A PRESIDENTIAL CHEAT SHEET
• In the seventy-five years since the end of World War II, the country has had eighteen presidential elections, with twelve winning candidates. Of the victors, six have been Republicans and six were Democrats. Four of the Republicans won second terms. Four of the Democrats were also reelected, two of whom were Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, who moved up from vice president.
• This period also had seventeen defeated candidates. (Adlai Stevenson lost twice.) Of those losers, eight were Republicans and nine were Democrats. One of the Democrats who lost (Jimmy Carter) was a sitting president. So were two of the Republicans (Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush).
• Of the nine defeated Democrats, only Carter was a sitting president. Three had been vice presidents: Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Albert Gore. Nominating them was a tapestry of errors. All were desultory campaigners with no national appeal. The same was true of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. (Stevenson had telling wit, but was doomed to face a wartime hero.) While these defeated Democrats tried, their best wasn’t enough. Ninth on this doleful list was Hillary Clinton. In ways, she resembled Stevenson and Carter, in having a larger-than-life opponent.
• There are lessons in Clinton’s campaign. It turns out that being a woman didn’t help her with women: 55 percent of them had voted for Obama in 2012, as 54 percent did for her. More glaring in the equation was that she ended only 2,984,757 votes ahead of Trump. As we know too well from 2000 and 2016, Democrats need an extra edge to offset the quirks of the Electoral College.
• Losing the House of Representatives couldn’t have been cheering news for Donald Trump and his party. In theory, a recovery is possible. Barack Obama lost the House in 2010 and went on to get reelected in 2012. Trump has to hope he can match that feat. To stay in the White House, Obama called on his 2008 supporters, who had provided one of the largest majorities in recent history. Trump doesn’t have that kind of backstop. Indeed, the 2018 midterms made clear that his 2016 cadre has been dissolving.
• As the presses start rolling on this book, Democrats have yet to settle on their nominee. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll make do with two models. One would be a younger candidate, quite new to the national scene, as Obama was in 2008. The other would be older, with a familiar image and message. Neither would be a fatal choice. The reason is that an outsized majority is already eager to oust Donald Trump.
• It won’t matter if the Democrats’ candidate is to the left or gaffe-prone or a woman or unusually young. Even if some of these attributes prompt a little headshaking, they will not cause hesitant Democrats to vote for Donald Trump. At worst, some may sit it out, reducing the party’s majority. But even that is unlikely, as was attested by the 93 percent turnout in 2018. Dread of another Trump term will override all uncertainties.
• For a deeper perspective, we’ll journey back 160 years, to 1860, when Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House. Including that election, the party has had twenty presidents, who together have had a varied electoral experience. Donald Trump’s hopes can be set against that array. Most notable were the seven who won a first term and then another one. They were Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, William McKinley, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. (But Lincoln, McKinley, and Nixon didn’t finish their second terms.)
• Two—Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge—ascended from vice president and then won a full term on their own. Rutherford Hayes attained one term and decided not to run again. (He got that one with a lower popular total.) Four served part of one term. James Garfield and Warren Harding died in office. Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur moved up from vice president, but didn’t run when the rest of their tenure ran out.
• Gerald Ford also moved up from vice president, and was defeated when he ran on his own. Four served one full term and were defeated when they tried for reelection. They were Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, and George H. W. Bush. In sum, among the twelve presidents sharing Donald Trump’s current prospect, seven won another term and five did not.