The global trend that pushed Donald Trump to victory

President-elect Donald Trump’s 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 for why a campaign fails — things like messaging choices, or whether candidates campaigned enough in the right places — cannot account for such a sweeping shift. Such factors matter on the margins and among specific demographic groups, but Harris received a decisive, across-the-board rebuke. 

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.

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 — regardless of their ideology or history — that it was time for a change.

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

Given Trump’s victory, we can confidently say the United States is not exceptional. Three different exit polls found that at least 70 percent of Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s current direction, and they took it out on the current ruling party. Trump registered as the change candidate despite being a former president himself, and the voters rewarded him accordingly.

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.

Why you can’t understand Trump’s victory without the global trend

Reading the American press today, you see a lot of focus on granular campaign choices. Did Harris lose because she picked the wrong VP? Emphasized the wrong issues? Targeted the wrong kinds of voters? Appeared on the wrong kind of media?

Perhaps one of these theories will prove to have merit. We don’t have enough data yet to be sure. But if the story were fundamentally about messaging or targeting, you’d expect her to improve on Biden’s 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. 

You can’t explain Harris’s defeat in terms of losses with the white working class when she also did worse than Biden with non-white workers and college graduates. You can’t 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.

Uniform swings call for uniform explanations. And the most plausible one, given global context, is anti-incumbency.

“The central plot lines of the [2024 election] are already clear, and not that dissimilar from four years ago,” the political scientist John Sides writes at Good Authority. “In 2020, an unpopular incumbent lost reelection. In 2024, an unpopular incumbent’s party lost reelection.”

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 — with ruling conservative parties in Britain, India, and Poland all suffering notable setbacks. 

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?

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. 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’ve lost, and they are hurting — hurting enough that they see an otherwise-booming economy as a failure.

As much sense as the inflation story makes, it remains an unproven one. We’ll need a lot more evidence, including detailed data on the US election that isn’t available yet, to be sure whether it’s right.

But we can be fairly confident, given reams of polling data showing Americans were dissatisfied with the country’s direction, that a desire for a change in leadership played at least some role in Trump’s return to power — part of a global trend away from stability and toward upheaval, however chaotic or even dangerous it will prove to be.