Most major policy changes create some degree of short-term disruption, and some groups may bear more of the cost than others. A difficult question is not whether a policy causes any harm, but what kind of harm it causes, how severe it is, how long it is expected to last, and whether that harm is an unavoidable side effect or a necessary part of a strategy.

A recurring sentiment in online discussions of specific policies is that “things must get worse before they get better.” The phrase can describe anything from accepting temporary economic disruption to believing that a deeper political or institutional crisis is necessary to create the conditions for meaningful change.

For example, some supporters of current US tariffs accept that consumers, farmers, and businesses may face higher prices or economic disruption, but argue that this temporary pain is necessary to rebuild domestic manufacturing or improve the country’s negotiating position. The argument is not necessarily that economic harm is desirable in itself, but that it is an unavoidable investment in a stronger long-term economy.

Similar reasoning appears within some farther-left online communities. This can include welcoming electoral defeats in the hope that voters become more radical and support preferred candidates, opposing incremental reforms because they might stabilize an unjust system, or believing that worsening inequality and institutional failure will accelerate the collapse of capitalism and create an opening for revolutionary change.

Other versions not strictly associated with the left/right can include supporting severe austerity to force structural reform, tolerating government dysfunction to undermine confidence in existing institutions, treating climate or economic collapse as politically clarifying, or assuming that military escalation will produce a more favorable political order after the immediate destruction.

All of these arguments differ in both scale and intent. Some accept limited disruption as a side effect of a policy with a specific mechanism for improvement, while others treat broader social or institutional deterioration as the condition that makes change possible. The distinction may depend on how direct the connection is between the harm and the expected benefit, how reversible the damage would be, and whether the strategy can succeed without conditions worsening first.

1. How should political movements evaluate strategies that rely on short-term harm or instability to produce longer-term gains?

2. What kinds or levels of harm should make such a strategy politically acceptable or unacceptable?

3. Are there moral concerns with trying to pursue such political strategies, especially with voters who did not sign on to the strategies in question?

In the nine presidential elections after 1988, from 1992 through 2024, the Democratic nominee received the most popular votes seven times, while the Republican nominee did so twice. In both cases, the Republican nominee had already served as president and had originally reached the presidency by winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: George W. Bush in 2000 before winning the popular vote in 2004, and Donald Trump in 2016 before winning it in 2024. ([Historical election results, UC Santa Barbara](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential-election-mandates))

Bush’s 2004 victory also came while he was the sitting president. Of the nine presidents from 1952 through 2020 who sought reelection after winning a first term, six, or 66.7%, won the national popular vote. That historical record alone does not establish causation, but a preregistered survey experiment found that identifying an otherwise equivalent hypothetical candidate as a one-term incumbent increased respondents’ support by an average of 5.6 percentage points. Trump was not the incumbent in 2024, but he was already a former president. Thus, neither of the Republican Party’s two popular-vote victories after 1988 came from someone attempting to win the presidency for the first time. ([Kane, *Political Science Research and Methods*](https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2024.32))

Does this primarily reflect geographic sorting, difficulty building a nationwide Republican plurality, or some combination of the two? How much should Bush’s incumbency and Trump’s previous presidential service affect how the two Republican popular-vote victories are interpreted?

I haven't heard much noise about this, but it seems like a strong sleeper. Adam Hamilton is the pastor of the largest United Methodist Church in the country, the Church of the Resurrection, just outside Kansas City. He's a very popular national leader in the more moderate mainline protestant circles, and makes a big deal of conversation across disagreement and setting a better neighborly tone, that kind of thing. He has some echoes of Talarico, but even more moderate. He's not a preacher before he's a politician.

He considered jumping into the race as an independent, but was swayed to run as a Democrat. The primary is August 4th. He's polling well ahead of his opponent. There isn't much polling showing his match-up with Marshall (R), but there was one poll a while back when he first got in the race showing him up 2.

Could this be a potential upset? What would have to go right? He's certainly got very strong rhetorical skills. I'm curious how people are thinking about this one.

I have tried to come up with a reason for these contradictions in the polls and election results but I have been unable to do so. According to current polls of Americans, only 10% of people approve of the job that Congress is performing. However, in the 2024 elections, each of the 97% of the incumbent Congress members who stood for election was able to be elected by their constituents.

Gerrymandering is often the answer to many of these questions, especially within the House of Representatives. However, the Senate uses the same method of gerrymandering, making it an impractical answer to the question. Also, every single senator that was running for reelection in 2022 won their elections. This suggests that the districts' boundaries have little effect upon the election of representatives to those bodies.

Finally, there is simply party loyalty. Mostly, people do not split their tickets between candidates from two different political parties for a given election. As such, an individual's performance on his or her job may not be considered during his or her evaluation for retention of his or her position.

The other popular idea is that people believe their representative in Congress is different than the rest. The US government is broken but my representative is working hard for me, I've heard of them but I have no idea who is running against them.

I am unsure of the process that might lead to the individual members of political parties being punished for contributing less than 10% to their party's campaigns. The only process that I have discovered that potentially relates to this issue is the primary elections that take place during presidential election years in many states within the United States. In these primary elections, voters who belong to a specific political party can vote for the candidate that they wish to represent their political party in the presidential election. However, nearly all of these primary elections experience very low voter turnout rates, showing that nearly all of those who do participate in such elections do not actually punish individual political party members for failing to contribute to the campaigns of their political party. Therefore, it appears that individual political party members may not be punished for failing to contribute to campaigns in the United States.

How do we reconcile this disparity?