire cost of any presidential election held before the 2000s. This pattern was pioneered by Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and taken furthest by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, whose average donation was reported at $27.
• Small-dollar fundraising is not evenly spread through a campaign, however: it tends to cluster around short, highly publicised moments. Kamala Harris’s campaign, for example, raised nearly $50 million within seven hours of her 2024 launch, largely through ActBlue. This suggests the internet has changed the timing and visibility of giving as much as who gives.
• Digital advertising has also grown into a major and less transparent category of spending. Political advertisers spent an estimated $1.9 billion on online adverts across the major platforms during the 2024 cycle, and digital advertising can be microtargeted (tailored to narrow audiences using personal data) in a way that television advertising, still subject to long-standing federal disclosure rules, cannot.
• Because online political advertising is not subject to the same disclosure rules as broadcast television, it has become a growing route for dark money. In the 2024 cycle, groups that do not disclose their donors spent more than $281 million on online adverts without reporting that spending to the FEC at all.

Taken together, this suggests the internet has not resolved the tension between free political speech and the risk of corruption that runs through this whole topic; it has simply moved a growing share of both small-dollar democracy and undisclosed dark money onto a platform that 1970s-era campaign finance law was never designed to regulate.

Check your understanding 1. Explain how online platforms such as ActBlue and WinRed have changed the way presidential campaigns raise money. 2. To what extent has the internet made political spending in the USA more transparent, or less?

Conclusion: money, water and 2026

Does money still find a way through in 2026? On 30 June 2026, the Supreme Court answered this question again, in real time. In NRSC v FEC, the Court struck down the federal limit on how much a political party may spend in coordination with its own candidates, overturning FEC v Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (2001), a limit Congress had relied on for a quarter of a century. Coordinated party spending had been one of the last channels still subject to a meaningful federal cap; it no longer is. The chronology in this document can therefore be read, quite literally, up to the week in which it was written: the pattern Stevens and O’Connor described in 2003 has continued for more than twenty years since, and was still operating a month before this document was completed.

Is it fair to say that, by 2026, it is essentially all soft money? Not literally. Soft money, in the strict sense, means unlimited donations to a political party for generic party-building activity, and that specific practice has remained banned since BCRA in 2002; the NRSC ruling did not touch it, nor did it alter the separate limits on how much an individual or PAC may give to a party or a candidate directly. But functionally, the description is not far off. The practical effect Congress was trying to prevent in 1974, large sums of money reaching a campaign with no meaningful cap, has re-emerged through a sequence of legally distinct routes: soft money itself, then 527 groups, then Super PACs and hybrid PACs, then dark money, and now unlimited coordinated party spending. None of these is technically “soft money”, yet each has served the same function. The proportion of election money moving through the strictly capped, disclosed “hard money” channel has fallen steadily since 2002, even as the banned label itself has stayed banned.

Are US presidential elections decided simply by whoever spends the most? The evidence is mixed, and this is exactly the kind of claim a good exam answer should be cautious about accepting at face value:

• Barack Obama outspent both John McCain (2008) and Mitt Romney (2012), and won both elections, a pattern often cited as evidence that money buys victory.
• Yet Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump in 2016 and lost; Michael Bloomberg spent over $1 billion of his own money seeking the 2020 Democratic nomination and won only American Samoa.
• Most strikingly, in 2024 Kamala Harris and her allied groups raised and spent around $2 billion in total, compared with around $1.45 billion supporting Donald Trump, and Trump won.
• Political scientists generally treat the relationship as correlation rather than simple cause and effect: strong, already-popular candidates tend to attract the most donations, meaning donors are often picking likely winners rather than creating them, and beyond a basic competitive threshold, additional spending appears to bring diminishing returns.

On the evidence gathered in this document, money looks close to a necessary condition for a competitive presidential campaign, a candidate with too little of it cannot get a message seen at all, but it is not a sufficient one. It cannot buy a popular message, a disciplined campaign or a favourable political climate, and it has not, in half a century of trying, been brought under lasting control. The water, in short, is still finding its outlet.

“Money, like water, will always find an outlet.”

Check your understanding 1. “US presidential elections are decided by whoever spends the most.” Evaluate this view, using at least two named examples from this document. 2. Explain what is meant by describing US campaign finance reform as a game of “regulatory whack-a-mole”. 3. Why might voters, courts and legislators disagree about whether the current system is a success or a failure?

This clash between free political speech and the control of money in elections is one of the sharpest contrasts between the US and UK approaches to politics; it is picked up directly, and set alongside the UK’s capped, disclosed system of party funding, elsewhere on histpology.co.uk.

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Sources

Federal Election Commission, campaign finance statistics and historical reports (fec.gov)

OpenSecrets, “Cost of Election”, “Presidential Elections” and “Dark Money Basics” (opensecrets.org)

McConnell v Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003)

Buckley v Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976); Citizens United v FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); SpeechNow.org v FEC, 599 F.3d 686 (D.C. Cir. 2010); McCutcheon v FEC, 572 U.S. 185 (2014); Carey v FEC, 791 F. Supp. 2d 121 (D.D.C. 2011); NRSC v FEC, 609 U.S. ___ (2026)

Federal Election Commission, “Supreme Court finds limits on coordinated party expenditures unconstitutional in NRSC v FEC”, FEC Record, 1 July 2026 (fec.gov)

OpenSecrets, PAC profiles for Restore Our Future, Priorities USA Action, Make America Great Again Inc. and Future Forward (opensecrets.org)

OpenSecrets, “2024 in review: total outside fundraising for presidential candidates”, February 2025 (opensecrets.org)

Bipartisan Policy Center, “Trends in Campaign Financing, 1980–2016” (bipartisanpolicy.org)

Brennan Center for Justice, research and analysis on campaign finance and FEC enforcement (brennancenter.org)

Ballotpedia and Congress.gov, legislative history of FECA, the DISCLOSE Act, the For the People Act and the Freedom to Vote Act

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KEY TERM Incumbency: the fact of currently holding a political office; in this context, being the sitting president, or the sitting vice president standing to succeed them, at the time of an election.

Defining Incumbency and Its Advantage

• Incumbency advantage refers to the electoral benefit an officeholder (in this case, the President) derives simply from already holding office, independent of the underlying popularity of their party or policies.
• In the American context it is most commonly discussed in relation to Congress, where re-election rates regularly exceed ninety per cent, a topic covered in more detail in a separate page on congressional elections.
• It operates differently, and far less reliably, at the presidential level, where only one individual holds the office and every re-election campaign is fought under intense national scrutiny.
• The theory behind incumbency is retrospective voting, the idea that the electorate evaluates an incumbent chiefly by judging the record of the preceding term rather than by comparing detailed policy platforms.
• On this view, elections function as a periodic referendum on the performance of the sitting administration, particularly its management of the economy, rather than a forward-looking choice between programmes.

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Advantages and Disadvantages of Incumbency

Advantages

Disadvantages

Name recognition and media attention: voters already know the incumbent, who also commands routine media coverage simply by carrying out the duties of office, while a challenger must work hard merely to be noticed. Example: Obama’s official activities as president routinely led the nightly news throughout 2012, coverage Romney could only match by paying for advertising. Fundraising: sitting presidents typically raise money more easily than challengers, drawing on an established donor network and the fundraising pull of the office itself. Example: incumbents from Nixon onward have generally out-raised their challengers, though, as the disadvantages column shows, this has not always been enough to win. Lack of a primary challenge: an incumbent seeking a second term is very rarely challenged seriously within their own party, sparing them the cost and division of a contested primary that most challengers must survive first. Example: both Obama in 2012 and Bush in 2004 proceeded directly to the general election without a meaningful primary contest. Single candidacy: because the incumbent party unites early behind one figure, it enters the general election with its resources and organisation intact, while the opposing party’s field can fragment support and money across several rivals. Example: in 2012, Romney emerged from a long, multi-candidate Republican primary against Gingrich, Santorum and Paul bruised and short of funds, while Obama faced no equivalent contest. Executive position: control and experience: incumbents can use the formal powers of office, executive orders, pardons, foreign policy announcements and the timing of favourable economic data, to shape the campaign, and bring direct experience of governing that no challenger can match. Example: George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign was built substantially around his conduct of the war on terror as commander-in-chief. Experience of the campaign: an incumbent’s operation has typically already fought one national campaign, giving it a tested staff, fundraising machinery and voter data that a first-time challenger must build from scratch. Example: Obama’s 2012 campaign built directly on the organisational and data infrastructure developed for his 2008 run. Risk aversion: voters often prefer the known quantity of an incumbent to the uncertainty of change, particularly where no acute crisis demands it. Example: Reagan’s 1984 ‘Morning in America’ campaign leaned explicitly into continuity and stability after the recovery from recession. The rally round the flag effect: international crises or military action can produce a short-term surge in an incumbent’s approval ratings, as the public initially unites behind the government. Example: George W. Bush’s re-election prospects in 2004 benefited from the residual rally effect of the 11 September attacks and the war on terror.

Blame for things that go wrong: incumbents carry direct responsibility for events during their term, even those substantially outside their control, and can be punished disproportionately at the ballot box. Example: Jimmy Carter was blamed for stagflation and the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, and Donald Trump was blamed for the Covid-19 pandemic and the recession that followed it in 2020, despite neither having caused the underlying shock. Media exposure cuts both ways: the same heavy coverage that raises an incumbent’s profile also gives challengers, and unscripted moments, a national stage on which to damage them. Example: Joe Biden’s faltering performance in the televised debate of 27 June 2024, watched by tens of millions, crystallised doubts about his fitness and led directly to his withdrawal from the race three weeks later. Money does not guarantee success: a fundraising advantage does not automatically convert into votes once conditions turn against an incumbent’s record. Example: George H. W. Bush entered 1992 with a substantial financial and organisational advantage yet still lost to Bill Clinton amid recession and voter anger over a broken promise not to raise taxes. Primary challenges can still be damaging: even where an incumbent survives a primary challenge rather than losing it, the contest can leave the party divided and the incumbent weakened for the general election. Example: Gerald Ford only narrowly saw off Ronald Reagan’s challenge for the Republican nomination in 1976, and Jimmy Carter survived a bruising challenge from Ted Kennedy in 1980; both incumbents went on to lose in November.

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The Historical Record

• Since George Washington established the norm of a voluntary two-term limit, twenty-eight incumbents have stood for re-election.
• Eighteen won and ten lost, a success rate of roughly two in three, though the pattern is far from evenly spread across history.
• Grover Cleveland is the sole president to lose a re-election bid, in 1888, and later regain the office four years afterwards, giving the United States its only non-consecutive presidency prior to Donald Trump’s return in 2025.

The table below sets out every contested incumbent re-election bid of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Year	Incumbent	Outcome	Electoral vote	Popular vote
1912	William Howard Taft (R)	Lost	8 to 435	23.2% (three-way split with Roosevelt and Wilson)
1916	Woodrow Wilson (D)	Won	277 to 254	49.2% to 46.1%
1932	Herbert Hoover (R)	Lost	59 to 472	39.7% to 57.4%
1936	Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)	Won	523 to 8	60.8% to 36.5%
1940	Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)	Won	449 to 82	54.7% to 44.8%
1944	Franklin D. Roosevelt (D)	Won	432 to 99	53.4% to 45.9%
1948	Harry Truman (D)	Won	303 to 189	49.6% to 45.1%
1956	Dwight Eisenhower (R)	Won	457 to 73	57.4% to 42.0%
1972	Richard Nixon (R)	Won	520 to 17	60.7% to 37.5%
1976	Gerald Ford (R)*	Lost	240 to 297	48.0% to 50.1%
1980	Jimmy Carter (D)	Lost	49 to 489	41.0% to 50.7%
1984	Ronald Reagan (R)	Won	525 to 13	58.8% to 40.6%
1992	George H. W. Bush (R)	Lost	168 to 370	37.4% to 43.0%
1996	Bill Clinton (D)	Won	379 to 159	49.2% to 40.7%
2004	George W. Bush (R)	Won	286 to 251	50.7% to 48.3%
2012	Barack Obama (D)	Won	332 to 206	51.1% to 47.2%
2020	Donald Trump (R)	Lost	232 to 306	46.8% to 51.3%
2024	Kamala Harris (D)†	Lost	226 to 312	48.3% to 49.8%

* Ford had succeeded to the presidency under the Twenty Fifth Amendment following Nixon’s resignation and had never himself been elected president or vice president; he is nonetheless conventionally treated as an incumbent seeking re-election.  † Harris was the sitting vice president and the Democratic nominee following Joe Biden’s withdrawal on 21 July 2024; she had not herself held the presidency, making 2024 a case of quasi-incumbency rather than a true incumbent re-election bid.

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Case Studies in Success

• 1984: Ronald Reagan’s landslide, winning forty nine of fifty states on the back of a strong economic recovery from the 1981 to 1982 recession, remains the largest electoral college victory in modern history.
• 1996: Bill Clinton was re-elected comfortably amid sustained economic growth and low unemployment, defeating a Republican challenger, Bob Dole, widely seen as failing to offer a compelling alternative.
• 2004: George W. Bush won narrowly, converting the residual rally effect from the 11 September attacks and the broader war on terror into re-election, defeating John Kerry by 286 electoral votes to 251.
• 2012: Barack Obama secured a second term despite a slow recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, benefiting from a divided and underfunded Republican challenge from Mitt Romney.

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Case Studies in Failure

• 1932: Herbert Hoover was overwhelmed by the Great Depression, losing 41 of 48 states to Franklin Roosevelt as unemployment approached twenty five per cent.
• 1976: Gerald Ford never escaped the legacy of his pardon of Richard Nixon, combined with stagflation (high inflation paired with a stagnant, slow-growing economy) and a weak recovery, losing narrowly to Jimmy Carter.
• 1980: Jimmy Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan amid continuing stagflation, a sustained energy crisis and the unresolved Iran hostage crisis, which entered its 444th day on the very day of Reagan’s inauguration.
• 1992: George H. W. Bush, despite record approval ratings after the 1991 Gulf War, lost to Bill Clinton after a recession and a broken 1988 promise not to raise taxes, with Ross Perot’s independent candidacy taking 18.9 per cent of the popular vote, the largest third-party share since 1912.
• 2020: Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden amid the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated economic contraction; the rally round the flag effect that has historically attached to incumbents during a national crisis conspicuously failed to appear.

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The Quasi-Incumbency Problem: 2024

• Joe Biden withdrew from the race on 21 July 2024 after a widely criticised debate performance had crystallised doubts about his age and fitness.
• He endorsed his vice president, Kamala Harris, who inherited the nomination without a contested primary.
• Harris therefore entered the general election as the sitting vice president of an unpopular administration, without having herself been the incumbent president, and without the benefit of a full term in which to build an independent record.
• Her campaign attempted to run simultaneously on continuity, emphasising achievements of the Biden administration, and change, distancing herself from its least popular positions on inflation and immigration, a balancing act that several commentators judged incoherent.
• Harris was in an almost impossible position: voters had shown themselves willing to punish the governing party for perceived poor performance on the cost of living, even though the candidate on the ballot was not the official who had presided over it.

The light of America’s promise will always burn bright, as long as we never give up, and as long as we keep fighting.

Kamala Harris, concession speech, Howard University, 6 November 2024

• Harris lost all seven swing states and the national popular vote.
• She became the third Democratic vice president in a row, after Walter Mondale in 1984 and Al Gore in 2000, to fail in an attempt to succeed a two-term president of their own party.
• The single exception in the modern era is George H. W. Bush’s victory in 1988, still the only time a sitting vice president has been elected directly to succeed the president he served under since Martin Van Buren in 1836.

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Term Limits and the Absence of Incumbency

• The Twenty Second Amendment, ratified in 1951 after Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented four elections, restricts a president to two elected terms.
• Its effect is to guarantee that, roughly every eight years, the presidency is contested as a genuinely open seat with no incumbent on the ballot at all, as occurred in 2000, 2008 and 2016, and, in practical terms, again in 2024 once Biden withdrew.
• Open-seat contests remove the direct incumbency effect but not necessarily its indirect, party-level equivalent, since the sitting party’s nominee is frequently judged by the same retrospective standard as a true incumbent would be, as the 2000, 2016 and 2024 cases illustrate.
• Donald Trump’s own repeated ‘threats’ about a third term, including a mooted plan to run as vice president alongside JD Vance before later becoming president again, has been widely read as recognising, however implausibly given the constitutional bar, the scale of the advantage incumbency is thought to confer.

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Evaluating Its Significance Today

• As an explanatory and predictive factor, incumbency remains central to the leading quantitative forecasting models of American presidential elections, both of which treat it as a foundation variable rather than a marginal adjustment.
• The advantage is neither uniform nor guaranteed. Increased partisan polarisation has shrunk the pool of persuadable swing voters since the 1990s, meaning fewer voters remain available to be moved by retrospective performance judgements regardless of how well or badly an incumbent has governed.
• The six year itch, the historical tendency for a president’s party to suffer heavy congressional losses in the sixth year of a two-term presidency, shows that incumbency at the top of the ticket offers little protection to the president’s own party further down the ballot, as the 2014 and 2018 midterms both demonstrated.
• Shocks beyond a president’s control, such as a pandemic, a recession or a foreign policy crisis, can overwhelm whatever structural advantage incumbency would otherwise supply, as 1932, 1980, 1992 and 2020 each show.
• Quasi-incumbents, vice presidents or same-party successors who inherit the burdens of an administration’s record without ever having exercised its full powers themselves, appear to fare especially poorly, a pattern visible across Nixon in 1960, Humphrey in 1968, Gore in 2000, Clinton in 2016 and Harris in 2024.

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Contemporary Example: The 2028 Cycle

• As of July 2026, the country is in the invisible primary phase of the 2028 cycle.
• Vice President JD Vance is widely regarded as the Republican front runner, occupying a position similar to the status held by Bush in 1988, Gore in 2000 and Harris in 2024, though how that status will translate into votes remains untested.
• Trump himself is constitutionally barred from a third term under the Twenty Second Amendment, despite his own repeated suggestions to the contrary, guaranteeing a genuinely open Republican contest for the presidency itself even as Vance seeks to inherit its incumbency-linked advantages.
• No comparable front runner has emerged on the Democratic side.
• The 2026 midterm elections will offer an early practical test of whether the six year itch pattern reasserts itself against the Republican Party in Congress, even though the presidency will not itself be on the ballot until 2028.

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Conclusion

• Incumbency is among the most consistent single predictors of outcomes in American presidential elections.
• Yet its record is markedly uneven: it has rewarded presidents who preside over peace and prosperity, Reagan, Clinton, Bush in 2004 and Obama among them, while offering little protection against depression, stagflation, recession or pandemic, as Hoover, Ford, Carter, Bush senior and Trump each discovered.
• Its benefits, moreover, transfer poorly to same-party successors who have not themselves held the presidency, a pattern that both the historical record and the unsuccessful vice-presidential candidacies of Nixon, Humphrey, Gore, Clinton and Harris illustrate consistently.
• Incumbency, in short, is a significant but conditional advantage, decisive when conditions favour the sitting administration and largely inert, or even counterproductive, when they do not.

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Constitutional Origins

The electoral college was devised at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 as a compromise between two rejected alternatives: direct popular election, distrusted by many delegates as vulnerable to ‘demagogues’, and selection of the president by Congress, which risked making the executive dependent on the legislature.

Under Article II, each state was given a number of electors equal to its total congressional delegation, a formula that also meant the Three-Fifths Compromise over enslaved populations directly inflated the political weight of slaveholding states in presidential elections, as well as in the House.

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How the Electoral College Works

The mechanics of the system are set out in Article II of the Constitution, as modified by the Twelfth Amendment of 1804, which required separate ballots for president and vice-president after a tied election in 1800, and by the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022:

Feature	How it works
Total electors	538 in total: 435 tied to House seats, 100 to Senate seats, plus 3 for Washington DC.
Votes needed to win	An absolute majority: 270 of the 538 electoral votes.
Allocation to states	Equal to each state’s total congressional delegation, so every state has at least 3 votes regardless of population.
Allocation method	Winner-take-all in 48 states and Washington DC; Maine and Nebraska instead split most of their votes by congressional district.
Choosing electors	State parties nominate slates of electors pledged to their candidate; voters are technically choosing these electors, not the candidate directly.
Casting the vote	Pledged electors meet in their state capitals in December to cast their votes, which are then sent to Congress.
If no majority	The House of Representatives chooses the president from the top 3 candidates, with each state delegation casting a single vote; the Senate chooses the vice president from the top 2.
Certification	Congress formally counts the votes on 6 January. Since the Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022, the vice president’s role in this count is purely ceremonial.
Reapportionment	The 538 votes are reallocated between states after every ten-yearly census. The current allocation, based on the 2020 Census, is fixed for both the 2024 and 2028 elections, so the 2028 map will be identical to 2024’s. It last changed for 2024, when Texas gained 2 votes, Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon gained 1 each, and California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia each lost 1. It will next change for the 2032 election, based on the 2030 Census.

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Rogue and Faithless Electors

Because electors are chosen by party rather than directly elected as free agents, they are expected, and in most states legally required, to vote for the candidate to whom they are pledged.

Electors who break this pledge are known as faithless electors. They are rare and have never changed the outcome of an election, but they do expose a genuine gap between the Constitution’s original design, in which electors were meant to exercise independent judgement, and the party-controlled system that operates today.

• 2016: seven electors broke their pledges when the college met, the most since 1972, two defecting from Donald Trump and five from Hillary Clinton, though the underlying result, Trump 304 to Clinton 227, was unaffected.
• Chiafalo v Washington (2020): the Supreme Court unanimously held that states may legally require, and punish breaches of, elector pledges, closing off any prospect that electors could act as genuinely free agents in the way the Framers originally envisaged.

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Contested and Disputed Elections

Because the college translates state-level results into a single national outcome, close or disputed state counts have twice in recent decades produced serious constitutional and political crises.

• 2000, Bush v Gore: after a 36-day recount battle in Florida, the Supreme Court halted a manual recount, handing George W. Bush the state’s 25 electoral votes by a final margin of just 537 votes out of nearly six million cast, and with it a 271 to 266 electoral college victory, despite Al Gore winning the national popular vote by more than half a million ballots.
• 2020 to 2021, the fake electors scheme: after Trump’s defeat, his campaign organised slates of 84 self-styled “alternate” electors across seven contested states, who signed certificates falsely declaring that Trump had won, in the hope that Vice President Mike Pence would count them instead of the certified results when Congress met to certify the outcome on 6 January 2021. Fake electors and allied organisers in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin were later criminally charged, although a Michigan court subsequently dismissed the case against 15 defendants for insufficient evidence.

“Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.”

Al Gore, concession address, 13 December 2000

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Contemporary Example: 2024

Trump won decisively in 2024, 312 electoral votes to Kamala Harris’s 226, becoming the first Republican candidate in twenty years also to win the national popular vote, with 77.3 million votes, 49.8 per cent, against Harris’s 75.0 million, 48.3 per cent, a margin of 1.5 percentage points.

Maine and Nebraska, which have allocated most of their electoral votes by congressional district since 1972 and 1992 respectively, both split their votes again: Harris won the electoral vote attached to Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district even while losing the state overall, only the third such split since Nebraska adopted the method.

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Evaluating Its Significance Today

Attitudes to the electoral college often track self-interest as much as principle, illustrated neatly by Donald Trump’s own reversal after losing, then winning, under it:

“The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.”

Donald Trump, tweet, 6 November 2012, the day after Barack Obama’s re-election

“The Electoral College is actually genius in that it brings all states, including the smaller ones, into play. Campaigning is much different!”

Donald Trump, tweet, 15 November 2016, after his own election

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Strengths

Strength	Explanation
Reflects the federal nature of the USA	Guarantees every state, however small, a minimum voice (at least 3 electoral votes) in choosing the president, consistent with a constitutional structure built around states as well as citizens, rather than a single undifferentiated national electorate.
Tends to promote a two-horse race	Winner-take-all allocation in 48 states makes it very difficult for a third-party or independent candidate to win any electoral votes at all, which helps sustain the stable two-party competition that has characterised US politics since the mid-19th century, and arguably avoids the fragmented, multi-party coalition-bargaining seen under some proportional systems.
Builds broad geographic coalitions	Candidates must campaign across many different states and regions to assemble an electoral college majority, rather than simply maximising turnout in the largest cities.
Produces decisive, quickly known results	Confines contested counts to a small number of close states rather than triggering a nationwide recount, as a single national popular vote tally conceivably could.
No clearly better alternative has emerged	Reform proposals such as direct national election, or the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, would require a constitutional amendment or a fragile inter-state agreement, and critics argue they carry their own risks, such as nationwide recount disputes; despite decades of criticism, no alternative has attracted the sustained, cross-party consensus needed to replace the current system.

“I venture somewhat further, and hesitate not to affirm, that if the manner of it be not perfect, it is at least excellent.”

Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 68, 1788

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Weaknesses

Weakness	Explanation
Small states are over-represented	A Wyoming voter’s electoral weight is around 3.6 times that of a Californian, since Wyoming’s roughly 194,000 people per elector compares with California’s roughly 700,000, sitting uneasily beside the “one person, one vote” principle applied elsewhere in American electoral law.
Winner-take-all can distort the result	Because all of a state’s electoral votes go to whichever candidate wins its popular vote, narrow national margins can look like landslides: Ronald Reagan won 50.7 per cent of the popular vote in 1980 but 489 of 538 electoral votes, 90.9 per cent. The same mechanism can also work in reverse, handing the presidency to the popular vote loser, as it did in 2000 and 2016.
Unfair to national third parties	A candidate can win a substantial share of the national vote yet no electoral votes at all if that support is spread thinly across states rather than concentrated: independent candidate Ross Perot won 18.9 per cent of the popular vote in 1992, almost 19.7 million votes, but zero electoral votes, having failed to finish first in any single state.
Rogue or faithless electors	Electors are not directly bound by the Constitution to vote for their pledged candidate. Although Chiafalo v Washington (2020) confirmed that states may legally require and enforce pledges, seven electors still broke ranks in 2016 alone, exposing a structural gap between the Framers’ original design and how the system operates in practice.
Risk of a president and vice-president from different parties	Because a contingent election has the House choose the president and the Senate separately choose the vice-president, it remains constitutionally possible for the two chambers, especially if controlled by different parties, to elect a president and vice-president from opposing tickets. This is not merely theoretical: under the pre-1804 system, the Federalist John Adams became president in 1796 while his defeated rival, the Democratic-Republican Thomas Jefferson, became vice-president as runner-up, an arrangement the Twelfth Amendment only partially closed off.
Concentrates campaigning on a shrinking number of swing states	Leaves voters in the large majority of “safe” states, of either party, with limited practical influence on the outcome, a criticism that continues to drive reform proposals such as the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, enacted by 18 states and Washington DC holding 222 electoral votes as of 2026, 48 short of the 270 needed to take effect.

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Possible Reforms

Dissatisfaction with the electoral college has produced several distinct reform proposals, differing sharply in how they would work and in how much constitutional and political difficulty they would face.

Reform proposal	How it would work
National Popular Vote Interstate Compact	Member states legally pledge to award all their electors to whichever candidate wins the most votes nationwide, once enough states have joined to control a 270-vote majority between them. It requires no constitutional amendment, since states retain full authority over how their own electors are chosen, and the existing state-run election machinery, registration, voting and counting, is otherwise left untouched.
Constitutional amendment for direct election	Would abolish the electoral college outright: the candidate with the most votes nationwide wins, with no intervening electors or state-level allocation at all, and no single national body currently exists to administer or recount such a vote. Almost all such proposals specify a simple plurality rather than a guaranteed majority, so a president could in principle be elected with well under half the national vote. It requires approval by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters, 38, of the states, the highest bar of any reform on this list.
Congressional district method nationwide	Extends the system already used in Maine and Nebraska to every state: two electoral votes go to the statewide winner and one to the winner of each congressional district. This is a state-level choice, achievable through ordinary state legislation.
Proportional allocation within states	Each state would divide its electoral votes between candidates in proportion to their share of that state’s popular vote, rather than winner-take-all, again achievable through ordinary state legislation.

• Impact on 2000 and 2016: either direct election or NPVIC would have changed the outcome in 2000, handing the presidency to Al Gore, who led the national popular vote by over half a million ballots, and in 2016, handing it to Hillary Clinton, who led by almost 2.9 million.
• Impact on 2020 and 2024: neither reform would have made any difference, since Joe Biden and Donald Trump respectively won both the popular vote and the electoral college in those years.
• Impact of the congressional district method: this does not reliably track the national popular vote, since its outcome depends on how districts happen to be drawn. Applied nationwide in 2012, Mitt Romney would have won the presidency despite Barack Obama winning the national popular vote by around 5 million ballots, largely because Republican-drawn districts following the 2010 census were skewed in the GOP’s favour. Applied to 2020, Biden would still have won, but by a much narrower margin of around 277 to 261 rather than his actual 306 to 232.
• Impact of proportional allocation: would generally produce results closer to the national popular vote than winner-take-all, but by splitting electoral votes so widely it could, in principle, leave no candidate with the 270 votes needed for a majority even in an otherwise clear-cut election, throwing a contingent election to the House of Representatives far more often than the current system does.
• Public opinion: a Gallup poll from September 2024 found 58 per cent of Americans in favour of amending the Constitution to elect the president by national popular vote, against 38 per cent preferring the current system; a Pew Research survey from the same period put support for change at around 65 per cent. This is a recent shift: a 1968 Gallup poll found 66 per cent in favour with almost no partisan gap, whereas today around 80 per cent of Democrats support change against roughly 46 per cent of Republicans.
• Party behaviour: every state that has joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact backed the Democratic candidate in 2016, and every governor who signed compact legislation has been a Democrat. In 2025, Maine’s Republican-controlled House voted 76 to 71 to withdraw from the compact, only for the Democratic-controlled Senate to block the repeal 18 to 16; Colorado Republicans have separately, and so far unsuccessfully, pushed to repeal that state’s membership.

• Why the parties differ: the current system has delivered the presidency to the Republican candidate twice since 2000, in 2000 and 2016, despite a national popular vote loss both times, giving Republicans a structural reason to defend the status quo and Democrats a matching reason to seek change.
• Likelihood, constitutional amendment: exceptionally unlikely, since the partisan divide makes both the two-thirds congressional supermajority and the 38-state ratification threshold very difficult to reach.
• Likelihood, NPVIC: more attainable in principle, needing no supermajority, but stalled at 18 states and Washington DC holding 222 of the 270 electoral votes required, with growth confined to Democratic-leaning states and the narrowly defeated Maine repeal effort of 2025 showing membership cannot be taken for granted.

• Likelihood, district and proportional methods: achievable through ordinary state legislation alone, but state parties have little incentive to unilaterally give up a system that currently favours them, so comprehensive reform of the electoral college looks unlikely in the near future despite real public support for change.

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Judgement

The electoral college has drifted a long way from Hamilton’s vision of independent, deliberating electors: it now operates as an automatic, state-by-state counting mechanism for pledged slates, with faithless electors an increasingly closed-off possibility since Chiafalo.

Whether it still deserves its place is a live and consequential debate rather than a settled question.

To its defenders, it reflects the federal structure of the union, helps sustain a stable two-party system and has generally produced quickly accepted outcomes, with no clearly better alternative yet commanding broad consensus.

To its critics, it over-represents small states, can distort or reverse the popular verdict, denies representation to national third parties in proportion to their support, and, through the contingent election procedure, still leaves open the theoretical possibility of a president and vice-president from opposing parties, as briefly occurred in 1796.

Reform proposals exist and command real public support, but the partisan self-interest that currently divides opinion on them, visible even in Trump’s own reversal from “disaster” to “genius”, makes near-term change unlikely, and the answer to whether reform should happen at all likely turns as much on how far Americans still value state-level federalism against national democratic equality as it does on the mechanics of counting votes.

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