The News
Today, Semafor launches its inaugural Global Election Hub, a new platform designed to provide insight into the key figures and global patterns behind the most consequential elections taking place this year around the world. The innovative digital destination will track critical contests and candidates, highlight electoral trends and ballot updates, and provide deep context from Semafor’s editorial team. The Global Election Hub will also highlight Semafor newsroom’s extensive U.S. election coverage and will use Semafor’s newest editorial product, Signals, to present readers with authoritative information and a range of diverse global perspectives on election news.
Ben’s view
2024 has been called “The Biggest Election Year in History ,” The Super Election Year, and the “Voldemort of election years.”
More than half the world will vote — in India, in the United States, in Russia (sort of), South Africa, Mexico, and dozens more countries.
But “global elections” is a bit of a contradiction in terms, and a disorienting idea. People aren’t voting for United Nations representatives. They’re voting for presidents and prime ministers and governors and councilors (and, yes, occasionally members of the European Parliament). The vast share of political journalism, too, is inherently national, looking inward from Washington or Westminster or New Delhi. There’s no big global needle telling you which side —populists vs. establishment in many places, authoritarians versus liberals in others, actual Communists versus nationalists in a few — is winning.
The Semafor Election Hub represents our effort to orient the curious reader in this chaotic landscape, with our map, calendar, and key readings from around the world; and to centralize that running conversation in a Global Election Hot List that will keep an eye on consequential races and red flags alike.
At the heart of the story are the two biggest trends that together compose the crisis in democratic politics that faces the world in 2024.
First, the rise of a new right populism that has transformed politics in the United States and Europe over the past decade, and where small stories — a nationalist Romanian leader making claims to part of Hungary, a backlash against migrants from Brazil to Finland — help explain larger ones, like Britain’s post-Brexit identity crisis. We also hope to help American political journalists — Dave Weigel, Shelby Talcott, Benjy Sarlin, I, and others on the Semafor team have been in that game for a while — to understand what in Donald Trump’s appeal and Joe Biden’s struggle to sell his policies reflect personality and national trends, and where we are seeing the consequences of tectonic global movements.
The other great trend is the rise of a new kind of authoritarian rule which is democratic only in its form. Russia’s elections later this month are the purest form of this. The Indian election later this spring could pull the world’s largest democracy in the same direction.
Our hotlist will elevate the trends and moments that shed light on these questions, and we will be attuned to the aesthetics and ideology of rising political movements as well as to their substance. Populism right now has a particular style — some would say, a hairstyle — as does a waning Establishment. Familiar global patterns turn up across continents, and some of our most widely-read elections stories have come from Semafor Africa, including the rise of Ghana’s theatrical, social-media driven “masked candidate” and the struggles of Cameroon’s 91-year-old incumbent.
Speaking of that needle: we considered and discarded the idea of concocting some kind of Red-or-Blue arrow giving you the state of populism on any given day. The story is far too complex, the measurement is all apples and oranges and bananas, and it’s not always clear which side gets which color. But in the absence of false certainty, we hope to offer context, orientation, and multiple, global perspectives on our own coverage and others’ as we approach the biggest stories of 2024.