Why Bush will win re-election

[Gordon B]

Since 1900 there have been 10 elections when the incumbent party was trying for only its second consecutive term in the White House

1900 McKinley Win
1916 Wilson Win
1924 Coolidge Win
1936 FDR Win
1956 Ike Win
1964 LBJ Win
1972 Nixon Win
1980 Carter Loss
1984 Reagan Win
1996 Clinton Win

The candidate of the incumbent party won 9 of 10 times. Only Jimmy Carter, who was powerless against the Ayatollah Khomeini (444 day hostage crisis), runaway inflation (13.5% in 1980 ) and high unemployment (7.2% in 1980), managed to lose.

The last five winners on the list averaged 59% of the two-party vote. After two terms, the incumbent party's advantage since 1952 has been nill. FDR was the exception but that was mostly because the American public did not want to change horses during WWII.

Hillary Clinton knows that her chances are much better in 2008 after a Bush win this year then they would have been in 2004.

[Monte Smith]

Hey Gordon, isn't there a much-deployed piece of small print in the financial sector to the effect that "past performance is no guarantee of future earnings?"

[Dr Dave]

George W. Bush is powerless against Osama bin Laden. Even members of his own party say his cut-taxes/raise-spending tactics will bankrupt the country. He's backed into an investigation of the CIA and the rest of the US intelligence apparatus which I personally suspect will do him no good, no matter how he tries to spin it. U.S. troops are still dying every day in Iraq. He may still be able to wrap himself in the Flag and get re-elected as the Great Protector Against Terrorists, but frankly, I don't think I'd want to be George W. Bush in a second term.

[Uli]

Even Gordon used to have better reasons why Bush will get elected.

[Monte Smith]

Originally posted by Dr Dave
George W. Bush is powerless against Osama bin Laden.

Hahaha. Dave, you ARE in a funk.

[moneyp]

Since 1900 there have been 10 elections when the incumbent party was trying for only its second consecutive term in the White House

Bush Sr.???

[RBS]

Yeah, what about Bush, Sr.?!?

And like Monte said, past performance.....

And with all due respect, Nixon isn't a great argument. He quit halfway through his second term.

[Sergio Zamora]

Bush Sr. succeeded Reagan, who served two terms.

[bostontricky]

Waiting for Chris to explain how you can't re-elect someone who was appointed...

[RBS]

I see. "Incumbent party," not "Incumbent President." I think that's a bit of a stretch, honestly. And I'm always interested in what Gordon posts, too.

[Sergio Zamora]

Originally posted by RBS
I see. "Incumbent party," not "Incumbent President." I think that's a bit of a stretch, honestly. And I'm always interested in what Gordon posts, too.

It's Gordon's game, it's Gordon's rules.

[RBS]

I've always felt that way.

It's Gordon's world, we just live in it.

[Gordon B]

Originally posted by Sergio Zamora
It's Gordon's game, it's Gordon's rules.

How many people here really thought that Reagan would sweep the country against Mondale in 1984?
Why is Hillary waiting for 2008?

Monte, no guarantees but it's hard to deny that Bush gains the maximum incumbency advantage.

Nixon won 49 states after the Watergate break-in. The country only turned against him after the Arab oil embargo wrecked the economy.

[walto]

"The candidate of the incumbent party won 9 of 10 times. "

This, however, is only in those particular cases in which "the incumbent party was trying for only its second consecutive term in the White House."


What a strange and at least apparently meaningless statistic, Gordon. Still, 9-10 is 9-10. But I've got one for you. In the only other time in the history of the United States when a member of the Bush family has run for re-election for the presidency, he lost.

I admit, however, that one's silly too.

[Gordon B]

Originally posted by walto
"The candidate of the incumbent party won 9 of 10 times. "

This, however, is only in those particular cases in which "the incumbent party was trying for only its second consecutive term in the White House."


What a strange and at least apparently meaningless statistic, Gordon. Still, 9-10 is 9-10. But I've got one for you. In the only other time in the history of the United States when a member of the Bush family has run for re-election for the presidency, he lost.

I admit, however, that one's silly too.

Walt, I don't now why you think it's silly. It's conventional wisdom that the incumbent has an advantage. However, upon a breakdown of election data it appears that the adavantage is only until the electorate is "tired" of the same party being in power for a long time. Thus, a party that's held the Presidency for only one-term has a large advantage. The difference between 1 term and two term incumbent parties is something like 8 pct of the two-party vote. That's huge.

When Bush lost in 1992, the country was tired of Republicans not Bush specifically, IMO.

Bush v. Kerry is shaping up along the lines of Reagan v. Mondale, IMO. Deficit spending and defense spending were high for both Republicans. Both Democrats promised to raise taxes. The Republican incumbent had followed a Democratic President in both cases.

In case you question my credibility as a forecaster, let me state that I've made money for my company's investors in currency trading in 12 of the last 14 months, averaging over 30%/year over four years and I've come in 1st, 3rd, and 2nd in the last three years in the office football pool (49 players this year). That's not counting all of the cds I've won from baseball bets here.

[Chris D]

Originally posted by Gordon B
...Nixon won 49 states after the Watergate break-in. The country only turned against him after the Arab oil embargo wrecked the economy.

This is so absurd as to be laughable. The country turned on him when the depths of Watergate and the Dirty Tricksters came to light. None of the upper echelon's involvement was known at the time of election.

[Gordon B]

Originally posted by Chris D
This is so absurd as to be laughable. The country turned on him when the depths of Watergate and the Dirty Tricksters came to light. None of the upper echelon's involvement was known at the time of election.

You really think that the American people would have pressured their Congressmen to turn Nixon out if the economy had been strong?

[Chris D]

Given the smoking gun, yes.

[RBS]

I do too, Gordon. I do respect your opinion, fellow Mets fan that you are, but I tend to think that it had less to do with the economy than the fact that Nixon okayed some small time crooks to break in to the Democratic Headquarters.

Was Clinton not thrown out of office because the economy was going strong, or because most people saw through the shenanigans that the Republican party was throwing?

Would he have been tossed out had the economy been doing poorly? I think not.

[walto]

Hey, I'm not picking anybody to beat Bush either, Gordon! This isn't a particularly courageous prediction, you know. I'm just saying that the universe of 10 elections you picked is odd--like doing data-mining based on the first letter of the candidates' last names or something. Why not just look at ALL the incumbent races and leave off this "tired" business. That seems like it's in there just to pad the results. If it's not, lets just see all the "tired elections"--whether the incumbent is involved or not, so we can judge if anything's really going on there. This confounding doesn't really help convince, I don't think.

BWTHDIK--my predictive track record certain pales next to yours!

[frankiepop]

Why Bush will win re-election

he HAS to or gordo owes me TWO cds.







these picks should make abbey a demo- cat.

[frankiepop]

Nixon won 49 states after the Watergate break-in. The country only turned against him after the Arab oil embargo wrecked the economy.

gordon, i am not arguing with the thread's premise, but that quote is false.

i would say - find my 1 historian... = but i am sure there is a crackpot in every crack
pipe.


yes, dick won 49 states after watergate. and there was an embargo, but it was not the embargo that turned the country against him.


it was the watergate hearings later. watergate really wasnt grasped well at all prior to the elections. no proof. woodward and bernstein's book delivers a view before and after the election on watergate's effect.

nixon fell under the senate 3 month summer hearings where you had 7 demo and repub senators slowly and methodically eliciting facts out of haldeman, erlichman, att gen mitchell, and other higher ups. nixon went from a 60 to about a 40. the john dean and tape fiasco was huge.

in the house final reports of nixon literally obstructing justice were revealed on the tapes. nixon had about a 20 rating. in retrospect, it's amazing how he lasted so long under an onslaught of revelations of lying, buying off burglars with millions of hush dollars, erasing the dean conversation, (tip of the ice berg)...

[crawjo]

Well, I think Bush is certainly the favorite. Right now he doesn't look great in the polls against a Democrat, but I think once you actually put Bush next to the guy running against him, it will be back to the "lesser of two evils" thing, and Bush will probably win. Too many people hate him for him to get 59 percent of the vote however. If I had to predict, I'd say it would be something like 52-46. It will be a close, ugly, and contentious election.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by Gordon B
Since 1900 there have been 10 elections when the incumbent party was trying for only its second consecutive term in the White House

1900 McKinley Win
1916 Wilson Win
1924 Coolidge Win
1936 FDR Win
1956 Ike Win
1964 LBJ Win
1972 Nixon Win
1980 Carter Loss
1984 Reagan Win
1996 Clinton Win

The candidate of the incumbent party won 9 of 10 times. Only Jimmy Carter, who was powerless against the Ayatollah Khomeini (444 day hostage crisis), runaway inflation (13.5% in 1980 ) and high unemployment (7.2% in 1980), managed to lose.

The last five winners on the list averaged 59% of the two-party vote. After two terms, the incumbent party's advantage since 1952 has been nill. FDR was the exception but that was mostly because the American public did not want to change horses during WWII.

Hillary Clinton knows that her chances are much better in 2008 after a Bush win this year then they would have been in 2004.

Um.

Didn't George [Bush] the First lose to Clinton in 1992?

Tired of republicans? Hell no...they were tired of multi-TRILLION dollar deficits [gee...it really is true: like father, like son], lies to congress [via Ollie North and Contra Costa] piss poor Domestic policies and a dipshit for a VP.

You're trying too hard, Gordon.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by Gordon B
You really think that the American people would have pressured their Congressmen to turn Nixon out if the economy had been strong?

Ohmigod.

Re-writing history again, are we?

C'mon Gordon...you conveniently left off George the First's loss to Clinton and now you determine that Nixon would have been welcomed back to the presidency with opened arms if he had a strong economy...wha-?

Buddy...stay away from the Ann Coulter bullshit on radio and in print. It's rotting your brain.

[GoodSpeak]

I suppose next you'll tell us segregation was a good thing and the Civil Rights movement was just a shameless power grab.

Un-freakin'-believable.

[Gordon B]

Tim, if you actually read my initial post and the ones that followed, you'd know that you made the same mistake that others did before their error was pointed out. The Republicans had been in power for three terms before GHWB's loss to Clinton in 1992. It's the one-term incumbent party that has the edge. That meant LBJ in 1964 but not GHWB in 1992.

Walt, you view that the 9/10 may just be an in-sample relationship found through data mining, one that won't continue out-of-sample could be correct. However, if you look at the actual percentages of the two party vote, as opposed to the binary result that I posted, the 1 term incumbency for party edge looks much more impressive. If it holds up, Bush, barring a major scandal should get at least 56% of the two-party vote and if the economy is healthy even 58-61%. Time will tell.

• Bush Slips--Even Further
  
  Moments after the polls closed in New Hampshire on January 27, Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie declared that President Bush had won 94 percent of the Republican primary vote. It was a dramatic claim. Unfortunately for Gillespie, it was dramatically inaccurate.
  
  When the Associated Press posted the unofficial returns from the GOP primary, it reported that Bush had won a little less than 86 percent of the vote. The fact that almost one out of every seven New Hampshire voters who took Republican ballots had apparently cast them for someone other than the party's incumbent president drew little note in major media accounts, but it was intriguing enough to merit mention in this column ("Bush Slips -- Among Republicans," Online Beat, 1-20-2004).
  
  As it turns out, however, the unofficial tally by Associated Press significantly underestimated the collapse in the president's fortunes. According to updated figures from the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office, which only today posted a final figure on the total number of ballots cast, only 78 percent of New Hampshire voters who took Republican ballots marked them for Bush. (In one New Hampshire town, Milton, Bush received only 48 percent of the vote, while in a number of others he was held below 60 percent of the vote.)
  
  The figures on the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office website (http:// www.state.nh.us/sos/electionsnew.htm) show than 69,379 New Hampshire voters cast regular and absentee ballots in the Republican primary. Just 53,962 voted for Bush (78 percent). More than one in five Republican primary voters, 22--percent--chose not to vote for Bush.
  
  Where did the renegade Republican votes go? While roughly ten percent of Republican primary voters statewide backed little-known Republicans whose names appeared on the ballot or simply did not vote, a remarkable 8,288 (12 percent) wrote in the names of leading Democratic presidential contenders.
  
  The Democrat who won the most Republican primary votes was Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, who got 3,009 write-in votes, for 4.3 percent of the Republican primary total. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean received 1,888 write-in votes for 2.7 percent. Retired General Wesley Clark got 1,467 Republican write-ins for 2.1 percent.
  
  By contrast, Bush received only 257 write-in votes in the Democratic primary, where a total of 220,053 ballots were cast.
  
  How does the level of support for Bush in this year's Republican primary compare with past primaries in which a supposedly popular president faced no serious opposition? Not well. In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower won 98.9 percent of the Republican primary vote, according to the New Hampshire Political Library. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson won 95.3 percent of the Democratic primary vote. And in 1984 and 1996, Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic President Bill Clinton both secured around 85 percent of the vote in their respective party primaries.
  
  Considering President Bush's less-than-stellar showing in New Hampshire, it should come as little surprise that Republicans in some states have decided to cancel their primaries. In South Carolina, for instance, the state Republican Party's executive committee decided not to hold their state's tradition first-in- the-south primary. They simply endorsed Bush for reelection and agreed to select delegates at district and state Republican Party conventions where, presumably, the president will not have to run the risk of embarrassment at the hands of independent thinking voters.

(Online Beat thanks to a sharp reader, Joe Loy, who alerted us to the shifting New Hampshire Republican primary figures. Thanks also to Paula Penney, an administrative assistant in the New Hampshire Secretary of State's office, who explained that it takes time to get a final count because a lot of New Hampshire votes are still cast on traditional paper ballots. Penney says the results that are now posted should be the last official word on what New Hampshire voters think of Bush--until November.)

[Al in NYC]

OK, perhaps I spoke too soon on the "separate out the Alley" thread.

[GoodSpeak]

Originally posted by Gordon B
Tim, if you actually read my initial post and the ones that followed, you'd know that you made the same mistake that others did before their error was pointed out. The Republicans had been in power for three terms before GHWB's loss to Clinton in 1992. It's the one-term incumbent party that has the edge. That meant LBJ in 1964 but not GHWB in 1992.

Gordon,

George the First was a one term president. Period. Any connections to past or even present day republicans is debatable at best. What about Truman?

C'mon...all you are doing is crunching numbers to fit your initial premise. It takes absolutely no talent to omit certain parts of the whole in order to justify the outcome of it's parts. I think you already knew that or you wouldn't try to sell us this bill of spoiled goods.

The "big picture" tells quite a different tale...I think you know that one, too.