POPULISM‘Inflation Is Radioactive’: Trump’s Victory Is Part of a Global Populist Wave of Voters Throwing Out Incumbents
The person running against the unpopular incumbent party won this election, just like the person running against the unpopular incumbent won the 2020 election. The election result should not necessarily be interpreted as a shift in the levels of racism or sexism or xenophobia necessarily.
Was the U.S. election the latest eruption of populism across the globe? The Conversation U.S. senior politics editor Naomi Schalit brought this question to James D. Long and Victor Menaldo, two political scientists at the University of Washington who are specialists in comparative politics. They discussed how Donald Trump’s victory mirrors a movement in advanced industrialized countries that are liberal democracies to throw incumbents out of office after a prolonged period of post-pandemic inflation.
Naomi Schalit: It looks like the price of groceries played a big part in the rejection of Kamala Harris.
James Long: The person running against the unpopular incumbent party won this election, just like the person running against the unpopular incumbent won the 2020 election. Trump was the unpopular incumbent then, and although Harris was not technically the incumbent now, she represents the incumbent party. And it’s hard to win as an unpopular incumbent.
I don’t necessarily interpret the election results as a shift in the levels of racism or sexism or xenophobia necessarily. I think it’s just that those types of things probably got packaged up into feelings about immigration policy, and perhaps even anxieties about the economy, like inflation.
Victor Menaldo: I think we learned or confirmed that inflation is radioactive and that folks have a very long memory when it comes to price increases, and they will not simply embrace a reduction in the inflation rate as much as they’ll remember that the cumulative change in the level of inflation was 20% on average since 2021. So even if inflation is trending in the right direction, in terms of its rate, it’s the accumulation of the increased cost of living that I think has a lot of bite for voters.
Schalit: You can talk about inflation being down at 2.1% but the groceries still are really expensive.
Menaldo: That you paid 20% more on average for these over three years is what matters. That affects your standard of living and your budget.
More importantly, I think the Democrats are totally and utterly out of touch. They are not a working-class or middle-class party, though they pretend to be, and they advance policy agendas that people really don’t like. I think Harris, to her credit, understood that and ran away from things like defunding the police and banning fracking, but she wasn’t able to outrun them.
