In the week since the presidential election, there’s been kilometres of column inches (and here I go) explaining all the reasons why Donald Trump won and Kamala Harris lost. But the result may well have been known long before 150 million Americans put pencil to ballot paper.

As the Financial Times’ chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch, points out, nine other major global democracies had already gone to the polls in 2024 – including the United Kingdom, France, India and Japan. In all of them, the incumbent party lost support – the first time this has happened in more than a century of election tracking.