Why Obama will probably be a two-termer

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Sunday February 15, 2009 · 9:12 AM PST

2009/02/15 · 09:12

I'm not getting into how good a job he's going to do. I'm not getting into whether the economy will recover by 2012. I don't need to consider any of those things. All I need to do is look at history.

Incumbent presidents are not easy to beat. Voters have a tendency to avoid "changing horses in midstream." Even Bush managed to win a second term with an approval rating below 50 percent.

It's true that Bush's father lost a reelection bid. But he was from the same party as the president who preceded him (Reagan). Obama is in a different category: he won by defeating the party in power. So far, there have been fifteen presidents who reached the office that way and later sought reelection. Twelve of them were reelected.

Specifically, those fifteen presidents were (in reverse order) Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Nixon, Eisenhower, FDR, Wilson, McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, Cleveland, Grant, Lincoln, Pierce, and Jefferson. (I am excluding four presidents who died in their first term--William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren Harding, and JFK--and one who declined to run for a second term for health reasons: Polk.) Only three from that list failed to be reelected: Franklin Pierce, Benjamin Harrison, and Jimmy Carter. Each was a unique case.

Pierce was actually rejected for reelection by his own party, something that has never happened before or since. We can discount Harrison, who came to office without winning the popular vote. Carter is the lone exception here, the only president in U.S. history to decisively defeat the party in power, serve one term, and decisively lose a reelection bid against the other party. (I am using the word "decisively" to exclude an electoral/popular split like what happened in 1888.) That's how rare it is.

Whatever you think of Obama's policies, he's a far more skillful politician than Carter ever was, and anyone who doesn't realize that by now is living in a dream world.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Comments are closed on this story.