The Global Headwinds Hitting Kamala Harris' Campaign

Incumbent parties around the world are losing — often, big time.

If you spent the past week looking for signs Vice President Kamala Harris might lose the presidential race to former President Donald Trump, your best bet was maybe not to look at Madison Square Garden, where Trump held a rally widely condemned for its racism and misogyny. It wasn’t necessarily to look at Harris’ rally in Washington, D.C., or in the swing states, which largely went off without a hitch. It wasn’t to stare at spreadsheets full of early voting or polling data or to look at contested 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. Just a few days earlier, the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan, long the dominant party there, had turned in its second-worst electoral performance in history.

While there are unique reasons for these electoral flops — a corruption scandal in Japan; a drop in prices in Botswana for diamonds, one of the nation’s largest industries — they also fit into a new yearslong trend of electorates punishing incumbent parties around the world, as a seeming hangover from the COVID years and subsequent global inflation batters politicians’ approval ratings.

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

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