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While the sudden and dramatic departure of President Joe Biden from the 2024 campaign last month has reset the race for the White House, it doesn't change the fact that as of mid-July voters appeared poised to depose two consecutive incumbent, elected presidents for the first time since 1892-1896. Overall, the public's mood, according to benchmark public opinion instruments, has been sour for about 20 years. What is going on out there?
One way of measuring the public's mood is Gallup's longstanding question about whether the country is "on the right track or the wrong track?" It's a simple binary that does not accommodate a lot of nuance, but the verdict is clear: the last time a majority of the American public thought things were heading in the right direction was in January of 2004. The closest we've been to a "right track" majority since then was in February of 2020, when 45 percent of respondents thought the United States was headed in the right direction. The last time Congress had more than 50 percent approval was in April of 2003.
It's not just data, but election outcomes. The House has changed hands four times since our Century of Discontent kicked in sometime during the Bush II Administration, in 2006, 2010, 2018 and 2022, the most changes in party control of the chamber in a 20-year period since the House flipped five times between 1880 and 1898. Party control of the White House has toggled back and forth between Democrats and Republicans four times since the turn of the century, making 2000 to 2020 the most unstable 20-year period since the presidency flipped in four straight elections from 1884 to 1896.
In 2017, political scientist Morris Fiorina described this situation as one of "unstable majorities," in which partisans overreach in office, turning away independents and leading to a shift in party control of national institutions. In a New York Times essay this past April seeking to explain this grim public opinion data, Damon Linker identified "an awful lot of failure over the past 20-odd years" in terms of policy disasters from the Iraq War to the Great Recession as well as a decrease in life expectancy that is unique in OECD countries, driven by exploding rates of drug overdoses and a rise in per capita suicides.
Fiorina and Linker both get at important elements of the story, but I think they are missing part of the throughline. Frustration with American politics and institutions is also driven by a failure that stretches back to the beginning of the century to address the issues that Americans say they care the most about.
Since 2000, health care costs have consistently risen at a rate higher than general inflation, and Americans who have the misfortune of having to use their health insurance regularly are quickly plunged into an opaque billing odyssey for a system in which prices seem to be made up on the spot. Ditto for the cost of higher education. And whatever you think of the two parties' proposed solutions, the U.S. immigration system has been broken for a generation. Despite a modest decline since 2021, the Gini Index—which measures income inequality—is substantially higher than it was in 2000, and the share of wealth held by the richest 1 percent of Americans has increased from under 25 percent in 2003 to more than 30 percent in 2024. Baby Boomers have held more than 50 percent of the country's total wealth non-stop since 2007.
This is a remarkable story of policy failure that transcends any single event and tells us, instead, a story of elite inability to consistently improve the lives of ordinary citizens. Progress on the margins, like the Affordable Care Act, is not necessarily experienced as such because reforms left so much of a broken system intact. One small example—my two children had ear tube surgery in January of 2024, and I have subsequently received five different bills from three different entities over the course of eight months for a total out of pocket cost of more than $5,000 for a 10-minute surgery. If Gallup called me right now, you could guess what I would tell them.
The health insurance system, like many other things Americans encounter daily, feels like a scam. We encounter junk fees in doctor's offices and hospitals, when booking air travel, trying to manage our bank accounts, buying a car, initiating cable or internet service, buying tickets to a concert, and on and on and on. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have consolidated entire industries like music, car-hires and food delivery under the control of apps that harm the individuals who actually produce the value and funnel wealth to a tiny elite. These little cuts suck billions of dollars out of the hands of working people every year while others enrich themselves. Our phones ring multiple times a day with confidence games and extortion plots on the other end. It is harder than ever for individuals to move up the income ladder.
This all creates systemic precarity for all but the upper-middle class and above. Most people, even those with good-paying jobs and the material trappings of success, are only one adverse life event—a cancer diagnosis or a failed business venture—away from total ruin. That's no way to live in one of the richest countries in the history of the world.
None of these problems has an easy solution, and it's not like no one has tried. But America's antiquated governing institutions—from the Senate's filibuster rule to frequent periods of divided government—have made it extraordinarily difficult for either Democrats or Republicans to put a policy agenda in place. The party that can figure out how to govern effectively and swiftly show progress on the core drivers of American precarity, will be the one to break this 21st century pattern of political instability.
David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
