It wasn't just us. Incumbents are toppling worldwide.

What just happened?

Democrats are soul-searching. They are looking for lessons. 

One good lesson for Democrats is to be serious about inflation.

Did Biden mishandle the border? Was their position on abortion or gender too vague? Was DEI and "wokeness" the problem? Are Democrats failing to understand that working class Hispanics vote their pocketbook, not their ethnicity?  Or is is mostly just inflation? College classmate Jeffrey Laurenti wrote me, observing that the election took place amid a worldwide tsunami of frustration with incumbents, and that the common denominator  for all of them is inflation. Voters hate it and punish incumbents for it.  

Jeffrey did graduate work at Princeton, and then had a long career as a foreign policy expert, advising governments in his policy work with the United Nations Association of the United States, the United Nations Foundation, and the Century Foundation. He has been active in New Jersey Democratic politics. He was an Electoral College elector for Barack Obama in 2012.

Laurenti, at the mythical site of the birth of Venus, in Cyprus

Guest Post by Jeffrey Laurenti

Kudos to the Trump campaign for pulling off an unquestionable victory for a larger-than-life candidate of manifestly questionable character. The themes of retribution and resentment, of nostalgia curdled by rage, of power unconstrained by rules or self-doubt, attracted more voters to the polls than did the politics of joy and laughter wrapped around the unappreciated record of a tired administration.   

One could be excused for not having noticed that Donald Trump's vote totals this week have apparently fallen by over a million votes from his levels in 2020. That year saw an unprecedented surge in voter engagement on both sides, with Trump mobilizing 74 million voters to come out for him, a 17 percent spurt from the 63 million votes he had garnered against Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately for Trump, Joe Biden’s campaign drew to the polls 81 million voters, a 23 percent increase over Clinton's 66 million.

Much better than the Democrats, however, Trump has kept most of the new voters he mobilized four years ago engaged. His falloff from 2020 compares to Kamala Harris’s much more precipitous 12 million vote drop from Biden’s total --  which suggests how disillusioned those new voters must have been with the Biden regime.

To be sure, the falloff this week was not evenly distributed across the nation. In fact, in most of the seven “swing” states where the parties’ billion-dollar campaigns focused most of their resources, Trump and sometimes Harris managed to squeeze out additional votes relative to 2020; even in the crumbled “blue wall” Northern states, Harris did outpoll Clinton. But in “safe,” presumably noncompetitive states where neither side made any campaign investment at all, like New Jersey, Illinois, and most astoundingly New York, Harris won notably fewer votes than Clinton eight years before, while Trump suffered little or no erosion from his 2020 gains.

Biden will be saddled with much of the blame for Democrats’ failure to hold on to the voters they mobilized in 2020, at the very least for his ineptitude as a communicator. Yet it must be recognized that the disenchantment goes far beyond Biden’s senescence or his program and policy choices. It’s a reflection of the economic dislocation caused worldwide by the Covid pandemic and lockdowns. 

Most of the world is appalled by the Trump comeback, but they’ve already seen the playbook: In virtually every democratic country, the party that's been in power navigating recovery from the Covid pandemic, regardless of its ideological orientation, has faced popular disenchantment and electoral reverses in the past two years.  

In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist majority evaporated in elections this summer, with voters stampeding to the left and far right. After dismissal of a centrist-led government in Rome led by the widely-admired Mario Draghi, Italian voters gave power to Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing, even neo-fascist, bloc. Amid intense public dissatisfaction with the economy, Britain’s Conservative government was routed four months ago, replaced by left-leaning Labour. 

Germany’s center-left government, in power since 2021, collapsed this week, and its governing parties are on a death watch in the face of imminent elections. Even the fair-haired Canadian wunderkind, Justin Trudeau, is in trouble. There has not been such a consistent pattern of democratic instability since 1979-82. 

Nor has the distemper been confined to Europe. Brazil’s right-wing president and Trump imitator Jair Bolsonaro was defeated for reelection by a left-wing former president who actually served jail time (which, in the U.S., Trump has so far escaped). The African National Congress, which has ruled South Africa with large majorities since the end of the apartheid regime, lost its majority this spring, as did Narendra Modi’s BJP party in India. Just last week, both Japan’s eternally dominant Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner suffered heavy losses in parliamentary elections, depriving them of their governing majority. 

The phenomenon is worldwide, even where democracy has not taken root. The spread of military coups d'état across the Sahel may arguably be an analogous response to economic crisis in some of the world's poorest societies: skyrocketing food prices trumped democratic liberties. An explosion of public unrest in tightly controlled China forced a change in the Communist leadership’s obtuse pandemic policies, and the persistence of the country’s economic malaise is still not played out.

Yes, other issues in the national or local context are always important – such as concerns about “wokeness” or abortion in the United States, or about defunding the national health service in Britain. Still, the common denominator underlying the fragility of incumbent parties in the democratic world appears clearly to be economic rather than ideological. 

In developed countries, and especially in Europe, the combustible mix of inflation and migration has fueled ethno-nationalist right-wing surges. Many in Europe were hoping the U.S. election would prove a bulwark against the contagion, but it appears we've caught it too. The irony is that the United States weathered the pandemic’s economic aftershocks better than any other developed country – yet many Americans remained convinced they were worse off.

I did door-to-door canvassing in the days leading up to the election (full disclosure: I supported Ms. Harris). I was struck by a comment repeatedly voiced to me: “I had more money in my pocket under Trump.” One black neighbor on his porch gave specificity to that generality: “The only president who ever sent me a check was Trump.” 

That was my epiphanic moment: Trump’s marketing genius in “personally” sending out, with his signature, the Covid relief checks that Nancy Pelosi had muscled through Congress (over widespread Republican objections!) deeply penetrated voters’ subconscious. In four years, the hapless Biden never found a way to connect his policies to the average American’s kitchen-table reality.

Biden, the failed communicator, has already faded from memory. He has scant prospect of seeing in his lifetime the historical reassessment of his one-term presidency that, 40 years on, has redeemed the long-scorned Jimmy Carter. As Biden goes into the night, the lights of democracy seem to be flickering out across the world. Will we see them back on?   

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