2 weeks Ago
If you spent the past week looking for signs Vice President Kamala Harris might lose the presidential race to former President Donald Trump , your best bet was maybe not to look at Madison Square Garden, where Trump held a rally widely condemned for its racism and misogyny. It wasn’t necessarily to look at Harris’ rally in Washington, D.C.
, or in the swing states, which largely went off without a hitch. It wasn’t to stare at spreadsheets full of early voting or polling data or to look at contested White House transcripts. Your best bet might have been to look 9,000 miles southeast across the Atlantic to landlocked Botswana in Southern Africa.
There, the Botswana Democratic Party lost its parliamentary majorities for the first time in the country’s 58-year history. Just a few days earlier, the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, long the dominant party there, had turned in its second-worst electoral performance in history. While there are unique reasons for these electoral flops — a corruption scandal in Japan; a drop in prices in Botswana for diamonds, one of the nation’s largest industries — they also fit into a new yearslong trend of electorates punishing incumbent parties around the world, as a seeming hangover from the COVID years and subsequent global inflation batters politicians’ approval ratings.
The global trend casts Harris’ toss-up battle against Trump in a different light, one where her tactical decisions and the ideological positioning of the Democratic Party could matter less than the simple fact inflation hit 9.1% in July 2022, and one where a win against a candidate as evidently flawed as Trump is far from preordained. But there are also reasons Harris may be better positioned to ride out an anti-incumbent wave.
“There is a lot of unhappiness with the way democracy is functioning in many countries,” said Richard Wike, the director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center. “There’s just a lot of discontent with political leaders,” he added. “Huge majorities in just about every country we survey say elected officials don’t care what people like me think.
” This year, Pew surveyed citizens of 31 different countries. Across them, 54% said they weren’t satisfied with how democracy was working , while just 45% were. It’s reasonable to expect voters to take their anger out on incumbents, whether in the United States or elsewhere.
The ideology of these parties does not seem to matter. The Liberal Democratic Party in Japan is a center-right party, roughly equivalent to the pre-Trump GOP in the United States. The Conservative Party in Great Britain, which suffered a drubbing this summer, occupy a similar space on the left-to-right political spectrum.
South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, which has held power since the end of apartheid, suffered huge losses and lost its majority, only remaining in power through a coalition agreement. Center-left leaders in Canada and Germany have also seen their popularity plummet. Even the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by popular right-wing populist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, suffered major losses in elections earlier this year and was forced to team up with allies to control parliament.
The one exception to the rule seems to be Mexico, where voters elected Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as his successor. Both belong to Morena, a left-wing populist party. Polling data from Gallup indicates the malaise clearly extends to the United States.
Just 26% of the country says the United States is on the right track. A plurality of the country, 46%, describes the economy as “poor,” and 62% says the economy is actively getting worse. While these impressions are not exactly backed up by macroeconomic data — which shows low unemployment, whipped inflation and solid wage growth — they do represent an ongoing bitterness about the post-COVID economy.
Adding to Harris’ problems is the unpopularity of her boss, President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race with just over 100 days to go before the election. While Biden’s approval rating briefly ticked up following the decision , it once again stands at a net of -18 in the FiveThirtyEight average . Trump’s campaign and allied super PACs have hammered Harris for failing to decisively break with Biden in some interviews.
“Harris backed Biden on everything,” a narrator says ominously at the start of an ad the Trump campaign released earlier this week. And there are other headwinds, some of which Harris has only minimal control over: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has created clear but surmountable cracks in the Democratic coalition, and the Biden administration’s turn toward border security, which came years too late in the eyes of most Democratic strategists. Additionally, there are questions that may only be able to be answered in hindsight.
Why are Democrats potentially losing ground with union voters, even though the Biden administration was incredibly pro-union? Why didn’t full employment and wage growth lead to broader popularity? The answers to all of these questions have at least something to do with inflation, a global problem perhaps exacerbated by legislation supported by all but one congressional Democrat. It’s difficult to place blame for the inflation spike on any one part of the party’s coalition. But with both progressives and moderates within the Democratic coalition jockeying for influence in a Harris administration or to craft the narrative of why she lost, these collective headwinds make it difficult to evaluate Harris’ — and to a certain extent, Biden’s — political strategy and positioning.
In an interview with HuffPost in October, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) blew past an aide’s attempt to end the conversation when asked about attempts by the party’s moderate wing to pin Biden’s poor approval ratings on the economy on progressive influence.
She noted the United States spent more to prop up its post-COVID economy than other advanced economies and subsequently had gross domestic product growth, small-business formation numbers, and the lowest unemployment and inflation rate. “There’s no counterargument here to push on Democratic leadership to say that somehow we need to follow a less progressive path and it will lead to a stronger economy,” she said. “All of the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction.
” If there is one global trend that could help Harris, it could be the simple fact she literally does not look like the 46 presidents she may end up succeeding. Voters around the world have expressed interest in electing more representative politicians, Wike said. For Harris, who would be the first woman, second Black person and first Asian American elected to the presidency, it could be a boost — although Harris has often downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy.
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Whether you give just one more time or sign up again to contribute regularly, we appreciate you playing a part in keeping our journalism free for all. Already contributed? Log in to hide these messages. “There’s a lot of interest in having, for instance, more women elected to public office, more young people, more people from poor backgrounds,” Wike said.
“So there’s this overall kind of sense that, OK, we’re frustrated. People around the world are frustrated with political elites, and they want to see some changes in terms of what those political elites look like.” There’s also the simple fact Harris has tried to seize on a “change” mantle even as a pseudo-incumbent, boasting in her closing television ad: “As president, I will bring a new generation of leadership.
” The sell is at least sort of working. Trump, even out of office, has been the defining figure of American politics for nearly a decade. An NBC News poll released Sunday found voters were equally concerned about Trump not being “the change we need as he will continue the same approach as his first term” as they were about Harris not being “the change we need as she will continue the same approach as Joe Biden .
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