Democrats looking for silver linings in the 2024 election results can find a few if they squint. The balance of power in the U.S. House of Representatives is pretty close, Democrats won Senate races in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin while losing those states in the presidential race – a rare occurrence in the Trump era before this year – and Kamala Harris now received the third-most votes of any U.S. presidential candidate in history.

But the widespread depression spreading among Democrats is an indication of the severity of the defeat. Democrats had rough election years in 2000, 2004, 2010, 2014 and 2016, but after those defeats, you rarely heard many within the party say they wanted to quit and turn their attention to other things. Yesterday the Guardian reported, “for many anti-Trump voters – and even some institutions – the return of Trump prompts a feeling of just wanting to ignore it all, including politics more broadly, and focus their energy elsewhere.”

Soon-to-depart Democratic National Committee chairman Jaime Harrison wants his party rated internationally: “Democrats beat back global headwinds that could’ve turned this squeaker into a landslide,” he wrote in a memo to party members. Indeed, the past few years have been rough for incumbent parties.

Britain’s Labour swept out Conservative rule in July, self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei triumphed in Argentina last November, and incumbent parties, some long-dominant, lost ground this year in countries as diverse as India, Japan, South Africa and South Korea.

There are exceptions — with Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico’s ruling left-wing populists elected president in June — but the anti-incumbency wave has defied traditional political trends.

But for the past three years, we’ve been hearing from Democrats morning, noon and night that the U.S. economy is doing so much better than the economy just about anywhere else. We’ve been told the U.S. economy is “the envy of the world,” “the world’s best recovery,” “significantly outperforming its peers in investment and GDP per capita,” “the strongest in the G7,” and so on.

So if the U.S. economy really is the envy of the world, the best recovery, and so on, shouldn’t the expectations for the incumbent party be higher?

Harrison wants to blame “global headwinds.” But if the Democratic boasting is right, then the “global headwinds” should have been weaker in the United States in November than anywhere else. But since Democrats lost so badly – Harris going 0-for-7 in swing states, Republicans gaining four seats in the U.S. Senate, little or no change to the GOP-held House, a slightly bigger GOP advantage in state legislative seats — isn’t it fair to ask whether the Democrats are being honest with themselves about the state of the economy after the worst inflation in four decades? After the election, The Atlantic‘s Annie Lowrey wrote, “the cost-of-living crisis became the defining issue of the campaign.” For much of the year, the Democratic Party’s position was that there was no cost-of-living crisis.