In 2016, the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote for the nation to exit the European Union was a harbinger of populist national attitudes espoused by Trump and embraced by many Americans. Trump that year won the presidency in his first bid for public office by harnessing similar themes on immigration and other issues.

Eight years later, Trump is president-elect once more, with the Republican avenging his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden by beating the Democratic incumbent’s vice president, Kamala Harris. And while the circumstances of American elections are unique to this country, recent voter choices around the globe helped point to Trump’s 2024 win.

Around the world in relatively affluent democracies, the same thing is happening: The incumbent party is losing and often quite badly.

On Oct. 27, Japan’s long-ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party suffered one of its worst electoral results. In late September, Austria’s center-right People’s Party saw an 11-percentage-point decline in vote share and lost 20 of its 71 seats in Parliament. Over the summer, after being in power for 14 years, the U.K.’s Conservative Party collapsed in a landslide defeat, while France’s ruling centrist alliance lost over a third of its parliamentary seats.

These insurgent party losses don’t fit in neatly with the usual left-right political spectrum. Each country has its unique political circumstances. Center-left governments from Sweden to Finland to New Zealand have lost, but so have center-right governments in Australia and Belgium.

And on Oct. 30 in Botswana, the party that has governed the southern African country since it became independent from the U.K. in 1966 received a stunning rebuke in national elections. The Botswana Democratic Party lost its majority in Parliament for the first time in the modern history of the landlocked nation, home to about 2.5 million people. Its leader, President Mokgweetsi Masisi, lost to rival Duma Boko, who was sworn in the next day.

Harris was no ‘change’ candidate

In all of the defeats of incumbent parties, one commonality was dissatisfaction with the government status quo. Sometimes, it’s been due more to policy, in others, personality. That’s certainly the case with Trump, who could not only capture a healthy Electoral College majority but the popular vote as well.

The Republican return to power under Trump, after four years of a Democratic administration, can be credited to his singular figure profile. Trump left office in 2021 as a pariah to many after helping to incite a mob of supporters on the U.S. Capitol at the end of an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat. But by Nov. 5, 2024, Trump was back politically, and then some.

Trump, by that point, had effortlessly dispatched his GOP rivals, forced Biden out of the race after a disastrous June 27 debate performance, and then Harris in a dominant victory that exceeded the expectations of all but the president-elect’s most loyal supporters. Along the way, Trump shrugged off a 34-count felony conviction in New York and an array of other criminal indictments.

Harris, in hindsight, had more of an uphill climb against Trump than it seemed to many at the time. The vice president was unable to shake the Biden administration’s baggage and faced the same voter backlash as virtually every incumbent government in the world during the past several years.

Voters made clear a high priority was returning to pre-COVID-19 prices, during the first three years of Trump’s last White House stint. Those economic desires far outweighed Harris’s pitch on democracy, Trump’s personality and public persona, or even overturning abortion bans.

In CNN’s exit polls, 2 in 3 voters called the nation’s economic condition “fair” or “poor,” and 3 in 4 said their families’ economic conditions were the same or worse than they were four years ago. Harris effectively dodged that issue when asked about it in her lone televised debate with Trump, and numerous news interviews.

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Her three-month-plus campaign drew journalist plaudits for its minimal missteps, seeming grassroots enthusiasm, and huge fundraising advantage over rival Trump. Harris seemed to have some amount of momentum in the campaign’s final weekend. But none of that mattered. Nor did the Harris campaign’s elaborate ground game operation to turn out votes in battleground states.

Like candidates for incumbent parties globally, Harris lost in large part because she failed to convince voters she was the “change” candidate.