The elections being held in South Africa and the US in the first week of November are different in many ways.

While the words, actions, voting records, campaign contributions, and even the dietary preferences of each congressional and senatorial candidate participating in America’s midterm elections are picked over in brutal detail, South Africans barely know who their candidates are.

The Democratic Alliance’s Helen Zille is a notable exception, with the veteran politician not only being a household name, but having run an innovative campaign for Johannesburg executive mayor that has broken with the party-over-personality norm characteristic of previous local government elections.

Indeed, given the poor (perhaps even malicious) management of the ANC candidate lists, there was still great uncertainty at the time of writing as to who some of its mayoral candidates would be.

In addition, the proliferation of parties in South Africa in an era of Babelian communications has done nothing to enhance genuine democratic choice. Instead it sows voter confusion and, in some cases, will lead to fragile coalitions in which the smallest party can be disproportionately disruptive.

In the US, by contrast, the dominance of the two main parties, together with the often opaque influence of corporate interests, is seen by many as stifling of genuine democratic choice.

Where the two elections converge most strongly, however, is in the high stakes involved, despite neither being the main electoral event in its respective country, with those contests scheduled for 2028 in the US and 2029 in South Africa.

Domestically, this is because municipal governance has eclipsed electricity loadshedding as the biggest national crisis.

In the US, meanwhile, the midterms represent an opportunity to assess President Donald Trump’s report card, and potentially rein in his administration by voting in candidates ready to reassert the legislative branch’s oversight authority.

Besides the high stakes, there are two other notable areas of convergence.

For one, voters in both countries are unhappy about levels of corruption.

In South Africa, the effects of chronic graft are highly visible at a municipal level, with money having been diverted away from vital services such as electricity, water and sanitation, roads, traffic lights, and waste management.

Across the Atlantic, there are growing concerns not only about corporate influence, but also the abuse of political office for personal and family enrichment, conflicts of interest, and misuse of public resources.

Secondly, voters in both countries are showing signs that they are ready to place bread-and-butter issues ahead of traditional party loyalties.

South African voters are increasingly more interested in whether public money will be spent to fix broken infrastructure and to improve living standards than on ideologically charged rhetoric.

In some key US states, meanwhile, there are signs that voters are willing to break with deeply engrained partisan loyalties and support candidates who they feel take their cost-of-living concerns seriously.

Ultimately, both elections may well reaffirm the enduring relevance of that Clinton-era campaign adage: “It’s the economy, stupid!”