No. of Recommendations: 31
In the final analysis, I believe the election was primarily a verdict on the economic failures of the past four years, with social and foreign policy issues taking a back seat in the minds of most voters.
There may be something to this. As the biggest single item, voters really *hate* inflation. (And generally don't notice when it stops, as prices are still higher than they remember)
It's interesting to note that these big economic issues, notably inflation, are pretty much global in nature lately rather than local to any given country. Not coincidentally, this has been a year that an unusual number of countries have had either elections or "elections", and that incumbents have been tossed out in a very large fraction of them, apparently for much the same reason.
Another common thread is reactions against immigration (legal or illegal or refugee) perceived to be beyond what's reasonable. It's not a thing that a country is entirely powerless to do something about, but big increases are, like inflation, a pretty much global phenomenon. Chinese competition and antipathy are similar widely common threads.
It seems like folks are blaming each individual player in the orchestra for a bad performance, when it was really mostly just a bad composition they were performing. The global year of "toss da bums out".
Jim
