As the dust falls on the 2024 presidential election in the United States, the Democratic Party continues to lick its wounds. Every day, new post mortems arise, providing potential explanations for the Democrat’s election defeat. These range from lamentations that state that the Democratic Party lost touch with its grassroots supporters, to criticism that the Democratic Party failed to connect to voters on cultural issues. This debate rings true even among the discussions ongoing at Vanderbilt University, most exemplified by the various articles published in this esteemed publication. Each of these criticisms rings true to specific segments of the Democratic Party, and it remains to which narrative will prevail in assessing their future.
However, a vastly underappreciated aspect of the analysis is the extent to which voters have punished governing political parties in 2024. The routing of the Democratic Party was by no means unique worldwide. Early in the year, the Conservative Party, who had governed the United Kingdom for 13 consecutive years, was swept from office in a landslide defeat, losing two-thirds of their seats in Parliament and almost half of their vote share. A few days later, voters significantly reduced the size of the governing coalition of French President Emmanuel Macron, plunging France into the instability of a hung parliament, where no party commanded a governing majority. Several months later in Austria, the governing coalition of the centre-right OVP and the centre-left Greens lost close to a third of their seats in government. In Japan and India, center-right governing parties that had long records of governing lost their majorities for the first time in a decade.
This trend was not restricted to the developing world either. In one of the more unsung upsets of 2024, the Botswana Democratic Party, which had governed the country continuously since its independence in 1966, was relegated to fourth place in Parliament, having lost close to half of their vote share and paving the way for the country’s first democratic transfer of power to an opposition party. Subnational elections also reflected this trend, with governing parties being swept from power in subnational jurisdictions from Australia to Germany to Canada.
Most strikingly, even citizens in non–democratic countries have found ways to express their discontent in ways that they can. In Venezuela, thousands of people took to the streets to protest the manipulated election results and economic deterioration under President Nicolas Maduro. In China, a series of “revenge on society” attacks, in which individual citizens have launched indiscriminate attacks on people in public, serve as the most high-profile examples of bubbling dissatisfaction in a country where a lid is otherwise kept on dissent.
The fact that the vast majority of governing parties in the developed world have seen a loss in their vote share in elections held this year has become a well-discussed fact of political science. However, the cause of this decline in vote share is focused on less. Each of these individual elections gave birth to their own prognosis, with many have attributed the developed world’s electoral losses and discontent to the rising living costs. This symptom contrasts the economic stagnation and deflation experienced in developing countries such as China and Botswana. The core of this diagnosis is the general economic malaise that is felt globally. Whether they live in the towering skyscrapers of New York City or the smallest village in Kgatleng, people across the world feel that their best days, economically or otherwise, are behind them and that the future holds less than the past. Their pessimism and frustrations are then projected onto the government and the society of the day, which, more often than not, bear the brunt of the blame for everything that has gone wrong thus far. It is the reality that public policy makers and public opinion servants, both current and aspiring, have to confront soon. This is also what any follower and participant of politics has to consider in their evaluations of elections and campaigns, whether at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, in the United States, or around the world; namely, how much of the election was influenced by factors within the control of incumbents, and how much was merely due to factors beyond their control.
Interestingly, some leaders have bucked the global wave of anti-incumbency sentiment. In Mexico, outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s protege, Claudia Sheinbaum, was elected in a landslide to succeed him. President Maia Sandu was re-elected to her post in Moldova despite economic and geopolitical challenges. Most recently, Irish Taoiseach Simon Harris’ governing coalition was re-elected with an expanded seat count, albeit with a marginally reduced vote share. How these leaders bucked the global trend and preserved their power will factor into how politics and policy are made moving into the future. More leaders seeking to extend their mandate will certainly seek to emulate their fates. The question for citizens passing judgment on their leaders must then be to make the diagnosis between two questions. Do they place individual responsibility for their predicament at the feet of those leaders, or are their leaders merely powerless droplets, swept up in a tsunami of stagnation and dissatisfaction?
