The Year of Elections

A News Roundup

Billions of people are voting this year, and whole lot of them are in India.

2024 has been hailed as the “Year of Elections.” We have our own upcoming presidential election in the US, of course, but we’re not alone.

Globally, more voters than ever in history will head to the polls as at least 64 countries (plus the European Union)—representing a combined population of about 49% of the people in the world—are meant to hold national elections, the results of which, for many, will prove consequential for years to come.

Now that we’re almost halfway through the year, this is a good time to take stock of the results so far.

I’ll be spending plenty of time later this year on the US presidential election, so there’s no reason to cover that now, but I’ll take just a few moments of your time for the Republican primary in Virginia’s fifth congressional district (into which I have been somewhat unwillingly redistricted). The primary was held last Tuesday, but the fighting is still going on.

The last round of redistricting put an ambitious state senator named John McGuire into the same district as ultra-MAGA Representative Bob Good, setting the two men on a collision course. Unfortunately for Congressman Good, he was not quite ultra-MAGA enough. Early in the presidential primaries, he briefly backed Ron DeSantis for president. This sort of thing happens all the time, and usually after the presidential primaries there is a period in which candidates for lower office are invited to back the party’s winner, and all is forgiven. That’s not how Donald Trump operates. He never forgot the slight, so he made a point of endorsing McGuire over Good.

Interestingly, this did not put McGuire unambiguously over the top. McGuire is up by less than 400 votes out of about 63,000 cast. So Good has drawn from the MAGA playbook by screaming about voting irregularities, demanding a recount, and claiming the election was stolen. This is now what the Republican Party stands for: being a sore loser.

The stakes of this conflict are small. The fifth district includes the left-leaning town of Charlottesville, but it’s overwhelmed by a swath of conservative rural Virginia and those Liberty University zealots down in Lynchburg. So we’re likely to send a MAGA guy to Congress no matter what. Yet it’s amusing and revealing to see the national trends of the Republican Party re-enacted as small-scale farce.

Now let’s turn our attention to elections in the rest of the world.

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Lessons from the Labour Party

Some elections had results that are a foregone conclusion. In Russia, Vladimir Putin won 87% percent of the vote—not quite enough for Saddam Hussein, but pretty close. If you click on that link, you will note that not only did Putin rig the vote by disqualifying every other halfway serious candidate (and killing one of them), he then mandated high voter turnout by making it basically a condition of employment to go vote—with the proviso that you’d better vote for the right guy. One of the passive-aggressive ways subjects of a dictatorship can register a protest is through low turnout, which is a way of declaring that you know the election is already rigged, so you refuse to go through the motions. Putin has removed that option.

Iran, if I recall correctly, will also be holding a general election any day now, but that won’t make any difference, either.

Then there is the UK, where people are free to vote any way they like on July 4—but it’s pretty clear most of them aren’t going to vote for the Conservative Party. The Conservatives have been in power for a long time, they’ve been damaged by scandal, and they’ve gone through their roster of candidates and ended up with a prime minister who is a lot less charismatic than Boris Johnson. So they were due to be turned out. But that’s not what really made this happen. What made it happen was the improbably reform of the Labour Party.