At first glance, it would seem easy to explain the election as part of a 2024 global wave against incumbents beset by post-covid turmoil and inflation. Britain saw a huge Tory parliamentary majority turn into its thinnest minority in the party’s nearly 200 year history. Germany’s governing coalition has collapsed amid soaring unpopularity. French President Emmanuel Macron’s party was crushed in parliamentary elections. South Korea’s opposition party dominated in a parliamentary landslide, and even in Japan, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, which had governed almost uninterrupted since 1955, lost its parliamentary majority. So it might seem preordained that Kamala Harris, representing the incumbent administration, lost decisively as well.
But Harris could have bucked the trend. The American economy is doing better than those of other nations. Employment is strong, wages are up, inflation is down, productivity is soaring. More importantly, Donald Trump has many strengths as a political figure, but he has many weaknesses. Recall that after Jan. 6, 2021, Trump’s approval rating was down to 34 percent in a CNN poll. In a Marquette Law School poll matchup a year later, Joe Biden was beating him by 10 percentage points nationally, 43 percent to 33 percent. Then came the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the 2022 midterms, in which the Republicans did very badly for a midterm and MAGA candidates in particular got crushed. Trump’s favorable rating sank to 31 percent in a CNN poll, with an unfavorable rating at a staggering 60 percent. Republicans were disillusioned with him. At this point, Trump was leading a Republican Party that had lost its House majority in 2018, its Senate majority and the presidency in the 2020 cycle, and then fared historically badly in those 2022 midterms. In December 2022, Ron DeSantis was outpolling Trump easily among Republicans in a Wall Street Journal poll.’
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