With two assassination attempts and a debate that ended a candidacy, the 2024 presidential election was definitely a wild year in U.S. politics. It ended with a historic comeback to the White House by Donald Trump.

 

Across the country there were however also thousands of local races being run for positions ranging from school board, mayor, and city council, to governor, to congressional seats. Yet, despite this abundance of democracy in action, incumbents — statistically — were set to win hand-over-fist as they almost always do.

 

In search of information to help me make sense of what happened, I unearthed a book by political strategist, Louis Perron, Beat the Incumbent: Proven Strategies and Tactics to Win Elections, published this past January, which focuses specifically on helping challengers win elections.

 

For candidates, the book offers tactics they can utilize in their campaigns; for voters, it offers new understanding about the ways that candidates choose to engage with the public.

 

Beat the Incumbent is unique because it doesn’t rely on the same general narrative as most political books. It’s not solely about U.S. races and cases, leading figures, or historical trends, rather, it feels fresh because it does two things incredibly well: First, it draws on global examples which greatly expand the scope of what American voters would consider normal or even possible during an election cycle, and second, it offers readers a clear start-to-finish blueprint to get off the bench and start affecting their own campaign.

 

Born and raised in Switzerland, Perron grew up fascinated by politics, and was long determined to himself become a candidate one day. The issue that he eventually had to confront, however, was that Swiss politics, stable as they may be, are incredibly sterile.

 

Since finishing his political studies in Washington D.C. over 20 years ago, Perron has been an election specialist working with candidates across the globe to win elections, and specifically, helping challengers to beat incumbents.

 

Having advised on dozens of campaigns for presidential, senatorial, congressional, gubernatorial, and mayoral races, Perron has developed unique insight that allows anyone and everyone to build a campaign with genuine potential to win elections.

 

The book begins with how to approach the basic questions that many candidates never take the time to ask themselves: Why do you want to run? Who is it that you’re really running against? How do you stack up as a challenger? Is a position in the public spotlight something that you actually want in your life? Can your friends, spouse and children handle it all the same?

 

As the book builds, Perron offers the reader everything a candidate needs to be successful: how to organize a campaign timeline, understand polling surveys, create winning messages, avoid common hazards, improve charisma, fundraise effectively, use outsider status to an advantage, and much, much more.

 

While the book is largely targeted at readers who are or want to get involved in politics, be it on the local, national, or international level, it’s not just a book for politicians, political operatives and candidates. Readers who are simply interested in the political process will find it equally worthwhile.

                  

It’s a captivating dive into the tactics that have worked for politicians for decades, and includes in-depth case studies ranging from Vladimir Zelenskyy’s rise from comedian to president of Ukraine, to how Tony Blair finally brought the U.K. Labour party back into power after the Thatcher reign began 20 years earlier, along with many others.

 

Yes, the world has changed in countless ways over the last decades, as have elections with evolving laws, the introduction of social media, and a global trend that seems to prioritize bluster over substance, but at the end of the day, politics boils down to one single thing: an individual’s ability to engage with their target audience. Perron takes the reader on a walk through history, explaining in clear terms how each one of these figures was able to buck the status quo and usher change into their sphere of influence, but in a way that provides a “finger on the pulse” level of insight that I haven’t seen packaged so neatly anywhere else.

 

If there’s one thing that the book could be critiqued on, it would be that when viewed with a siloed perspective, some of the case examples he highlights can seem overly-dated, but when digested as a systematic whole, the examples weave a compelling case for how to do things now.

 

For readers who are considering their own political future, or want to bolster the campaign that they’re already running, Beat the Incumbent really does read like a cheat-sheet. You can feel its theoretical roots as you read, but it’s not about Band-aid solutions, patterns, or heady concepts. Page after page, Perron’s expertise as a practitioner shines through as he lays out the fundamentals for a successful campaign. It’s not hyperbole to say that anyone with ambition can sit down with the book and go from aspirational thinker to having the mindset of a well-prepared candidate in a matter of hours.

 

Beat the Incumbent isn’t a Rosetta Stone for the times, and it doesn’t try to be. What it is, is a map to help us all understand the world of politics a bit better, and most importantly, to help the next generation of leaders get their place at the table.