When sitting presidents get reelected, they frequently get elected resoundingly. In the post-war era, six sitting presidents have been reelected. Four of them won in landslides. In 1956, Eisenhower improved on his 1952 totals (55%) by racking up 57% of the vote. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson earned 61% of the vote. In 1972, Nixon jumped from 43% (in 1968) to sixty-one percent. In 1980, Reagan won only 51% of the vote in a three-way race. In 1984, he was reelected with 59% of the vote in a two-way race. Bill Clinton fought two three-way races, never getting as much as simple majority of the vote. Still, he upped his percentage from 43% in 1992 to 49% in 1996. Only George W. Bush defied this trend. He won the presidency in 2000 despite losing the popular vote. His election was essentially a fluke produced by a flawed ballot design in one county of Florida and enabled by an aggressive governor (his brother) and secretary of state, and a partisan ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States. His reelection was anything but resounding. He earned slightly less than 51% of the vote, and he benefited from a secretary of state in Ohio who used every trick in the book to depress Democratic turnout.
But I don’t want to talk about the controversial elections of the Bush era. I only mention them to point out they are historical anomalies. It is much more normal for a sitting president to win big than to win narrowly.
The sample of post-war incumbents who have lost is half the size of those who won, but it still shows a 2:1 ratio for blowouts. Jimmy Carter (41%) and George H.W. Bush (37%) were blasted out of office. Gerald Ford (48%) put up a more respectable showing.
We’ve grown accustomed to an even red/blue divide, but it’s probably a transitory state of affairs. In 2012, we may be facing a choice between someone like Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry and President Obama. In a circumstance like that, we ought to expect a result similar to 1964, 1972, and 1984. It really doesn’t matter what state you live in, it’s easy to see that Gingrich and Perry are not suitable presidents.
Mitt Romney is a very bad politician. But he wouldn’t be seen as flatly incapable of doing the job. That’s why he would probably produce an election more like 1976 or 1996. Either he would very narrowly defeat the president, or he’d be beaten comfortably but, like Bob Dole, not resoundingly.
The biggest difference between a fight against Romney and a fight against Gingrich or Perry is in how it would affect the downticket races. Republicans are already worrying about it, as The Hill reports:
Republicans on Capitol Hill prefer Romney over Gingrich, with many of them saying a Gingrich nomination would jeopardize the chances the GOP will keep the House and win the Senate.
Weeks ago, it seemed likely that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) would stroll to the nomination and be able to save his resources for the general election against President Obama. Now he is in a dogfight with Gingrich, trailing the Georgia Republican in most of the early-voting states by double digits.
“[Gingrich] says outrageous things that come from nowhere and he has the tendency to say them at the exact time to undermine the conservative agenda,” former Sen. Jim Talent (R-Mo.), who is backing Romney, said in a conference call Thursday. “If the nominee is Newt Gingrich, the election is going to be about the Republican nominee, which is exactly what President Obama and the Democrats want.”
I’m definitely in the anyone-but-Mitt camp. We need a landslide or nothing is going to change much.
Sorry to be OT so early Booman,
But ya gotta check this out. Not a big deal really, but I guess Mittens learned not to judge a book by it’s cover!
“Romney Meets Bob”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/ben-smith/2011/12/romney-meets-the-bobs-106896.html
Outstanding OT! My chuckle for the morning.
"flawed battle design in one county of Florida"
It WAS a battle, but you might want to correct that.
I think I might have to turn off the autocorrect on my spellchecker. The new one is so aggressive.
I can’t believe anyone uses autocorrect. I’ve wondered for a while how there can be so many typos on the Net when everybody has spellcheckers. Answer: they’re relying on autocorrect, which in my experience gets it wrong at least a third of the time.
Al Gore’s flawed battle design was a lot more widespread than that!
Ba-dum-bum!
I choke at cheering for Newt to win anything, but certainly even the most antipathetic Independent or Progressive would walk on coals to get to the polling stations if Newt were to be the choice on the ballot.
My major concern this year relates to how large Obama’s coattails are this time. There are critical races in many states like WI and OH we need to win. I would love to see good turnout among Dems. I suspect we will have turnout on par with 2008.
We can only hope.
A lot of folks lament the polarization of American politics, but now I’m thinking Democrats would benefit from it being more polarized, because that would mean narrowing the intensity gap.
Good on you to mention coattails… While Clinton did win reelection in 1996 by a decent margin, his coattails were zero. I believe the Dems actually lost control of both the House and Senate in the 1994 midterm, and it took ten years to win back control.
In 1996 Dems lost more than a few governorships as well.
With congressional approval rating hovering near a pathetic 10 percent, and a long term “recession” (Krugman says it’s time to use the “D”) word, it’s more than a bit hard to see Obama’s coattails being anything but marginal.
I wonder if we might not see reverse coattails in those states, with people who are furious at the Republicans in state government turning out in great numbers, and also pulling the lever for Obama.
The thing that frightens me is a dynamic in which the media, just for ratings if nothing else, promotes Gingrich as “man of ideas” throughout the general election. That combined with a new recession that is likely to begin soon could mean that Gingrich will be sold as the one who knows how to fix the economy and win on that count…
Sorry to rain, but we’ve already had the landslide in 2008 and nothing changed much.
What will another do?
Well this time it would be nice to have a majority in the House and a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate as well as Obama retaining his seat. Then if Progressives didn’t move some mountains we’d well and truly deserve to lose.
The R’s have very few Senate seats to defend this time. Without sitting down to do the math, I believe the D’s would have to win all but two or three (out of 34 or so) races to get a filibuster-proof Senate majority, including the reddest of states. And even that assumes that the D’s are fielding serious candidates in every race, and that the D’s elected in red states wouldn’t join R’s to filibuster on controversial bills. Practically speaking, a filibuster-proof Senate majority is not on the table until 2014 in the best-case scenario.
Yeah I know, but was just fantasizing that now that the electorate has experienced the TParty’s version of leadership, even Tom Coburn might want to turn blue, haha!
Yeah, it would be nice, but doesn’t answer the question. The Dems had a so-called filibuster-proof majority and at best moved a few molehills. One can be excused for wondering what would make it different this time.
Molehills.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqGEbF7Qyn4&NR=1&feature=endscreen
Delonjo, aside from a laundry list of legislative accomplishments from the 111th Congress, you could try this thought experiment: imagine if John McCain had won the 2008 election.
On domestic policy—no Recovery Act, no Affordable Care Act, etc.
On foreign and military policy—no end to the Iraq War, no end to DADT, etc.
I doubt Democrats will win another landslide up and down the ticket in 2012, but if they do then the entire agenda that Republicans blocked in the Senate in 2009 and 2010 is back on the table. Heck, eliminating or weakening the filibuster is possibly on the table.
There is no “end game” to politics. There are only imperfect and temporary victories.
However, the longer Democrats can hold the White House (and one or both houses of Congress), the more entrenched those victories become.
The Dems only need a bare majority to end the filibuster. They had two chances to do so and chose the chickenshit path both times. One can only hope they finally learned their lesson last election, but listening to their consultants and spokesmodels, not much seems to have changed in their view of politics.
No matter what disappointments we have with Obama, just imagine Newt (or any other or the Republicans) appointing 2 or 3 Supreme Court justices.
Returning to the main point (“We need a landslide or nothing is going to change much”), even if Obama wins in a landslide, Democrats will be luck to retain control of the Senate and will require even more luck (or so it seems) to retake the House in 2012.
Then there’s the 2014 election—typically a rough one for the party of a president in his second term.
Right now, the reason I’m hoping the Republicans choose a weak general election candidate for president is because that increases Obama’s chances for re-election. If he’s there for four more years, two things happen:
1 – it minimizes the ability of Republicans to make large and disastrous changes in Washington;
2 – it adds another 16 million “Millenials” to the voting rolls, thereby painting today’s Republican party into an ever smaller and tighter corner.
Either way it’s not a good situation for the Republicans. You talk about what would happen if Gingrich gets the nomination. But the way Romney is going, even if he does get the nomination in the end it will have been a dogfight with Gingrich every step of the way, crowned by a nasty convention. If Romney emerges victorious from that, he will emerge by:
Just remember, this is the country that elected Nixon, Reagan, and W. Bush…and then re-elected them. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that any Republican nominee is “too extreme” for the American people to elect.
The way the primary is headed, there will be enough video from Republican “leaders” to sink whoever the nominee turns out to be. If Dems and their allies use the video the right way, GOP voters will be discouraged and Dem-leaners energized by the sheer awfulness of the not-Dem choice.
Our side could do a world of good by collecting and archiving relevant footage from the primary right now and having them ready to use in the general.
What is stunning, really, is how big of a chance the GOP is really pissing away. And Mittens is part of that. Given his now infamous NYT op-ed, MIttens should get crushed in the Midwest if he is the GOP nominee.
Based on what? The results of a few elections?
This is an example of what drives me crazy about political journalists. You’ve heard about numbers, but you don’t really understand them.
First you throw out every election prior to 1948? Why? Who knows, but it gets you down to 16 contests right off the bat, so we’re working with the statistics of very small numbers. There is no “normal” here.
Then you limit yourself to incumbents running for re-election, dropping us to 10. You ignore the elections of 1952 and 1968, when incumbents Truman and Johnson could have run but chose not to, skewing the population to wins. You then tell us that the Bush election was an anomaly, dropping us to 9. Then you throw out all losses, shifting the population even further to the plus column and conclude that it’s more normal to win big than to win narrowly.
And somehow all of this means that you’d rather run against Gingrich than Romney.
This is mathematical nonsense.