After making this point in my previous post, I came across this via the Financial Times, Democrats join 2024’s graveyard of incumbents.
From America’s Democrats to Britain’s Tories, Emmanuel’s Macron’s Ensemble coalition to Japan’s Liberal Democrats, even to Narendra Modi’s erstwhile dominant BJP, governing parties and leaders have undergone an unprecedented series of reversals this year. The incumbents in every single one of the 10 major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.
Indeed, the piece contains this rather remarkable figure. Interestingly, the Democrats did better, in terms of their vote share, than did most other incumbent parties.
I knew there had been an anti-incumbent wave, but did not realize it was this extreme. This is stunning stuff.
Ultimately voters don’t distinguish between unpleasant things that their leaders and governments have direct control over, and those that are international phenomena resulting from supply-side disruptions caused by a global pandemic or the warmongering of an ageing autocrat halfway across the world. Voters don’t like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit. The cost of living was also the top issue in Britain’s July general election and has been front of mind in dozens of other countries for most of the last two years. That different politicians, different parties, different policies and different rhetoric deployed in different countries have all met similar fortunes suggests that a large part of Tuesday’s American result was locked in regardless of the messenger or the message. The wide variety of places and people who swung towards Trump also suggests an outcome that was more inevitable than contingent.
Mass behavior is a real thing and is more complicated than just summing specific individual preferences. It is certainly more complicated than parsing campaign rhetoric and assuming different words are the main issue.
