The global headwinds hitting Kamala Harris’ campaign

If you’ve been looking for signs this past week. Vice President Kamala Harris could lose the presidential race against the former president Donald Trumpit might be best not to watch Madison Square Garden, where Trump held a rally that was widely condemned for racism and misogyny. It wasn’t necessarily watching Harris’ rally in Washington, D.C., or in the swing states, which largely went off without a hitch. It wasn’t staring at spreadsheets full of early voting or polling data or looking at disputed White House transcripts.

Perhaps your best bet would be to look to the southeastern Atlantic Ocean, to landlocked Botswana in South Africa. There the Democratic Party of Botswana lost its parliamentary majority for the first time in the country’s 58-year history. Just a few days earlier, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, long the dominant party there, had posted its second-worst electoral performance in history.

While there are unique reasons for these election flops: a corruption scandal in Japan; a drop in prices in Botswana for diamonds, one of the country’s largest industries – they also fit into a new multi-year trend of voters punishing incumbent parties around the world as an apparent hangover from the COVID years and subsequent global inflation is affecting politicians’ approval ratings.

The global trend casts Harris’s battle against Trump in a different light, one in which her tactical decisions and the Democratic Party’s ideological positioning could matter less than the simple fact that inflation was 9.1% in July 2022, and one in which victory against a candidate as clearly flawed as Trump is far from preordained. But there are also reasons why Harris may be better positioned to ride out an anti-incumbent wave.

“There is a lot of dissatisfaction with the way democracy is functioning in many countries,” said Richard Wike, director of global attitudes research at the Pew Research Center. “There is just a lot of dissatisfaction among political leaders,” he added. “Large majorities in virtually every country we survey say elected officials don’t care what people like me think.”

This year, Pew surveyed citizens of 31 different countries. Over them, 54% said they were unhappy with the way democracy workedwhile only 45% did. It is reasonable to expect that voters will express their anger at incumbents, both in the United States and 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 Republican Party in the United States. Britain’s Conservative Party, which suffered a drubbing this summer, occupies a similar place on the left-right political spectrum.

South Africa’s ruling African National Congress, which has been in power since the end of apartheid, suffered huge losses and lost its majority. It could only stay in power through a coalition agreement. Centre-left leaders Canada and Germany have also seen their popularity plummet.

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

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

Gallup polling data indicates the malaise clearly extends to the United States. Only 26% of the country says the United States is on the right track. A majority of the country, 46%, describes the economy as “poor,” and 62% say the economy is actively deteriorating. While these impressions are not exactly supported by macroeconomic data – which point to low unemployment, rapid inflation and solid wage growth – they do represent a lingering bitterness about the post-COVID economy.

Adding to Harris’ troubles is the unpopularity of her boss, President Joe Biden, who dropped out of the race with just over 100 days to go before the election. While Biden the approval rating rose shortly after the decisionit is again at a net of -18 in the FiveThirtyEight average. Trump’s campaign and allied super PACs have targeted Harris for failing to make a definitive break with Biden in some interviews.

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

And there are other headwinds, some of which Harris has only minimal control over: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has left clear but surmountable rifts in the Democratic coalition, and the Biden administration’s turn to border security, which is years overdue came in the past. eyes of most Democratic strategists.

Moreover, there are questions that can only be answered afterwards. Why might Democrats be losing ground to union voters, even though the Biden administration has been incredibly pro-union? Why didn’t full employment and wage growth lead to broader popularity? The answers to all these questions have at least something to do with inflation, a global problem that may be exacerbated by legislation supported by all but one of the Democrats in Congress. It is difficult to pin the blame for the inflation spike on any one part of the party coalition.

But with both progressives and moderates within the Democratic coalition vying for influence in a Harris administration or to tell the story of why she lost, these collective headwinds make it difficult to challenge Harris’s — and to some extent Biden’s — political strategy and positioning. to evaluate. .

In an interview with HuffPost in October, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) ignored an aide’s attempt to end the conversation when asked about efforts by the party’s moderate wing to dismiss Biden’s poor approval ratings on the economy to lead from progressive influence. She noted that the United States spent more to prop up its post-COVID economy than other advanced economies and subsequently experienced growth in gross domestic product, small business creation and the lowest unemployment and inflation rates.

“There is no counterargument here to push the Democratic leadership to say that somehow we need to follow a less progressive path and that this will lead to a stronger economy,” she said. “All the evidence points in exactly the opposite direction.”

If there’s one global trend that could help Harris, it could be the simple fact that she literally looks nothing like the 46 presidents she could eventually succeed. Voters around the world have shown interest in electing more representative politicians, Wike said. For Harris, who would be the first woman, the second Black woman and the first Asian American elected president, it could be a boost — 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 and more people from a poor background,” says Wike. “So there’s a general sense that we’re frustrated. People around the world are frustrated with political elites, and they want to see some changes in the way those political elites look.”

There’s also the simple fact that Harris has tried to seize the mantle of “change,” even as a pseudo-incumbent, bragging in her closing television commercial, “As president, I will introduce a new generation of leadership.”

At the very least, the sales are working. Trump, even when not in office, has been the defining figure of American politics for almost a decade. A NBC News poll Voters released Sunday were as concerned that Trump is not “the change we need, as he will continue the same approach from his first term” as they were about Harris not being “the change we need, as she will continue the same approach as Joe Biden.”

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