I think it’s smart for the Obama campaign to look at all possible ways of reaching the magical 270 electoral votes, but I don’t think this election is going to be close. It is going to be a blowout. As of today, I’d place heavy odds on it being a blowout in Obama’s favor, but things could take a turn for the worse. Actually, let me put this a different way. If Obama wins reelection, he will win it in a rout. If he loses, it could be close or it could be a blowout.
First, let’s look at recent history. Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton all won reelection in major drubbings that were never really in doubt. Jimmy Carter, who lost his reelection campaign, was drubbed. Poppy Bush only won 37% of the vote in 1992. The lone exception to this rule is 2004, which found George W. Bush winning reelection about as narrowly as it is possible to win.
Basically, people are able to reach a verdict on their sitting presidents, and it is very rare for the nation to be all that divided about the matter.
The other day I wrote about Harry Truman’s successful campaign for reelection in 1948, and that still serves as a counterexample to what I’m saying. Truman won narrowly. But Truman wasn’t a true incumbent and was seeking election for the first time.
I believe Obama will probably win at least as big as Clinton won in 1996, and perhaps close to as big as Lyndon Johnson won in 1964.
And, if he loses, I expect him to lose decisively, including in states we consider to be reliably blue.
People are going to come to a decision, and that decision is going to be similar whether it’s the voters of Connecticut or Missouri. This will not be a red/blue election.
and when he wins, Obama may become the 2nd best GOP president of the past 50 years…. given his current track record.
o, btw, did you noticewhat Ann Coulter said about Kent State?
http://wonkette.com/447009/ann-coulter-police-should-fire-on-liberal-protesters-more-often
interesting BooMan. don’t know if I agree with you, but it’s something to think about.
I think Booman’s analysis ignores the polarization that occurred in this country in the late 90s-early 00s. We’re not going to see 1964-level margins, or even 1996 margins, for quite some time, because there are quite simply a lot fewer swing voters in play than there used to be.
The 2008 results are probably just about as decisive as we can expect to see for the next few presidential elections. I expect Obama to win, and I don’t think the election will even be doubt, and his margin will be large by contemporary standards, but a large margin by contemporary standards is still a single-digit number.
The country has always been polarized, what was unique about the first decade of this century was the equality of that polarization.
When you are choosing between Joe Lieberman and Dick Cheney, it’s hard to see much difference. And 2004 was a very special case election with two horrible tickets in a very charged political climate.
It’s not normal for people to differ that much about whether the president deserves reelection. The Deep South voted for Goldwater because of Jim Crow, and they’d probably vote for Bachmann over Obama for the same reason, but the rest of the country is capable of making a more honest decision. I believe they will, one way or that other.
If Obama wins in a blowout, doesn’t that mean we keep the Senate? And will he campaign with any candidates?
No, it doesn’t mean that.
It’s a prerequisite for our keeping the Senate, but necessarily sufficient.
We have almost no pickup opportunities. Scott Brown is polling strong. And Nevada and Arizona are by no means assured pick-ups for us. And that’s it. We have nothing else to hope for right now.
Brown has no set opponent. Also, 10% to 15% of MA voters are going to pull the lever for both Brown and President Obama? I doubt that.
Calvin, from your lips to the voters’ hands, but I wouldn’t be surprised if 20% of Massachusetts voters voted for both Obama and Brown. Ticket-splitting like that is pretty common in the suburban and exurban belts around Boston.
It wouldn’t surprise me, either. Massachusetts voters are allergic to religious right, national Republicans, but that’s really not Brown’s profile.
I’m not predicting this will happen – we’ll see who his opponent is – but I wouldn’t be surprised if, given a weak or compromised Democratic opponent, Brown got serious crossover votes.
The country has always been polarized, what was unique about the first decade of this century was the equality of that polarization.
The equality of the polarization, but also its absolute degree. There used to be something like 30% of the electorate that were swing voters, and now that number has been cut in half, if not more.
So, of the three elections in the first part of this century, all three of them were special cases that don’t demonstrate anything structural that would indicate that elections have become closer. They were all just special cases in the same way. We had the closest election in history, followed by the closest election featuring an incumbent wartime president in history, followed by an election in the midst of an economic crisis in which the incumbent president’s party, represented by a candidate with much less political skill than his opponent, lost by mid-single digits.
That’s a theory.
It’s not normal for people to differ that much about whether the president deserves reelection.
It’s not normal to have three elections in a row decided by single digits, either. I think there’s something going on that goes beyond the particulars of each election.
I just looked up historical election results.
Before 2000-2004-2008, the last time there were three consecutive presidential elections decided by single digits was 1892-1896-1900.
Occam’s Razor suggests that something has changed.
Okay, and I just looked up the 1904 presidential election.
Teddy Roosevelt: 56.4% popular vote and 336 electoral votes
Alton Parker: 37.6% popular vote and 140 electoral votes
So, the pattern broke. That’s what I am predicting.
Good thing, because your first graphs are textbook hedging.
“The pattern broke.”
Indeed it did. Between 1868 and 1900 – nine consecutive election – exactly one featured a margin in the double digits. Eight of the nine were single-digit margins.
Then, the pattern broke in 1904. There was a longstanding pattern of close elections, and then something changed. Eight of the next eleven elections featured double-digit margins.
Is there some pattern, some underlying feature of the electoral landscape, that came into being in 2000 and ended after 2008? I suppose it’s possible, but it would be very odd for such a thing to happen in the middle of a president’s term.
The only way I can see a double-digit margin in the 2012 elections is if a strong third party candidate pulls votes exclusively from one candidate or the other. Maybe the Republicans will nominate a normal person and a Tea Party candidate will enter the race.
I think this ignores half of the equation – the opponent. While we’re still 17 months out, a lot of people, on both left and right, have made up their minds (for vastly different reasons) that Obama does not deserve re-election. The economy alone would normally be enough to doom him.
But for most folks on the left and even center, the Republican alternative is likely to be wholly unacceptable. I don’t know that we’ve ever had that combination – we really haven’t had a nominee on the fringe of mainstream political thought since Goldwater or McGovern, and while both LBJ & Nixon had their partisan haters, neither Johnson (who also wasn’t a true incumbent) nor Nixon had the kind of economic baggage Obama has had. I suspect the situation is a lot more fluid than historical precedent tells us. Seventeen months is a long time to go.
How about a get the hell out of Afghanistan/raise taxes on the plutocrats election? Oh well…
This is going to be a sanity/insanity election. And by the Congressional elections we will see just how many insane people there are in each state. And that’s regardless of whether the Republican candidate (it’s still a small probability) or the Democratic candidate represent the sanity electorate.
He will lose, decisively or otherwise. Well–he’ll lose if U2 releases a new album in 2012, as they recently threatened.
I’m serious. Every year U2 has released a new album, the Republican nominee has won: 80, 84, 88, 00, 04 (the years where they released new material in the 90s were 91, 93, 95, and 97). The most recent album was slated for 08 but put off to 09. Naturally, this meant doom for McCain and the White House for Obama.
Hey, stranger things have cost people elections, right? 🙂
LOL.
And here I was thinking U6 was the most important factor.
That Redskins thing too, the only time that has ever been wrong was with Kerry.
The other theory I had was that Philadelphia world series championships bookended Reaganism – 1980 and 2008 – but Obama likes Reagan a bit too much for that to really be true.
If the administration is serious that they’re going to pivot from jobs to the deficit, if they’re going to continue to pressure senate dems for a smaller jobs bill, if they’re not going to address the fact that we have 9.1% unemployment (official rate, and we know how distorted that number is), if the economy continues to shit the bed and more people lose their jobs, they will blame the president.
That’s simply the way it works. As atrios has said, over and over again:
Wanna win? Get Americans some fuckin’ JOBS.
How?
Seriously.
Other than persuading Bernanke to do more…
Do you think Boehner or McConnell are going to help?
Here’s what to watch for. Will Biden cut a deal that has hidden stimulus? I assume that’s the main thing they’ll be looking to trade. More money immediately in return for much, much less later on.
They have nothing else to try and future cuts can always be rescinded by a more Democratic congress.
They did a good job of doing that with the budget deal, which actually added money in the short-term and involved a bunch of phantom cuts of money that wasn’t going to be used anyway.
Boo, that’s the point. I don’t think they WANT to concentrate on that. They want to talk about the deficit, and that’s what they’re doing.
No one except beltway gasbags give a shit about the deficit. People want, and need jobs. And if the administration can’t create work due to the GOP, the GOP needs to be called out repeatedly.
For pete’s sake dude, you saw, just like I did, that the white hosue told the senate to come up with a smaller jobs bill. They just had this big ol’ article published in the Washington Post abouit that super-genius Tim Geithner.
I agree with mr. atrios: the administration knows what they need to do, they don’t want to do it.
Recess appointing people to the Fed might help somewhat. In fact it probably would have helped more to do that years ago. But it hasn’t been done.
You say they might be more effective if they are confirmed in the traditional way. Certainly. But that’s not an option and it clearly hasn’t been one for some time. Recess appointments aren’t as good as confirmation but they are better than the nothing we have now.
we have worse than nothing, we have Barack Hoover Obama.
The ability to actually create jobs is limited in this environment, and Republicans have made it Job One to see to it that none are created. So I would amend what you say to “Get Americans some fuckin’ JOBS, or at least be seen as the party that is doing everything possible to get jobs while making the Repubs pay a price for obstructing those efforts”.
Remember, it’s not just Congressional Republicans who are blocking job creation: Republican Governors and state legislatures are ELIMINATING JOBS all over the country, exacerbating the unemployment nightmare in a way that is out of reach of the executive branch. Perhaps the best tool in the executive toolkit is to direct funds towards cooperative blue and purple states, even beyond the traditional election-year patronage. This means we may be increasingly headed towards an even more divided country in which blue and purple states work in cooperation with the federal government while red states go all Texas.
I agree with this 100%. In fact,that’s why I was so irritated with the white house coming out yesterday and telling the Senate their jobs bill is too expensive. That move publicly undermined “be[ing] seen as the party that is doing everything possible to get jobs while making the Repubs pay a price for obstructing those efforts.”
If last month’s unpleasantness on the jobs front turns out to be a one-time blip caused by gas prices, which are now dropping, and we go back to where we were for the half year before that (a little under 200,000 jobs added per month), that should be good enough that the economy won’t kill Obama.
If last month represents an actual turnaround, though, then he’s in trouble.
Those are, I think, the relevant elections. And it’s going to come down to the economy. If we bounce back from the current slowdown to decent growth like we had a while back, he’ll win.
If not, I think it depends on the opponent. If he’s up against Mittens, he’ll lose. If Palin, he’ll win anyway. (I don’t think she’s running, and the country has made up its mind that she’s an idiot.) If it’s one of the others, I think it winds up being fairly close.
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