Why ‘late Regime’ Presidencies Fail

Presidents whom most voters view as failures, justifiably or not, have frequently shaped American politics long after they leave office—notably, by paving the way for presidencies considered much more successful and consequential. As President Joe Biden nears his final days in office, his uneasy term presents Democrats with some uncomfortable parallels to their experience with Jimmy Carter, whose state funeral takes place this week in Washington, D.C.

The former Georgia governor’s victory in 1976 initially offered the promise of revitalizing the formidable electoral coalition that had delivered the White House to Democrats in seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 (won by Franklin D. Roosevelt) to 1964 (won by Lyndon B. Johnson), and had enabled the party to enact progressive social policies for two generations. But the collapse of his support over his four years in office, culminating in his landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, showed that Carter’s electoral victory was instead that coalition’s dying breath. Carter’s troubled term in the White House proved the indispensable precondition to Reagan’s landmark presidency, which reshaped the competition between the two major parties and enabled the epoch-defining ascendancy of the new right.

The specter of such a turnabout now haunts Biden and his legacy. Despite his many accomplishments in the White House, the November election’s outcome demonstrated that his failures—particularly on the public priorities of inflation and the border—eclipsed his successes for most voters. As post-election surveys made clear, disapproval of the Biden administration’s record was a liability that Vice President Kamala Harris could not escape.

Biden’s unpopularity helped Donald Trump make major inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs, just as the widespread discontent over Carter’s performance helped Reagan peel away millions of formerly Democratic voters in 1980. If Trump can cement in office the gains he made on Election Day—particularly among Latino, Asian American, and Black voters—historians may come to view Biden as the Carter to Trump’s Reagan.

In his landmark 1993 book, The Politics Presidents Make, the Yale political scientist Stephen Skowronek persuasively argued that presidents succeed or fail according to not only their innate talents but also the timing of their election in the long-term cycle of political competition and electoral realignment between the major parties.

Most of the presidents who are remembered as the most successful and influential, Skowronek showed, came into office after decisive elections in which voters sweepingly rejected the party that had governed the country for years. The leaders Skowronek places in this category include Thomas Jefferson after his election in 1800, Andrew Jackson in 1828, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Roosevelt in 1932, and Reagan in 1980.

These dominating figures, whom Skowronek identifies as men who “stood apart from the previously established parties,” typically rose to prominence with a promise “to retrieve from a far distant, even mythic, past fundamental values that they claimed had been lost.” Trump fits this template with his promises to “make America great again,” and he also displays the twin traits that Skowronek describes as characteristic of these predecessors that Trump hopes to emulate: repudiating the existing terms of political competition and becoming a reconstructive leader of a new coalition.

The great repudiators, in Skowronek’s telling, were all preceded by ill-fated leaders who’d gained the presidency representing a once-dominant coalition that was palpably diminished by the time of their election. Skowronek placed in this club John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and Carter. Each of their presidencies represented a last gasp for the party that had won most of the general elections in the years prior. None of these “late regime” presidents, as Skowronek called them, could generate enough success in office to reverse their party’s declining support; instead, they accelerated it.

The most recent such late-regime president, Carter, was elected in 1976 after Richard Nixon’s victories in 1968 and 1972 had already exposed cracks in the Democrats’ New Deal coalition of southerners, Black voters, and the white working class. Like many of his predecessors in the dubious fraternity of late-regime presidents, Carter recognized that his party needed to recalibrate its message and agenda to repair its eroding support. But the attempt to set a new, generally more centrist direction for the party foundered.

Thanks to rampant inflation, energy shortages, and the Iranian hostage crisis, Carter was whipsawed between a rebellion from the left (culminating in Senator Edward Kennedy’s primary challenge) and an uprising on the right led by Reagan. As Carter limped through his 1980 reelection campaign, Skowronek wrote, he had become “a caricature of the old regime’s political bankruptcy, the perfect foil for a repudiation of liberalism itself as the true source of all the nation’s problems.”

Carter’s failures enabled Reagan to entrench the electoral realignment that Nixon had started. In Reagan’s emphatic 1980 win, millions of southern white conservatives, including many evangelical Christians, as well as northern working-class white voters renounced the Democratic affiliation of their parents and flocked to Reagan’s Republican Party. Most of those voters never looked back.

The issue now is whether Biden will one day be seen as another late-regime president whose perceived failures hastened his party’s eclipse among key voting blocs. Pointing to his record of accomplishments, Biden advocates would consider the question absurd: Look, they say, at the big legislative wins, enormous job growth, soaring stock market, historic steps to combat climate change, skilled diplomacy that united allies against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and boom in manufacturing investment, particularly in clean-energy technologies.

In electoral terms, however, Biden’s legacy is more clouded. His 2020 victory appeared to revive the coalition of college-educated whites, growing minority populations, young people, and just enough working-class white voters that had allowed Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to win the White House in four of the six elections from 1992 through 2012. (In a fifth race over that span, Al Gore won the popular vote even though he lost the Electoral College.) But the public discontent with Biden frayed almost every strand of that coalition.

Biden made rebuilding his party’s support among working-class voters a priority and, in fact, delivered huge gains in manufacturing and construction jobs that were tied to the big three bills he passed (on clean energy, infrastructure, and semiconductors). But public anger at the rising cost of living contributed to Biden’s job-approval rating falling below 50 percent in the late summer of 2021 (around the time of the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal), and it never climbed back to that crucial threshold. On Election Day, public disappointment with Biden’s overall record helped Trump maintain a crushing lead over Harris among white voters without a college degree, as well as make unprecedented inroads among nonwhite voters without a college degree, especially Latinos.

The defecting Democratic voters of 2024 mean that as Biden leaves office, Gallup recently reported, Republicans are enjoying their biggest party-identification advantage in the past three decades. All of the intertwined and compounding electoral challenges Democrats now face ominously resemble the difficulties that Skowronek’s other late-regime presidents left behind for their parties.

Although Carter identified as an outsider and Biden was the consummate insider, each sought to demonstrate to skeptical voters that he could make the government work better to address their most pressing problems: Carter called upon his engineer’s efficiency; Biden used his long experience to negotiate effectively with both Congress and foreign nations. In the face of a rising challenge from the right, each hoped to revive public confidence that Democrats could produce better results.

Yet by the end of their term, voters—fairly or not—had concluded the opposite. As Skowronek observed, that kind of failure is common to late-regime presidents. By losing the country’s confidence, these leaders all cleared the way for the repudiating presidents from the other party who succeeded them. “Through their hapless struggles for credibility,” Skowronek wrote, “they become the foils for reconstructive leadership, the indispensable premise upon which traditional regime opponents generate the authority to repudiate the establishment wholesale.”

In an email last week, Skowronek told me he agreed that the public rejection of Biden had provided Trump with an opening for a repudiating leadership very similar to the one Carter had unwittingly bequeathed Reagan.

“Characteristically, reconstructive leaders do three things,” Skowronek wrote to me. “They turn their immediate predecessor into a foil for a wholesale repudiation of ‘the establishment’ (check). They build new parties (check). They dismantle the residual institutional infrastructure supporting the politics of the past (check; see Project 2025). Everything seems to be in place for one of these pivotal presidencies.”

“Biden,” Skowronek added, “set up his administration as a demonstration of the system’s vitality. He tried to prove that (what Trump called) the ‘deep state’ could work and to vindicate it.” The public’s disenchantment with Biden’s record could now have precisely the opposite effect, Skowronek believes, by undermining people’s already fragile faith in government. That could strengthen Trump’s hand to pursue “a substantial dismantling and redirection” of existing government institutions.

Carter and Biden each paved the way for his successor’s agenda by conceding ground on crucial fronts. “In Carter’s case, that included deregulation, the defense build-up, and prioritizing the fight against inflation,” Skowronek wrote. “In Biden’s case, that ultimately included tariffs, immigration restrictions, and an ‘America first’ industrial policy. Just as one could discern in Carter some consensual ground for a new ordering under Reagan, one can discern in Biden’s innovations some consensual ground for a new ordering under Trump.”

Although Biden may look like a classic late-regime president, Skowronek doubts whether Trump can grow into the kind of transformative leader who has typically followed such beleaguered figures—not least because Trump seems quite likely to exceed his mandate and overreach in a way that provokes a voter backlash in 2026. Much in Trump’s record does indeed suggest that his agenda and style will be too polarizing, his commitment to the rule of law too tenuous, for him to build a coalition as durable or expansive as that assembled by any of the mighty repudiators of the past.

For Democrats, however, the sobering precedent of the Carter era is a public loss of faith that set up 12 years of Republican control of the White House. They can only hope that the late-regime rejection of Biden doesn’t trigger another period of consolidated GOP dominance.