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Lindsay Newman
A major question being asked from abroad this week is what recent global election results tell us about November’s US race. Will US politics get swept up by the anti-incumbent, anti-establishment sentiment seen elsewhere across 2024’s election cycle, eroding the longstanding US norm that current officeholders tend to be hard to displace? And what does this all mean for the particular contest between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, jumpstarted by last week’s debate?
Already this year, incumbents in South Africa and India saw their majorities stricken, and Senegal’s elections brought an outsider to power. Still, Mexico’s election of Morena’s Claudia Sheinbaum pointed in a different direction. With this week’s elections in France, as well as the vote in the United Kingdom that’s almost certain to spell the end of Conservative Party rule, something fundamental appears to be shifting in incumbency politics with relevant signposts for November’s US election.
It seems clear that the emerging narrative from the current election cycle is a long-COVID story. Persistent inflation, higher-for-longer interest rates, cost-of-living pressures, and elevated unemployment rates are driving voting behavior. Global voters are finding their pocketbooks lighter than before the pandemic, regardless of what their politicians or treasury department statistics may tell them. In 2024, perception has become reality, and this spells peril for incumbents.
The post-pandemic reckoning around the economic recovery that is taking place this election season may be driving voters away from the center and toward the extremes. One headline from last month's EU Parliament elections was that the center held, and yet, viewed from another perspective, the rise of the right-wing cannot be overlooked. Call it pragmatism, tactical populism, whatever you like — further-right and further-left political parties and politicians are finding themselves inside governments from Italy to Argentina. These movements have now set their sights on France, the UK, and the US.
When UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called a snap election for July 4, it felt like an inauspicious date to have chosen for what is likely to be “independence” from 14 years of Tory party rule. That’s a stunning duration of time that masks a declining trajectory since 2021, with roots likely in 2016’s Brexit referendum. Sunak’s snap call has awoken Nigel Farage and the right-wing Reform UK party, which according to the latest polling, is a stone’s throw from overtaking the Tories for a second-place finish. This means that as Labour readies for a win, the most dominant political party for nearly a decade and a half faces an extinction-level political event.
While the party system in the US may be on a stronger footing than the UK this election cycle, parallels for the US election can still be drawn. It has long been said that US politics is polarized and that left-right fault lines are increasingly deep, allowing for fewer points of convergence.According to polling conducted 10 years ago, the share of Americans expressing consistently conservative or consistently liberal viewpoints doubled in two decades. The 2014 story was not only a polarization story, but also a partisan one. Ten years ago, people felt more conservative (or liberal) and more intensely identified as Republican (or Democrat) than in the past. Jumping forward to today, it is a near-truism that there is little common ground between the two political sides, and the gap is widening. According to the American National Election Studies’latest data, affective polarization has accelerated over the last decade. Today, only 21% of Democrats report positive feelings for Republicans, and only 18% of Republicans report positive feelings for their Democratic counterparts.
As a consequence of these trends, President Joe Biden has tried moving further to the left on certain issues to address the risk of “uncommitted” voters as well as younger and more progressive voting blocs. On the other side, former President Donald Trump, rather than seeking to appeal to more moderate voters, is sticking with messages about an (economic) “blood bath” that appeal to his base. In a sign of the times, polling in May found that “political extremism and threats to democracy” trails only the economy as the most important problem facing the country ahead of November’s elections. And in troubling news for Biden’s reelection camp, voters tend to trust Trump – at least on the economy – more than the president.
Politics may be cyclical. But cycles can be generational. With roughly half of the world’s population taking to the polls this year, who will be leading and what policies they set at home will have consequences beyond borders and for years to come. The post-pandemic reckoning taking place across India, South Africa, and Mexico is building momentum that hits Europe this week. By November, the US may find itself caught up in this global tide, driving disaffected voters from the familiar middle ground and toward the poles, bringing potentially bad news for today’s incumbents.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
In the run-up to the 2020 election, Europe was preoccupied with the future of the transatlantic relationship. In London, almost every conversation among think tanks, civil society, and diplomatic circles eventually came around to the so-called special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom, just then wrestling with its Brexit bet.
There was plenty of hand-wringing about whether Donald Trump would be reelected in 2020. The frequently heard view across the pond was that Europeans could forgive Americans for electing Trump for the first time in 2016 – for they knew not what they did. But to return him to office, without the guise of plausible deniability, would mean something else entirely.
Europe would have been put on notice that US voters had accepted the “America First” embrace. The US was going home, and Europe might need to go it alone.
As we find ourselves in the (re)run-up to another Trump-Biden election season, all eyes are again on US voters and the choice they have set before themselves in November. Tariffs and trade policy are up for grabs, the energy and regulatory environment face “sliding doors,” and diplomatic and multilateral engagement find themselves on differential courses – on display last week at the annual G7 Summit where Biden sought in his final pre-election summit to keep the wartime band together with new US measures to intensify pressure on Russia and a transatlantic pledge to leverage Russia’s immobilized assets for Ukraine funding.
It is all too clear that geopolitics is at stake this fall.
What if the 2020 election vantage point from abroad got it wrong?
What if, despite the US rethinking its global role, we are still in the age of US primacy after all? Over the past four years, the US may have unwittingly made this case.
During the pandemic, US pharmaceutical firms – in concert with global researchers – delivered groundbreaking vaccines to save lives. Across the security sphere, the US has led its European partners on a renaissance of NATO, charting the course on both the sanctions to constrain Russia and the military expenditures to bolster Ukraine. Earlier this spring, when further US funding came into doubt, Ukraine and Europe faced a protracted scare. Elsewhere in the Middle East, the US has demonstrated that without any boots on the ground and with untiring diplomatic efforts bearing only partial fruit, it remains a pivotal player in any room. Iran’s attack on Israel on April 13, which saw nearly all of its 300-plus missiles shot down by a US-led coalition supporting Israel, is prime evidence.
And despite years of hard- versus soft-landing debates, the United States remains the world’s largest economy. In recent years, the Biden administration has been busy trying a new industrial policy on for size, a model now being replicated elsewhere. Meanwhile, the US Federal Reserve has set the global template and pace on fiscal policy.
The US dollar remains dominant, even as Russia and others that face a widening web of US-led sanctions and tools of economic security have continued to study currency alternatives. According to the Fed’s latest available data (2022), the US dollar represents 58% of global official foreign exchange reserves compared with the next best Euro at 21%. The dollar was involved in roughly 88% of global foreign exchange transactions in April 2022, a figure that has been stable for 20 years.
According to polling conducted across Europe, Canada, and the United States in 2023 by the German Marshall Fund in its Transatlantic Trends series, 64% of respondents viewed the US as the most influential actor in global affairs (including 62% of Europeans). Lest we overlook it, the same polling found that only 14% viewed China as the most influential global actor.
Looking across the ocean, the view from Europe looks significantly less lonesome than it did on the cusp of 2020. This might be because Trump did not win in 2020, or it might be that the US is more structurally entrenched in the global system than domestic partisan politics suggests. Will a Biden 2.0 mean the status quo on transatlantic support for Ukraine? Would a Trump 2.0 see the administration drive Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table and pursue a deal that leaves Europe out in the cold? Will Trump’s transactional foreign policy present a sharp test for Europe with more bilateral relationships than multilateral engagement?
Either way, November’s election and its aftermath will begin to answer these questions.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.
Former US President Donald Trump leaves the courthouse after a jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts in his criminal trial at the New York State Supreme Court on May 30, 2024.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Iowa in December 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump speculated, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Among the many Trump remarks that jolted the news cycle over the past eight years, this one springs to mind in the aftermath of Trump’s conviction in New York state court on 34 felonies relating to falsified business records.
As is clear from the counts, this is purely a paper crime, as no violence was alleged to have been committed. Still, observers from abroad are left to wonder if the verdict will be just another dynamic of US politics that Trump normalizes – and whether a candidate convicted of felonies could now become the American president.
No constitutional safety breaks
Nothing in the US Constitution precludes Trump from running for president. While each charge carries a maximum of four years in prison, the case will now get tied up in appeals likely to be decided after the election.
According to the current consensus among legal experts, should the convictions stand, any sentencing (scheduled for 11 July) is likely to be weighted more toward fines than prison time. Barring additional unforeseen circumstances, Trump will become the Republican nominee for the US presidency this summer.
This raises the question: What does Trump’s conviction really mean? Is this just a tale full of sound and fury but ultimately signifying nothing?
Biden’s strategy is key
Much now depends on President Joe Biden. This election season has been a bruising one for the current administration, and it is just getting started. Headlines have been filled with news of the ongoing Israel-Gaza conflict and domestic campus protest movements – neither of which are gaining Biden votes.
According to polling from May, only 34% of registered voters approve of Biden’s approach to the war in Israel. And on inflation and the economy, the top issues among voters, Biden’s outlook is equally grim.
On these leading issues, polling from late May finds that voters trust Trump more than the current president by a double-digit margin. For Trump’s conviction to matter in November, for it to have a half-life beyond the next few weeks, the Biden campaign needs to refocus the attention and capitalize on the potential tailwind offered by the New York conviction by making the election a referendum on Trump and not, as it currently is, a referendum on Biden.
A tight race with few persuadable voters
Otherwise, November’s election will be run amid calcified partisan politics in America. The election will turn on a handful of swing states – Arizona, Michigan, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin – where there are just a small number of undecided voters.
According to recent polling, those leaning toward Trump are particularly unlikely to change their minds. Even post-verdict polling has found Republican voters to be “sticky,” with only 16% saying that Trump should end his campaign as a result of the conviction.
Voters standing in the middle may be more flexible, but this election will not just turn on the independents in the center. The greater risk is voters disaffected by a rerun of 2020 stay home – or seek to undermine the electoral process and its results by resorting to political violence. We will likely look back to May 30, 2024, in the election post-mortem, to assess whether the New York conviction moved the needle with these voters.
Trump’s exclusive cohort
And for those observing from abroad and scratching their heads, with a sense of “how can this all be?” it feels only appropriate to point out that Trump, already in a rare group as a state leader, now joins an even rarified, more exclusive cohort – the convicted former leaders club.
From Malaysia’s Najib Razak to South Africa’s Jacob Zuma, and Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the world is populated by former leaders who fell afoul of the law mostly on financial or corruption charges. This is also something Europe knows a bit about with former French President Jacques Chirac convicted of corruption in 2011 (four years after he left office) and the specter of the oft-charged, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi still hanging over Italy.
Trump will be hoping that his prospects look like another fellow traveler along this path – current Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Lula saw his corruption charges related to the massive Operation Lava Jato annulled in 2021, paving the way for his reelection in 2022.
With a staggering $52.8 million of funding coming through the door in the 24 hours post-verdict, including a third sent through by first-time donors, Trump may be feeling like he lost on Thursday but will win on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
Lindsay Newman is the practice head of Global Macro, Geopolitics for Eurasia Group and is based in London. She writes the Views on America column for GZERO.