Never mind the polls and unemployment rates and even Harold Macmillan's "events, dear boy, events". If Barack Obama were to win re-election come November 6, he'd be only the second Democrat president to be elected to more terms than one since Franklin Roosevelt, back when Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters were tearing up the Billboard charts with "Is You Is or Is You Ain't (Ma' Baby)".
Bill Clinton was of course elected to two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of an unusually strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot. Perot split the anti-Clinton vote in 1992 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. Obama has no third-party spoiler on Perot's order of magnitude to save him, and in any event Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton, having no truck with Clinton's Third Way, more pro-business, incremental leftism which as an ideology has turned out to be nothing much more than a curiosity of the 1990s.
Jimmy Carter's offer for re-election in 1980 went sufficiently badly that he had conceded to Ronald Reagan before the polling stations on the West Coast were closed.
Lyndon Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and proceeded handily to win a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election and was the presumptive Democratic nominee until Eugene McCarthy finished seven points behind the sitting president in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968. By the end of the month, Johnson had uttered maybe his most famous remark, that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." The Democratic National Convention that summer was a madhouse, the party was radicalized, and Democrats were banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.
John Kennedy was of course assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration here. Unfair though that may be, it just can't be said with certainty that he'd have won re-election, and neither that he'd have lost, so Kennedy is counted out for these purposes.
Which leaves the case of Harry Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and won a term of his own in 1948, but he'd been exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was thus eligible for another kick at the can in '52. He wrote that he'd no intention of offering for re-election, but his name was on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary that March when Estes Kefauver won 55 percent to Truman's 44, and it was only after the Kefauver upset that Truman announced he'd be standing down. The Democrats chose Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, as their nominee to lose to Dwight Eisenhower.
On the Republican side over this same period were George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower. Four of those six were elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term and a couple years later gave way to the Carter interregnum, but Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he wasn't elected in the first place. And so one is left with Bush the Elder as the only Republican president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to be elected and not re-elected, and obviously he wasn't helped by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that smoothed the way for Clinton.
And the period from Hoover back to the advent of the Republican Party in the middle-19th Century is bleaker still for Democrats: James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson constitute the totality of elected Democrat presidents in the three-quarters of a century spanning 1856 and 1932. There's a reason they call Republicans the Grand Old Party.
Come to that, the grand total of Democrat presidents to be elected to more terms than one, in the century and a half since the founding of the Republican Party, is four. And that counts Cleveland whose two terms were non-consecutive. Republicans have re-elected presidents as many times in just the last sixty years.
It may justly be said that none of this history and statistics is dispositive, but there is such a thing as betting on form.
Bill Clinton was of course elected to two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of an unusually strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot. Perot split the anti-Clinton vote in 1992 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. Obama has no third-party spoiler on Perot's order of magnitude to save him, and in any event Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton, having no truck with Clinton's Third Way, more pro-business, incremental leftism which as an ideology has turned out to be nothing much more than a curiosity of the 1990s.
Jimmy Carter's offer for re-election in 1980 went sufficiently badly that he had conceded to Ronald Reagan before the polling stations on the West Coast were closed.
Lyndon Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and proceeded handily to win a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election and was the presumptive Democratic nominee until Eugene McCarthy finished seven points behind the sitting president in the New Hampshire primary of March 1968. By the end of the month, Johnson had uttered maybe his most famous remark, that "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." The Democratic National Convention that summer was a madhouse, the party was radicalized, and Democrats were banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.
John Kennedy was of course assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration here. Unfair though that may be, it just can't be said with certainty that he'd have won re-election, and neither that he'd have lost, so Kennedy is counted out for these purposes.
Which leaves the case of Harry Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and won a term of his own in 1948, but he'd been exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was thus eligible for another kick at the can in '52. He wrote that he'd no intention of offering for re-election, but his name was on the ballot in the New Hampshire primary that March when Estes Kefauver won 55 percent to Truman's 44, and it was only after the Kefauver upset that Truman announced he'd be standing down. The Democrats chose Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, as their nominee to lose to Dwight Eisenhower.
On the Republican side over this same period were George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, Ronald Reagan, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, and Dwight Eisenhower. Four of those six were elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term and a couple years later gave way to the Carter interregnum, but Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he wasn't elected in the first place. And so one is left with Bush the Elder as the only Republican president since Herbert Hoover in 1932 to be elected and not re-elected, and obviously he wasn't helped by the same 19-percent Perot phenomenon that smoothed the way for Clinton.
And the period from Hoover back to the advent of the Republican Party in the middle-19th Century is bleaker still for Democrats: James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, and Woodrow Wilson constitute the totality of elected Democrat presidents in the three-quarters of a century spanning 1856 and 1932. There's a reason they call Republicans the Grand Old Party.
Come to that, the grand total of Democrat presidents to be elected to more terms than one, in the century and a half since the founding of the Republican Party, is four. And that counts Cleveland whose two terms were non-consecutive. Republicans have re-elected presidents as many times in just the last sixty years.
It may justly be said that none of this history and statistics is dispositive, but there is such a thing as betting on form.
