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African National Congress (ANC) support has little to nothing to do with liberation loyalty voting or ideology and everything to do with the material circumstances of the party’s supporters.

In 1994, when the ANC first came to power, it won 63% in the historic election of that year. Five years later, when South Africans went to vote in 1999, it won 66%. Five years after that, in the 2004 election, it won almost 70% of the vote. That was the high-water mark, and in the elections of 2009, 2014, 2019, and 2024, ANC support slipped time after time from 65.90% to 62.15% to 57.50%, before slipping under 50% with its 40% result in 2024.

The chart below shows the data.

B-grade analysts have long explained those results via theories of liberation loyalty voting and ideological prejudice. Either ANC voters were voting out of ignorance, or the party was not being radical enough, and thereby ceding support. That is wrong. The driving forces behind ANC support are much less complex than that.

The chart below shows real per capita GDP for South Africa since 1994. This measures the value created in the economy, adjusted for the rate of inflation, and then divided by the number of people in the country. The chart shows that the indicator grew strongly for the period between 1994 and 2008 and then stagnated and began to lose ground.

Plot the ANC’s vote share data on top of the GDP data, and a pattern suggests itself in the chart below.

Now do the same thing from a different perspective: the number of people in employment.

When the ANC came to power in 1994, around eight million people went to work every day. By 2008, that had risen to around 15 million. However, in the almost 15 years since then, the number has risen to near 17 million. In other words, in the 15 years after 1994, South Africa almost doubled the number of people with jobs, but in the 15 years since 2008, the number has increased by just over 10%. The jobs numbers are shown on the chart below, and the ANC vote share number is plotted over it.

Again, the same pattern of cause and effect stands out: it is the material circumstances of people that determines ANC support levels.

Last week, The Common Sense plotted a new set of scenarios for South Africa to 2034. The strongest upside scenario was built around the ANC grasping the point that its vote share and the living standards of its supporters are related, and more than that, that the former follows from the latter. This point has been put to the ANC on scores of occasions over recent years but appears to have made no imprint on its current leadership, even as The Common Sense scenarios found that lifting the rate of economic growth to just 3% should be sufficient for the ANC to restore its national majority.