President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election was driven by a remarkably consistent nationwide trend of voters turning against the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Joe Biden in 2020 almost everywhere: in big cities and rural areas, in blue states and in red states.
Most common explanations for why campaigns fail — messaging choices or whether candidates campaigned enough in the right places — As such a sweeping cannot account for change. Such factors are important among marginalized and certain demographic groups, but Harris received a decisive, across-the-board rebuke.
To explain what really happened, we need to look at global trends as a point of comparison. And when we do, a clear picture emerges: What happened on Tuesday is part of a global anti-authoritarian sentiment.
2024 was the biggest election year in world history; More people voted this year than ever before. And around the world, voters told parties in power — regardless of their ideology or history — that it was time for a change.
We saw this anti-incumbency wave in the UK election and Botswana; and in India North Macedonia; and between South Korea and South Africa. This continues a global trend that began the previous year, when voters Poland And Argentina decided to step down from the current leadership. A handful of 2024 exceptions to this general rule look like true outliers: the current team’s victory in Mexico, for example, came later. 20 consecutive defeats for incumbents across Latin America.
In the wake of Trump’s victory, we can confidently say that the United States is no exception. Three are different exit poll At least that was found 70 percent Americans had unhappy With the current direction of the country, and they took it on the current ruling party. Trump registered as a change candidate despite being a former president himself, and voters rewarded him accordingly.
Once we start thinking about the US election results, as part of a global trend rather than an isolated event, we can begin to make a little more sense of what happened here.
Why you can’t understand Trump’s victory without world trends
Reading the American press today, you see a lot of focus on granular campaign choices. Did Harris lose because he Picking the wrong vice president? Emphasizing the wrong thing? Targeted Wrong kind of voter? appeared on The wrong kind of media?
Perhaps one of these theories will prove meritorious. We don’t have enough data yet to be sure. But if the story was fundamentally about messaging or targeting, you’d expect him to grossly improve on Biden in some areas and worse in others. The problem is that none of them can explain truly uniform changes across countries.
You can’t explain Harris’ defeat with the white working class when he too Biden did worse with non-white workers and college graduates. You can’t primarily focus on his position on alienating Gaza Arab and Muslim voters when his margin of defeat was far greater than that group’s defections. Likewise with Latinos, and every other subgroup that postmortems have begun to focus on.
Uniform swings call for uniform interpretation. And one of the most laudable in the global context is anti-incumbency.
“Its central plot line [2024 election] Already evident, and not so different from four years ago,” political scientist John Sides writes on good authority. “In 2020, an unpopular incumbent loses re-election. In 2024, an unpopular incumbent’s party loses re-election.”
Such an interpretation makes more sense than a pure focus on ideals. In fact, the global context suggests that a Republican president would likely perform worse if he were in office. While some right-wing rebels have performed well over the past two years, notably Javier Millei in Argentina, right-wing incumbents have often underperformed — with significant setbacks to ruling conservative parties in Britain, India and Poland.
If we really see America conforming to the global pattern, that clarifies something of what just happened. But it also raises a new, difficult question: Why are people the way they are? Dissatisfied with their government at this particular time?
A plausible answer is inflation. Following the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant global supply chain disruptions, countries around the world are facing rising prices and Voters hate inflation. Although inflation has eased in several places, including the United States, prices remain much higher than before the pandemic. People remember the low prices they lost and they’re hurting – they’re hurting enough to see An otherwise-booming economy as a failure.
As much as the story of inflation is understood, it remains an unproven one. We would need a lot more evidence, including details of US elections that are not yet available, to be sure if this is correct.
But we can be fairly confident, given the polling data that Americans are dissatisfied with the direction of the country, that the desire for a change in leadership played at least some role in Trump’s return to power – away from stability and part of a global trend. The coup, however chaotic or even dangerous it would prove to be.
