Looks like a landslide to me.
Posted on 03/18/2019 2:16:56 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The next election belongs to Trump.
Donald Trump will win the 2020 presidential election.
That’s not a prediction. That is a projection based upon history.
Beginning with the presidential contest of 1900, the party holding the White House has stood for its second term a total of 12 times. In 11 of those 12 campaigns, the incumbent party has triumphed. That’s about a 92 percent success rate. Those odds must look pretty good to a swashbuckling politician of the Trump stripe.
There is a single exception to the two-term incumbent party lock: President Jimmy Carter. The Georgian lost his re-election battle in 1980. At that time, the Democrat Party had held the White House for only four years, following Carter’s victory over GOP President Gerald Ford in 1976.
Undermining Carter’s presidency was the widespread perception that his time in office was a period of “malaise.” The economy sputtered, inflation skyrocketed, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and the Iranians held hostages in the American embassy, a persistent sign of the administration’s weakness and ineffectiveness. In retrospect, it may be too easy to attribute Carter’s four-year loss to the greatness of his 1980 opponent, Ronald Reagan. But at the time, Reagan was viewed by Democrats and their mainstream media allies as an aging, warmongering, not-very-bright B-movie actor in the thrall of an extreme conservative ideology. He would, they thought, be the easiest Republican to defeat.
Boy, were they ever wrong.
Besides Carter’s own missteps and his underestimating Reagan, two other political factors contributed to that singular four-year Democrat loss. First, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, heir to the liberal halo of his assassinated brothers, challenged incumbent Carter in the 1980 primaries. Although Carter won a tough nomination fight, he failed to unite or inspire the liberal activists embittered by their Bay State hero’s defeat.
The 1980 election also witnessed the third-party candidacy of independent John Anderson. Anderson may have served as a Republican congressman, but his trajectory had moved steadily leftward over his two decades in the House. By 1980, Anderson came out of central casting as a RINO’s RINO. While he certainly took votes from both parties, his largest percentage came in the Kennedy home state of Massachusetts, where Anderson broke the 15 percent mark. This provided just the margin needed for Reagan to take the Commonwealth, a feat he repeated in his 1984 landslide. Astonishingly, Ronald Reagan, the most conservative president of the post-World War II epic, squeaked out presidential wins in the most liberal state in the nation.
The Carter four-year Democrat jinx has lessons for President Trump. One, avoid an economic downturn at all costs. Two, stay away from potential foreign policy quagmires in North Korea or the Mideast. Three, make every effort to prevent any viable primary challenge. Four, beware a third-party candidate who could siphon voters away from the GOP and then swing critical electoral votes to the Democrats.
If Carter is the one president in more than a century who failed to hold his party in the presidency for at least two terms, he is hardly the only incumbent to lose re-election in the 20th Century. Four times, an incumbent GOP president lost for re-election. Still, each loss followed from eight to 16 years of Republican dominance in the corner office. That’s quite a different scenario from a party losing after only four years in the White House; there is a certain inescapable logic to the eight-year cycle.
One time, the Great Depression cost the GOP the White House. Twice, third party candidates helped submarine Republican incumbents. In 1912 running as the third party “Bull Moose” candidate, former Republican President Teddy Roosevelt challenged his designated successor President William Howard Taft, providing the opening for Democrat Woodrow Wilson to serve two terms. Roosevelt proved the most potent third party candidate of the modern two-party era. One might fairly call him the second party candidate, as he tallied more popular and electoral votes than Republican standard bearer Taft.
In 1992, Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot sabotaged the re-election effort of fellow Lone Star Stater George H. W. Bush. Of course, Bush, himself, had already undermined his own campaign by inking a tax-hike deal with big-spending Democrats that simultaneously surrendered the anti-tax re-election issue and broke his word solemnly declared at the Republican convention: “Read my lips, no new taxes.”
That Bush tax hike was inevitably linked to the Bush recession that fed Bill Clinton his campaign theme, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Rarely in political history has a single poor decision caused as much self-inflicted political pain. In the third term of the Reagan-led Republican ascendancy, President Bush carelessly ruptured his political coalition, by giving into the Democrats on tax increases. This helped secure his uncertain, hand-wringing image as a pragmatist willing to work across the aisle, while tarnishing his personal credibility, an irreplaceable political asset. Then his tax hikes inevitably connected to a severe economic downturn presenting an almost insurmountable difficulty for an incumbent, at the same time it gave Clinton his surefire top-tier issue.
Unless he’s willing to follow the four-year rule of Democrat Jimmy Carter or the single-term George H. W. Bush model, President Trump would be well-advised to learn from their mistakes. Lauded in some circles as centrists or moderates, their paper-thin political support crumbled in the face of economic problems and demonstrable weaknesses.
Since the Carter years, Americans have grown accustomed to two-term presidents. Beginning with Ronald Reagan’s White House years, political parties have routinely held the executive branch for eight years. For the first time since the earliest days of the Republic, we have witnessed three consecutive presidents serve out two full terms apiece: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. And going back to Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980, the United States has seen four out of five chief executives serve two full terms. The last time a similar pattern of consistency held in the presidency, illustrious figures roamed the White House corridors: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew “Old Hickory” Jackson, interrupted only by the single term of President John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts.
For all the media carping about turmoil and uncertainty, we live in the midst of a remarkable wave of presidential stability.
Will Donald J. Trump maintain that historic trend?
One cannot predict with absolute certainty. But those 11-to-1 odds look persuasive.
Fortune favors the bold! :)
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Fortes Fortuna Juvat!
Looks like a landslide to me.
If Bush had not said “Read my lips” and then raise taxes, there would have been no Ross Perot. Ross Perot ran for the specific reason that we did not like Bush I.
He only won the first time because he was on Reagan’s coattails. Interesting that Reagan is the only president to have coattails since the 1920s.
“Lots of people blame the “Read my Lips...” comment. They are wrong. The blame goes to Ross Perot.”
I respectfully disagree :-). HW Bush ran a horrible campaign in 1992. It was almost as if he mailed it in early and let Clinton win. He seemed to have had NO desire to serve a second term.
Perot not running *might* have given Bush a second term, but I stress *might* :-) ... I believe Bush did everything he wanted to set up his new world order in 4 years and had a Democratic candidate that was willing to do more dirty work that most Republicans (at the time) would have not supported.
Clinton came into office with a D house and senate ... his biggest blunder (from a globalist perspective) was letting his idiot wife try and shove Hillarycare down our throats. Outside of that, Clinton accomplished a lot (to our detriment).
Very true.
Even before the election - before there was even an internet - it was widely known that Clinton was a rapist and a con artist (White Water, Rose Law Firm, Troopergate, etc. etc.)
But did the media bring this up? Did they report it?
Hah!
Funny how that worked out.
Caliph Baraq did the same thing with Obamacare.
The Dems spent their 2 years fumbling on that when they could have jammed through stuff like card check unionization and cap & tax energy policy.
Perot served a very useful (idiot) purpose.
He drove home the point that voting for a third party is good for liberalism.
Every year we have the same old trolls who say they will stay home. Or they will vote for a 3rd party. or some such baloney.
But in the end we hold our noses and vote for the least evil. (McCain, Romney, whatever.)
Conservatives who voted for Perot went full retard in 92. Thanks guys. We shore do love our Clinton Dynasty you gave us.
You are wrong. It was bush's fault. He made a promise and broke it.
It wasn't that he said "No new taxes, read my lips", it's that we believed him and he lied to us.
F all the bushes.
I'm glad the lying son of a bitch went down in flames.
The only difference between bush 1 and clintoon was a rape and a couple of hundred blow jobs.
Those two were brothers from another mother, UN loving, globalist pricks.
It was bush 1 that started the nafta deal in 1992, remember Ross Perot kept saying, "That giant sucking sound you hear, is the sound of American jobs going down the drain to Mexico". Perot was against nafta and it wasn't ratified until 1994 under clintooooon.
Also, Clinton let the Democrats run wild with gun control initiatives the first two years.
You are correct on all points.
The myth that “Perot gave us Clinton” is based on the belief that the vast majority of Perot votes would have gone to Bush.
In fact, millions of Perot voters wouldn’t have voted at all if it was just Bush and Clinton in the race, who were just opposite sides of the same counterfeit coin.
The popular vote in 1992 was about 12 million higher than in 1988, and the popular vote in 1996 was about 8 million less than in 1992. The Perot candidacy was responsible for much of that spike in voting in 1992.
Exit polling in 1992 indicated that Perot drew votes from both major candidates more or less equally.
In some ways, Perot was the prototype for Trump.
Your absolutely correct. This last election might have gone the same way for me. If it would have been Jeb bush against Hillary Clinton, I had already decided I wouldn’t vote for either one. Thank God Trump ran and won the nomination. A nomination I believe the RNC didn’t want him to have.
And Kay-sick? What a joke. The man can't win the Presidency against Trump.
Exactly right. People forget that Ruby Ridge happened on Bush’s watch, and Bush signed an import ban on rifles. The Bushes are elites who sought to limit freedom for the masses.
But in the end we hold our noses and vote for the least evil. (McCain, Romney, whatever.)
Not quite so. Large numbers of Ted Cruz conservatives do not come out and vote for the McCains and Romneys. But moderate center right people who would not vote for Ted Cruz will come out for a Republian moderate.
Separately, there are millions of Evangelicals who came out for the first, and only time, in 1994. They were disillusioned by the 1995 Senate and have never come out since. Of course half of them have now died of old age.
The result is that conservatives down ballot are hurt.
It is the rare Ronald Reagan who can attract both.... or an effective ground game where the voters do not vote for the candidate or party, they vote for their local precinct worker.
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