The Presidential election was a disaster for Democrats. There’s been no shortage of think pieces, posts, and punditry seeking to explain why U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris was trounced while down ballot candidates significantly outran the top of the ticket. Aside from the usual blame game, in this case centrists mostly accusing the left of being too accepting of trans people, another explanation quickly became adopted as a given: Harris was virtually destined to lose as voters across the globe punished incumbents for Covid-19 related inflation.
This theory has spread its tentacles across the ideological spectrum. Spearheaded initially by Matt Yglesias both pre (2023) and post election, it has since gained steam—though with varying boundaries, implications, and suggested remedies—namely via Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, Noah Berlatsky in Public Notice, John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times, and David Dayen at The American Prospect.
On the surface, it’s rather convincing. Burn-Murdoch’s piece included a chart, which has been widely circulated, displaying research from ParlGov stating that all incumbent parties in developed countries (though the text of his piece says “major countries”) have lost vote share in 2024 national elections, a previously unseen phenomenon.
That’s pretty damning. But wait, what’s a major country? And why is 2024 the relevant data set while 2023 is omitted? If an incumbent party had a slightly lower vote share but remained in power, doesn’t that indicate something other than voters wanting to kick out the incumbents?
In other words, is the theory of inevitability that holds that Harris was destined to lose, rather than win, narrowly due to inflation really true in any meaningful sense? To the extent it bears out, does it even provide useful lessons? When incumbents lose seats in a parliamentary system, is that always the same as the American two-party elections? We would argue no. The reality is much more complex, as this piece lays out. Arbitrary decisions with respect to what elections count, whether 2023 elections were as inevitable, and whether it matters that Democrats were not wholly the incumbent party (the House of Representatives exists, even if none of the people who articulate this theory really acknowledge it).
To start with, Burn-Murdoch’s chart does not include Mexico in its 2024 data set, either because he does see Mexico as a major or developed country—rather offensive, a $1.79 trillion GDP says otherwise—or because it runs contrary to the other examples. In June, Mexico’s incumbent party won a landslide reelection victory, with now-President Claudia Sheinbaum winning 59.4% of the vote, improving significantly upon her predecessor’s 53.2% in 2018. To their credit, Dayen and Yglesias (in one of his several pieces touching on the matter) do acknowledge Mexico as an exception to the rule, but say that high-inflation prior to Covid-19 likely accounts for why the incumbents were not punished. It’s true that Mexico is historically prone to bouts of inflation, but their inflation rate had fallen to 3.64% in 2019 and 3.4% in 2020 before spiking to 5.69% in 2021 and 7.9% in 2022. Even if Mexican voters take some inflation as a given, this is still a substantial increase that one would expect to see reflected in the next election according to the supposed globally intertwined and inevitable relationship between incumbent vote share and inflation. It just doesn’t seem correct to say that inflation is so priced-in to Mexican politics that a 4% increase that more than doubles the rate doesn’t phase the population. Indeed, Mexico’s 2018 election came after a spike of inflation, jumping from 2.8% in 2016 to 6% in 2017, and in that case the incumbents were soundly defeated.
Political parties and their campaigns have agency. They can craft narratives and deliver compelling messages that convince voters to show up for them on election day.
While we’re far from experts on Mexican politics, it certainly seems as if the fact that Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was an entertaining populist who inveighed against the rich helped him—and might have been a useful example for Democrats. Yes, Harris was a potential bundle of firsts—but any more so than a Jewish woman in Mexico? Sheinbaum’s landslide win seems improbable enough to merit more curiosity than it has received from Democratic strategists.
Mexico is the most glaring counterexample, given the dramatic improvement from the prior election and its deep cultural connections to the United States, but it’s not the only place where incumbent parties retained power in 2024. Taiwan’s ruling DPP won the presidential election but came in second place of the legislature by one seat, although they had the higher raw vote total and improved their vote share from 34% in 2020 to 36% in 2024. Taiwan is a highly developed economy, so its results seem highly applicable to the United States. The Dominican Republic’s PRM party won reelection and increased its vote share from 52.5% in 2020 to 57.4% in 2024 after inflation peaked at 8.8%; not a wealthy country, but a fellow North American state that is culturally intertwined with the United States.
Bulgaria, an upper middle income country per the World Bank, held elections in June and October, with the GERB-SDS coalition retaining its plurality in both elections and increasing its vote share by 1.7% in October. (There were allegations of voting irregularities, but these appear to have been vote buying efforts by the fourth place party rather than the winners.) In high income Croatia, the HDZ won a plurality and remains the governing party with 34.4%, a 3% decrease from 2020 but not a bad showing in the face of a peak inflation rate of 10.67%.
Perhaps these examples don’t fit into the arbitrary limits of countries discussed in this theory. And we’re aware that they’re not the most commonly cited counterparts to the United States (although Mexico really ought to be).
But that points to a bigger issue—proponents of the theory have differing parameters of who qualifies. Burn-Murdoch limits it to 2024 and “major countries.” Yglesias in his New York Times op-ed says there are no examples of incumbents in a “rich country securing a strong reelection.” He includes 2023 elections and, in prior pieces, said incumbent losses were occurring in the English-speaking world and called it a dominant global trend. Dayen said “virtually every party that was the incumbent at the time that inflation started to heat up around the world.” Berlasky, citing Yglesias, says it’s “a brutal time for all incumbent parties across the world,” but only touches on Japan, Austria, the U.K., and France. Thompson says it’s a........