Election Day 2024: Live results and analysis

U.S. elections frequently rhyme with elections elsewhere. When Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives won the UK’s 1979 parliamentary elections, it presaged Republican Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory in the U.S. a year later. In 1992, Bill Clinton steered Democrats to the center en route to a win that put an end to a period of relative Republican dominance — a win that was echoed in Canada’s 1993 elections (a major political realignment that returned the Liberals to power) as well as the UK’s 1997 elections (which saw Tony Blair and “New Labour” win a landslide).

So as we’re looking for clues about how today’s elections are likely to turn out, it is helpful to look at recent trends in other democracies. And the broad theme, as Kaleigh Rogers pointed out in July, is that voters are angry and often taking it out on incumbent governments. That’s bad news for Democrats, who hold the presidency (and the Senate) right now.

On July 4th, U.K. voters sent the Conservatives packing by handing Labour a tremendous 411 out of 650 seats, a Blair-esque victory. In Canada, the governing center-left Liberals are widely expected to lose the next election. The centrist Renaissance party of Emmanuel Macron gave up the country’s prime ministerial post after losing seats in that country’s parliamentary elections last summer. In an era of inflation and immigration, incumbent parties are struggling at the ballot box.

To be fair, the Conservatives in the U.K. and the Liberals in Canada had each been governing for nearly a decade or more, giving voter fatigue far more time to develop than it has here. But more recently elected governments are struggling, too. Germany’s 2021 elections returned a government headed by Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party, a party which is now commonly third in election polling. The long-dominant Liberal Democratic Party in Japan just suffered an unexpected electoral setback in late-October elections. Even the newly elected Labour government in the U.K. has had a rocky start — its lead over the Conservatives has dwindled rapidly, especially if you take into account that many right-leaning voters now back the right-wing populist party Reform UK. It’s a hard time to be an incumbent.

There is, though, at least one counter-example. As voters in the Republic of Ireland get ready for an election that may be later this month, the parties in government — and especially the party that currently leads the government, Fine Gael — have been doing surprisingly well in polls. One reason for their success may give Democrats cause for cheer: Earlier this year, they replaced their former leader Leo Vradkar.