{"id":314,"date":"2024-11-09T17:59:24","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T17:59:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/09\/the-global-trend-that-pushed-donald-trump-to-victory\/"},"modified":"2024-11-09T17:59:24","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T17:59:24","slug":"the-global-trend-that-pushed-donald-trump-to-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/09\/the-global-trend-that-pushed-donald-trump-to-victory\/","title":{"rendered":"The global trend that pushed Donald Trump to victory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s victory in the 2024 election was powered by a remarkably consistent nationwide trend<\/a> of voters turning against the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Joe Biden did in 2020 nearly everywhere: in big cities and rural areas, in blue states and red ones.<\/p>\n

Most of the conventional explanations for why a campaign fails \u2014 things like messaging choices, or whether candidates campaigned enough in the right places \u2014 cannot account for such a sweeping shift<\/a>. Such factors matter on the margins and among specific demographic groups, but Harris received a decisive, across-the-board rebuke. <\/p>\n

To explain what truly 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 worldwide wave of anti-incumbent sentiment.<\/p>\n

2024 was the largest year of elections in global history; more people voted this year than ever before. And across the world, voters told the party in power \u2014 regardless of their ideology or history \u2014 that it was time for a change.<\/p>\n

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We saw this anti-incumbent wave in elections in the United Kingdom<\/a> and Botswana<\/a>; in India<\/a> and North Macedonia<\/a>; and in South Korea<\/a> and South Africa<\/a>. It continued a global trend begun in the previous year, when voters in Poland<\/a> and Argentina<\/a> opted to move on from current leadership. The handful of 2024 exceptions to this general rule look like true outliers: The incumbent party\u2019s victory in Mexico, for example, came after 20 straight defeats for incumbents across Latin America<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Given Trump\u2019s victory, we can confidently say the United States is not exceptional. Three different exit polls<\/a> found that at least 70 percent<\/a> of Americans were dissatisfied<\/a> with the country\u2019s current direction, and they took it out on the current ruling party. (While exit polls are based on preliminary, rather than comprehensive, data<\/a> sets, it is notable that so many polls appear to be picking up on the same trend.) Trump registered as the change candidate despite being a former president himself, and the voters rewarded him accordingly.<\/p>\n

Once we start thinking about the US election result as part of a global trend, rather than an isolated event, we can start to make a little more sense of what just happened here.<\/p>\n

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Why you can\u2019t understand Trump\u2019s victory without the global trend<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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Reading the American press today, you see a lot of focus on granular campaign choices. Did Harris lose because she picked the wrong vice president<\/a>? Emphasized the wrong issues<\/a>? Targeted the wrong kinds of voters<\/a>? Appeared on the wrong kind of media<\/a>?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Perhaps one of these theories will prove to have merit. We don\u2019t have enough data yet to be sure. But if the story were fundamentally about messaging or targeting, you\u2019d expect her to improve on Biden\u2019s total in some places and do worse in others. The problem is that none of them on their own can explain a truly uniform shift across the country. <\/p>\n

You can\u2019t explain Harris\u2019s defeat in terms of losses with the white working class when she also seems to have done worse than Biden with nonwhite workers and college graduates based on early data<\/a>. You can\u2019t focus primarily on her stance on Gaza alienating Arab and Muslim voters when her margin of defeat was far larger than the defections in that group. Ditto with Latinos, and every other subgroup that postmortems are beginning to focus on.<\/p>\n

Uniform swings call for uniform explanations. And the most plausible one, given global context, is anti-incumbency.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe central plot lines of the [2024 election] are already clear, and not that dissimilar from four years ago,\u201d the political scientist John Sides writes at Good Authority<\/a>. \u201cIn 2020, an unpopular incumbent lost reelection. In 2024, an unpopular incumbent\u2019s party lost reelection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such an explanation makes more sense than a pure focus on ideology. In fact, the global context suggests that a Republican president likely would have also performed poorly if they were in office. While some right-wing insurgents have performed well in the past two years, most notably Javier Milei in Argentina, right-wing incumbents have often underperformed \u2014 with ruling conservative parties in Britain, India, and Poland all suffering notable setbacks. <\/p>\n

If we are indeed seeing America fall in line with the global pattern, it clarifies some of what just happened. But it also raises a new, difficult question: Why are people so dissatisfied with their governments at this particular point in time?<\/p>\n

One credible answer is inflation. Countries around the world experienced rising prices after the Covid-19 pandemic and attendant global supply chain disruptions, and voters hate inflation<\/a>. Even though the inflation rate has gone down in quite a few places, including the United States, prices remain much higher than they were prior to the pandemic. People remember the low prices they\u2019ve lost, and they are hurting \u2014 hurting enough that they see an otherwise-booming economy as a failure<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As much sense as the inflation story makes, it remains an unproven one. We\u2019ll need a lot more evidence, including detailed data on the US election that isn\u2019t available yet, to be sure whether it\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

But we can be fairly confident, given reams of polling data showing Americans were dissatisfied with the country\u2019s direction, that a desire for a change in leadership played at least some role in Trump\u2019s return to power \u2014 part of a global trend away from stability and toward upheaval, however chaotic or even dangerous it will prove to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s victory in the 2024 election was powered by a remarkably consistent nationwide trend of voters turning against the Democratic ticket. Vice President Kamala Harris performed worse than President Joe Biden did in 2020 nearly everywhere: in big cities and rural areas, in blue states and red ones. Most of the conventional explanations<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":315,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/semicollar.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}