If you spent the last week looking for Vice President signs Kamala Harris could lose presidential race to former president Donald TrumpPerhaps it was best not to watch Madison Square Garden, where Trump held a rally widely condemned for his racism and misogyny. It wasn’t necessarily looking at Harris’ rally in Washington, D.C., or swing states, which went off largely without a hitch. It wasn’t about looking at spreadsheets filled with early voting or polling data, or looking at disputed 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. A few days earlier, the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, long dominant in this country, had recorded its second worst electoral performance in history.

Even if these electoral failures have unique reasons: a corruption scandal in Japan; a drop in prices in Botswana for diamonds, one of the country’s biggest industries – they also part of a new trend of electorates punishing incumbent parties around the world, amid an apparent hangover COVID years and resulting global inflation hits politicians’ approval ratings .

The global trend casts Harris’ battle against Trump in a different light, one where her tactical decisions and the Democratic Party’s ideological positioning may matter less than the simple fact that inflation hit 9.1% in July 2022, and one where a victory against a candidate as obviously flawed as Trump is far from predetermined. But there are also reasons why Harris might be better positioned to take on an anti-incumbency wave.

“There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in many countries,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center. “There is just a lot of discontent with political leaders,” he added. “In almost every country we studied, large majorities say that elected officials don’t care what people like me think. »

This year, Pew surveyed citizens from 31 different countries. Through them, 54% said they were dissatisfied with how democracy workswhile only 45% were. It is reasonable to expect voters to express anger at outgoing presidents, 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. Britain’s Conservative Party, which took a beating this summer, occupies a similar place on the political spectrum from left to right.

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, in power since the end of apartheid, suffered huge losses and lost its majority, remaining in power only through a coalition agreement. Center-left leaders Canada and Germany also saw their popularity drop.

Even the Bharatiya Janata Party, led by right-wing populist Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, suffered significant losses in the elections earlier this year and was forced to team up with allies to control Parliament.

The only exception to the rule appears to be Mexico, where voters elected Claudia Sheinbaum, a close ally of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to succeed him. Both belong to Morena, a left-wing populist party.

Gallup Polling Data noted the malaise clearly extends to the United States. Only 26% of respondents believe the United States is on the right track. A majority of the country’s population, 46%, describes the economy as “poor” and 62% say the economy is actively deteriorating. Although these impressions are not exactly supported by macroeconomic data – which show low unemployment, high inflation and solid wage growth – they nevertheless reflect a lingering bitterness towards 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 until the election. While Biden approval rating briefly increased after the decisionit once again settles at a net of -18 average FiveThirtyEight. The Trump campaign and allied super PACs have criticized Harris for failing to decisively break with Biden in some interviews.

“Harris supported Biden on everything,” a narrator says ominously. the start of an ad the Trump campaign released earlier this week.

And there are other headwinds, some of which Harris has little control over: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has created clear but surmountable fissures within the Democratic coalition, and the shift in Biden administration toward border security, which came years too late in the past. eyes of most Democratic strategists.

Additionally, there are questions that may only 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 greater 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 is difficult to pin responsibility for the surge in inflation on just one part of the party’s coalition.

But as progressives and moderates within the Democratic coalition fight to influence the Harris administration or to craft the narrative of why she lost, these collective headwinds make it difficult to assess strategy and positioning policies of Harris – and to some extent, of Biden. .

In an October interview with HuffPost, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) ignored an aide’s attempt to end the conversation when asked about attempts by the party’s moderate wing to attribute Biden’s poor approval ratings to the economy on progressive influence. She noted that the United States spent more to support its post-Covid economy than other advanced economies and subsequently recorded growth in gross domestic product, number of small business start-ups and the unemployment rate and lowest inflation rates.

“There is no counterargument here to push Democratic leaders to say that somehow we need to take a less progressive path and that will lead to a stronger economy,” he said. -she declared. “All the evidence points in the exact opposite direction.”

If there’s one global trend that could help Harris, it might be the simple fact that she literally doesn’t look like any of the 46 presidents she could succeed. 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 — even though Harris has often downplayed the historic nature of her candidacy.

“There is a lot of interest in, for example, more women being elected to public office, more young people, more people from poor backgrounds,” Wike said. “So there’s this general feeling that, okay, we’re frustrated. People around the world are frustrated with political elites and want to see changes in the appearance of these political elites.

There is also the simple fact that Harris has attempted to seize the role of “change,” even as a pseudo-incumbent, boasting in her closing television ad: “As president, I will bring new generation of leaders. »

The sale at least sort of works. Trump, although no longer in power, has been the defining figure in American politics for nearly a decade. A NBC News Poll released Sunday found that voters were just as concerned that Trump was not “the change we need because he will continue the same approach as his first term” as they were that Harris was not “the change we need because she will continue the same approach as Joe Biden. .”

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