We have records of the popular vote in our presidential elections going back to 1824. In all that time, there have been only 11 presidents who were elected to a second (consecutive) term. With the exception of the first, Andrew Jackson, every president who has been reelected has received a higher percentage of the popular vote the second time around. Here’s the list, with their percentage improvement:
Andrew Jackson: -1.2%
Abraham Lincoln: +15.5%
Ulysses Grant: +2.9%
William McKinley: +0.5%
Woodrow Wilson: +7.4%
Franklin Roosevelt: +3.4% (-6.1%, -1.4%)
Dwight Eisenhower: +2.2%
Richard Nixon: +17.4%
Ronald Reagan: +8.0%
Bill Clinton: +7.4%
George W. Bush: +2.8%
Grover Cleveland also won a second term, but it was non-consecutive and does not concern us here. We can look at the individual circumstances of each of these elections and find reasons why the popular vote percentage increased. Reagan and Clinton faced fairly strong third-party challengers in their first election, for example, which kept their numbers down. Lincoln’s reelection took place during the Civil War. But the point remains that presidents tend to have two fates: they are rejected, or they win reelection by a larger margin. We have to go back to the election of 1832 to find a counterexample. So, why do so many people assume that Obama will win reelection, but by a narrower margin?
No doubt, people are relying on some data. Polling numbers, mainly. But polls this far out are fairly meaningless, and Obama has a comfortable lead in almost all of them. I’ve been reading articles about the Indiana Senate race between Richard Lugar and Richard Mourdock, and I consistently see it predicted that Obama will not win in Indiana this time around. I sometimes hear the same thing said about North Carolina and Virginia. But, here’s my guess, based on history. If Obama loses in Indiana or North Carolina or Virginia, it means he has lost the election. But, if he wins reelection, he will win all three of those states and some new states that he lost four years ago. What states might those be? Arizona and Missouri are possibilities. Georgia and Montana and the Dakotas are not out of the question. It might surprise you, but even South Carolina isn’t out of the question.
For all the Republicans’ efforts, President Obama is nowhere near as polarizing as George W. Bush or Bill Clinton (post-Lewinsky) turned out to be. And the GOP has completely left the mainstream of American politics. I think that Dick Lugar is going to lose his primary next Tuesday. Do you know what that means?
“If Dick Lugar,” said John C. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri, “having served five terms in the U.S. Senate and being the most respected person in the Senate and the leading authority on foreign policy, is seriously challenged by anybody in the Republican Party, we have gone so far overboard that we are beyond redemption.”
Last time around, the GOP lost the support of Chuck Hagel and Colin Powell. Now, perhaps it will be Dick Lugar, John Danforth, and Olympia Snowe. Maybe even Lisa Murkowski. After all, she was booed this weekend at the Alaska GOP Convention, and the Paulistas took over control of the state party:
FAIRBANKS — Ron Paul might have finished a distant third in Alaska’s Republican presidential primary race, but the Texas congressman and his supporters won big at the Republican state convention this weekend.
In a tense and at times openly confrontational convention, Paul’s supporters came out in force to express their distaste with what they call “establishment Republicans” and successfully took control of much of the party.
The biggest victory the Paul supporters took home this weekend was the chairmanship of the Alaska GOP. Russ Millette, a Paul supporter, was elected to replace retiring party Chairman Randy Ruedrich at the state GOP convention in Anchorage.
These are the types of events that cause people to switch long-standing allegiances. For some, it happened when they impeached Clinton, or when they stole the 2000 election or when they invaded Iraq or after Abu Ghraib or when they sent John Bolton to the United Nations or when they intervened in the Terri Schiavo case or when they let New Orleans drown. I know people who switched in each and every one of those cases. I’m sure there are some who finally made the jump after the debt ceiling fiasco. There are limits for almost everyone. The truth is that the GOP isn’t just ceding the center-right to the Democrats. They’re force-feeding the center-right to us. And the election results should reflect that.
But this doesn’t bode well for the Democrats either. At what point does the “Big Tent” not be able to hold together into anything coherent?
Winning elections doesn’t bode well for Democrats?
Okay. That makes sense.
But, seriously, the party is going to move to the right if we have a good night in November.
Consider that a good night would involve winning Senate seats in:
Arizona: with George W. Bush’s surgeon general.
Nebraska: with George W. Bush’s hand-picked Democrat to serve on the 9/11 Commission.
North Dakota: with an energy executive.
West Virginia: with extremely conservative Joe Manchin
Indiana: with anti-choice Joe Donnelly
Maine: with middle-of-the-road independent Angus King
Nevada: with DLCer Shelley Berkley
Virgnia: with squishy Tim Kaine
Yes, we might add Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren to the mix, but we stand to vastly increase our hold on the middle at the expense of progressive dreams.
So it goes. The alternative is unthinkable.
I’m so excited for next year’s tax and social security reform initiatives that I can barely stand it.
Here’s to you, future Speakers Pelosi (again) and Cantor and Wasserman-Schultz. Enjoy the new normal of whiplash mini-reigns in the House because neither party can get the requisite 60 votes in the senate on a consistent enough basis to maintain base enthusiasm.
Congress will earn that 0% approval rating yet.
But that’s my point. And if we pick up all those seats(dreaming, I know) people will kvetch to the high heavens when Democrats get stomped again in the ’14 mid-terms because our problems aren’t addressed in any serious way. And people get more disillusioned and PO’ed.
there’s no helping it, Calvin.
Remember the Bush presidency? Now imagine that, with literally NO ONE competent in charge on any level. Imagine it where there are no more Jim Jeffords to switch parties or Dick Lugars to talk sense on foreign policy or Olympia Snowes or Arlen Specters to moderate things a bit.
You always look at the negative angle of everything but you miss the biggest negative of all. We’re holding on by a thread here and you want some progressive utopia. Things are a great deal more dire than that.
I’m not even talking about a Progressive utopia. I am just talking about getting unemployment below 6%, as one example. Or strengthening Social Security by lifting the earnings cap.
In our political discussions, the latter should be considered “progressive utopia.”
Can we get through the 2012 elections before worrying about what happens “when Democrats get stomped again in the ’14 mid-terms”?
It’s not that I disagree with your electoral analysis. In fact, I think it’s highly likely that if Obama wins in November that Democrats will lose one or both houses of Congress in the 2014 election.
The point of an Obama second term is to consolidate the progressive gains of the first term. Then, if the economy is decent in 2020, the ever-growing-Democratic majority that Ruy Texeira keeps writing about can elect a Democratic successor to Obama (something that hasn’t happened since 1948), and maybe, just maybe, sweep a bunch of states so that we control redistricting for the ’20s.
This is the right tack.
My intuition is, the Democratic Party will move a little to the right on social issues, but not on economic or social justice issues. It’ll look a little more like the New Deal coalition. The DEmocratic economic/social priorities will actually advance because we’ll be politically stronger and because the GOP agenda in those areas is so discredited.
At what point does the “Big Tent” not be able to hold together into anything coherent?
The 1850s. Show me a coherent Democratic Party since then.
Speak of the devil:
PPP
time for that Rove superpac to start flexing their muscles? Or do you think they’ll wait til colser to election?
from that poll:
Hey Booman have you seen the Obama campaign’s new ad on Romney’s offshore accounts? I think it’s a good ad. As a companion piece the OfA released an infographic on its website:
Obama Camp Releases Infographic On Romney’s Offshore Bank Accounts
With this ad and the Bin Laden R-Money et all are seeing that there was more than just luck that helped then Senator Obama annihilate then Senator and Former Frist Lady Clinton, the Obama campaign apparatus ain’t no joke. The POTUS may appear to be above the fray, but the campaign ain’t gonna just sit down and let R-Money and the GOP Millionnaires get away with trying to box them in.
Romney should thank his lucky stars for the Citizens United decsion, cause it’s the superpacs that will once again help to save romney’s bacon and make this election as close as it’s seems it gonna be by bombarding the airwaves leading up to election day.
I think Romney and the GOP bought their own crap with the “Obambi” and “American apologist in chief” talk they spew to the uninformed masses. They forgot that Obama is a grade A campaigner and the campaign that beat Hilary was not a one shot thing.
Yes, I saw the new ad. It hits harder than I would expect this far out from the election. They’re trying to destroy Romney before he can get any bounce.
i think the strategy is to hit early to cripple Romney before the superpac money really begins to flow into negative ads, especially since the Dem superpacs are not doing as well as their conservative counterparts.
I think the strategy is to hit early to cripple Romney before the superpac money really begins to flow into negative ads, especially since the Dem superpacs are not doing as well as their conservative counterparts.
Yes. Lets face it. The President, and his team, want control of the message. If I had Soros’ money(dreaming here) I certainly wouldn’t want Messina approving my message. They don’t have that problem on the GOP side because they all believe the same 3 things.
OT: President Obama in Afghanistan for surprise trip.
Stepping all over Mittens! No talking bad about POTUS overseas right????
Has RMoney ever been to Afghanistan (or Iraq)?
If Obama loses in Indiana or North Carolina or Virginia, it means he has lost the election.
I disagree. He has very different chances of losing each of those states, and Indiana is considerably more of a reach than the other two.
It is very easy for Indiana to slip out of his column, and be the only state that does so. He could even lose Indiana and gain Arizona, for instance.
Yeah, I agree. I don’t even put Indiana in our grasp; not yet at least.
At this point I’d say Arizona and North Carolina are toss-ups, and Virginia is lean-Dem.
Even if Booman is more or less stating that if Obama loses Virginia it means he’s lost Ohio, Florida, and Arizona as well, I just don’t see it with the listed states. I think he’s correct that if we lose VA we probably lost the election, though.
A more-polarized electorate could result in a closer Electoral College contest, even if Obama maintains or slightly increases his popular-vote margin.
I disagree.
More polarization implies that the so-called independants make up their minds. Their are two types of current “independants”: Actual centrists and disaffected Republicans.
You make the implied assumption that independants who really do vote their conscience are going to be anti-Obama. The only evidence of that that I see is that they are not currently fervently PRO-Obama. True independants want less to do with current Republicans than they do current Democrats. No proof, but that is my general impression talking to people from the Mid-West and Mountain West.
Disaffected Republicans will break both ways. But that’s just the point … BOTH ways. they are, after all, DISAFFECTED.
So, all in all, I don’t think further polarization will particularly hurt the Democrats. It will, however, hurt the country in the short run.
I didn’t say it would “hurt the Democrats” – I even said that it could result in Obama increasing his popular vote margin, which would almost certainly translate to good things for the party’s Congressional chances.
My point was that Obama’s Electoral College total could shrink.
Ok, you’ve lost me. How is further polarization going to lessen the electoral vote.
I could understand it if you disagreed with my analysis (which is faith based, after all), but you say his margin of votes could even go higher. I’m assuming that you mean in the non-fight states (MA and MS for example), further polarization will cause larger turnout which will pad the vote count to no purpose. I think that is a potential outcome.
In the “battleground” states, however, a higher turnout of the base on both sides is pretty much impossible. Both bases are totally identified: Obama in 2008 and TeaParty in 2010. Quite frankly, 2008 trumps 2010 in every realistically cited battleground. You could make the point that 2008 contained lots of first time voters what might not vote again … but you didn’t.
I look forward to more explanation. Perhaps, BooMan would particiapate with an entry addressing these points?
First of all, speak of the devil.
Secondly, to answer your question, one of the basic tenets of politics is that negative campaigning (i.e., a high degree of polarization) drives down turnout. It is more commonly used by Republicans for a very simple reason. They do best when turnout is low. They would much rather run with both candidates suffering from high negatives than both having high positives. We are the exact opposite.
Romney’s favorables are terrible. He will have a much easier time bringing Obama down to his level than he will in boosting his own image up. Fortunately, he has all the SUPER PAC money he could want to help him to do that job.
But the result isn’t a bunch of people flocking to vote for a candidate they hate. It’s a bunch of people refusing to vote for either of two candidates they hate. In other words, depressed turnout.
The first people to drop out are young adults. The last people to drop out are retirees. Nasty campaigning and mud-flinging can help get Democrats excited, but it’s generally a loser’s game. The problem is that attacks must be answered.
These considerations help explain why Democrats have such a hard time winning consistently.
Because they don’t play the game, and part of that is the whole dependence on the super wealthy for campaign cash. Just look at the corrupt DWS for instance.
In the “battleground” states, however, a higher turnout of the base on both sides is pretty much impossible. Both bases are totally identified: Obama in 2008 and TeaParty in 2010.
I’m not talking about the bases, but about the middle. Much of Obama’s margin in 2008 consisted of aisle-crossers; with greater polarization, they vote Republican.
I am fascinated by the historical comps, but I think if you break down the individual races, there are so many exceptional cases that there’s just no pattern to be discerned.
Working backwards:
Bush: Not an example. It was virtually impossible for him to have won re-election with a smaller percentage of the popular vote, since he lost the popular vote the first time around.
Clinton: 1992 was marked by a strong third party candidate who kept Clinton’s vote low.
Reagan: Ditto Clinton.
Nixon: Ditto Bush and Ditto Clinton. Nixon won by a tiny plurality in a three-way race in 1968.
Eisenhower: This is really your first case that isn’t exceptional.
Roosevelt: Fine.
Wilson: This is actually the best counter-example. Wilson won comfortably in 1912, and barely beat Hughes in 1916. The popular vote percentage went up only because there were three major candidates in 1912.
McKinley: +0.5% running against the same candidate? Hardly a strong showing.
Grant: OK
Lincoln: Hmm…. Well, if all the states that voted against you the first time secede, you’re bound to do better the second time around, aren’t you?
If this is the reason why you are so optimistic, I am feeling much better about my pessimism.
And speak of the devil.
I wish I could find a simple chart of the two-party popular vote, but I have been unsuccessful so far. What I mean by that is the percentage won only among votes for the two major parties. That helps differentiate 1992 from 1996, for example. Or 1968 from 1972.
You’re right to dig a little deeper and you make excellent points.
But I’d ask you to use your head, since I can’t find you better statistics. Did Bush win more comfortably in 2004 than 2000? Did Clinton win more comfortably in 1996 than 1992. How about Reagan in 1984 or Nixon in 1972 or FDR in 1936? Even taking into account figures like George Wallace, John Anderson, and H. Ross Perot, the reelections were never in doubt, while the initial elections were quite close or close to near the end.
I think the reason for this is fairly simple, and that’s why I think it has wide application to many different circumstances. People get to know the president quite well after 4 years and they either like him or they don’t. If they don’t like them, they do not reelect them. And if they do like them, then a lot of doubters come on board.
In 1980, no one initially thought that Reagan has much more than a joke. He won because the president was failing in rather spectacular form across a wide array of issues. But he was overwhelmingly reelected even though his first term had been quite difficult and contentious because people liked him. People ultimately liked Clinton too. I can’t say people liked Nixon exactly, but they weren’t ready to get on board with a countercultural candidate in the midst of a failing war. People definitely liked Ike. That was his motto. People liked FDR. Loved him, actually.
But people did not like Poppy Bush, they didn’t much like Carter (or, at best, thought he was incompetent), they couldn’t trust LBJ or find much to like. Truman screwed the pooch in Korea.
Dubya was a unique case He didn’t actually win the first election. The loser became president. And he might very well of had a similar thing happen to him in 2004 if we’d any voting booths in Cleveland and a fair count of the Ohio election. He might have won the popular vote and lost the Electoral College. People didn’t like Bush. But they didn’t like Gore or Kerry either.
I think people like Obama and they don’t like Mitt. And I don’t think it will change. And I don’t think history teaches us that Obama will win by a smaller margin the second time around than he did they first time. There’s just no precedent for that.
People definitely liked Ike.
Geez!! I wonder why?!?!? 😉
You are saying that of three possible outcomes — (A) Romney wins, (B) Obama wins by less than he did in 2008, (C) Obama wins by more than he did in 2008 — the least likely is outcome B, since that outcome is unprecedented. And it is unprecedented because after four years, a President has either won over the populace, or lost them. There are statistics that you claim support your case.
I think that there are plenty of cases where the public is ambivalent, or sharply and fairly evenly divided about how it feels about a President, and in fact that tends to be the norm in recent elections.
I also think that it’s hard to draw conclusions about the evidence because of the complicating factor of third party candidacies. It’s the sort of thing I’d love to see Nate Silver analyze.
I just want to comment on the historical data, since that is what grabbed me about this post. I’m trying to point out that there are some elections where the vote totals prove nothing, since either way the election turns out, it is going to validate your thesis.
Take 2004. Only two things could reasonably have happened: Bush could have lost the election, or he could have won with a plurality of the popular vote. It would have been freakish if he had lost the popular vote and won the electoral vote twice in a row. So 2004 almost had to validate your thesis, which means that it is worthless as a data point.
Take 1972. Once again, it was simply not possible that in a two-candidate race, Nixon would have won with less than 44% of the vote, which is all that he got in 1968. Either way the election had turned out, it would have appeared to validate the thesis, which means, again, that it proves nothing.
I looked back at 1916, and it was a very intriguing case. Wilson loses that election if California had gone Republican, and California came within 4,000 votes of doing so. (In 1912, California did go to the Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, by about 200 votes, because Roosevelt got the Republican ballot line there, and Taft wasn’t on the ballot at all.) So the difference between Wilson losing and winning re-election was just 4,000 votes, and yet you chalk it up as a case of a President winning over the populace during his term, which doesn’t seem right.
So while there are certainly Presidents who became more popular during their first four years in office, I don’t think that necessarily goes hand-in-hand with getting re-elected.
Nixon won in an overwhelming landslide in 1972. And you are suggesting that it isn’t a valid data point. I think that is odd.
It’s odd because you set up your hypothesis in an odd way. I think what you would like to say is that when a President runs for re-election, he is either going to be defeated or win in a landslide. If that’s the idea, then you can certainly use 1972 as an argument. But then you can’t go back to the time when they started tabulating popular votes and say you have an unblemished record. You can’t even go back to 2004.
So you change the assertion from “landslide” to “higher percentage of the popular vote than 4 years earlier.” And now that appears to make the argument stronger. Look, there are no exceptions since Andrew Jackson! But there are problems, as I’ve tried to point out. The problem with 1972 is that the way you are framing your hypothesis, the election of 1972 cannot have failed to confirm the hypothesis, no matter how the election had actually turned out. That’s not evidence for a hypothesis.
I think you’re nitpicking a bit.
I’m not arguing for a landslide. I’m arguing that a president either loses or gains more support. He doesn’t lose support but still win. The only example of that happening since Jackson is FDR’s third and fourth terms, and those were special cases.
In all the examples you show, the only one that I can consider at all equal to the animosity generated by the opposition is Roosevelt. If you’re going to make a comparision you have to compare apples to apples.
Trying to compare Ike and Reagan to Obama? Get real.