Posted on 06/15/2008 7:11:48 AM PDT by BerniesFriend
Many historians see little chance for McCain
David Paul Kuhn
One week into the general election, the polls show a dead heat. But many presidential scholars doubt that John McCain stands much of a chance, if any.
Historians belonging to both parties offered a litany of historical comparisons that give little hope to the Republican. Several saw Barack Obama’s prospects as the most promising for a Democrat since Roosevelt trounced Hoover in 1932.
“This should be an overwhelming Democratic victory,” said Allan Lichtman, an American University presidential historian who ran in a Maryland Democratic senatorial primary in 2006. Lichtman, whose forecasting model has correctly predicted the last six presidential popular vote winners, predicts that this year, “Republicans face what have always been insurmountable historical odds.” His system gives McCain a score on par with Jimmy Carter’s in 1980.
“McCain shouldn’t win it,” said presidential historian Joan Hoff, a professor at Montana State University and former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency. She compared McCain’s prospects to those of Hubert Humphrey, whose 1968 loss to Richard Nixon resulted in large part from the unpopularity of sitting Democratic president Lyndon Johnson.
“It is one of the worst political environments for the party in power since World War II,” added Alan Abramowitz, a professor of public opinion and the presidency at Emory University. His forecasting model — which factors in gross domestic product, whether a party has completed two terms in the White House and net presidential approval rating — gives McCain about the same odds as Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and Carter in 1980 — both of whom were handily defeated in elections that returned the presidency to the previously out-of-power party. “It would be a pretty stunning upset if McCain won,” Abramowitz said.
What’s more, Republicans have held the presidency for all but 12 years since the South became solidly Republican in the realignment of 1968 — which is among the longest runs with one party dominating in American history. “These things go in cycles,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “The public gets tired of one approach to politics. There is always a measure of optimism in this country, so they turn to the other party.”
That desire for change also tends to manifest itself at the end of a president’s second term. Only twice in the 20th century has a party won a third consecutive term in the White House, most recently in 1988, when George H.W. Bush replaced the term-limited Ronald Reagan, who was about twice as popular in the last year of his presidency as President George W. Bush is now.
But the biggest obstacle in McCain’s path may be running in the same party as the most unpopular president America has had since at least the advent of modern polling. Only Harry Truman and Nixon — both of whom were dogged by unpopular wars abroad and political scandals at home — have been nearly as unpopular in their last year in office, and both men’s parties lost the presidency in the following election.
Though the Democratic-controlled Congress is nearly as unpopular as the president, Lichtman says the Democrats’ 2006 midterm wins resemble the midterm congressional gains of the out-party in 1966 and 1974, which both preceded a retaking of the White House two years later.
One of the few bright spots historians noted is that the public generally does not view McCain as a traditional Republican. And, as Republicans frequently point out, McCain is not an incumbent.
“Open-seat elections are somewhat different, so the referendum aspect is somewhat muted,” said James Campbell, a professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo who specializes in campaigns and elections.
“McCain would be in much better shape if Bush’s approval rating were at 45 to 50 percent,” Campbell continued. “But the history is that in-party candidates are not penalized or rewarded to the same degree as incumbents.”
Campbell still casts McCain as the underdog. But he said McCain might have more appeal to moderates than Obama if the electorate decides McCain is “center right” while Obama is “far left.” Democrats have been repeatedly undone when their nominee was viewed as too liberal, and even as polls show a rise in the number of self-identified Democrats, there has been no corresponding increase in the number of self-identified liberals.
Campbell also notes that McCain may benefit from the Democratic divisions that were on display in the primary, as Republicans did in 1968, when George Wallace took the electoral votes of several Deep South states that could have given Humphrey a victory over Nixon. Democrats benefited from similar Republican divisions in 1976, when Ronald Reagan battled Gerald Ford all the way to the party’s nominating convention.
Still, many historians remain extremely skeptical about McCain’s prospects. “I can’t think of an upset where the underdog faced quite the odds that McCain faces in this election,” said Sidney Milkis, a professor of presidential politics at the University of Virginia. Even "Truman didn’t face as difficult a political context as McCain.”
Do the idiots who wrote this article actually believe that Humphrey would have carried Mississippi, Alabama, and the other deep south states if the 1968 election had been a straight Nixon vs. Humphrey race? Wallace kept Nixon from winning by a wider margin, he didn't cause Humphrey to lose.
>>>>What world are you in? Obama may be the weakest presidential candidate in history.
Huh? The Rats have won elections with Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter.
The benchmarks they are using with Obama as a candidate, are not the benchmarks that you would use as a conservative.
Don’t “most historians” also think President Bush is the worst president EVER? Who cares.
What a laughable notion... Since Harry Truman, Americans have voted for one outwardly liberal President (Jimmah Carter) and even he didn’t fully run as a liberal and the fact that he was a Southerner helped enormously.
Kennedy ran as a conservative, Johnson won because of Kennedy Sympathy, Carter also won (and barley) because of Watergate, Clinton won because of Perot.
Americans are not pining for a liberal to run their country and never have been, and despite the liberal media and their attempt to paint the United States as all Democrat because they have more registered voters. The fact is Americans usually prefer somebody more conservative in charge and always have.
The liberals and anti-war movements tried their best and with a large amount of help from the big three networks and just about every liberal rag (NT Times, Wash Post, LA Times, etc.) to unseat Nixon in 1972. The result was the largest margin of victory by any President in the history of the United States.
The United States in currently occupying two former enemy countries, they have another enemy country attempting to make a Nuclear weapon, they are also at war against Islamic extremist and the last thing they want or need running the White House is an outwardly liberal anti-war candidate.
You want to know about history... Just ask the last liberal anti-war candidate to run in the United States about history... Mr. George McGovern, the loser to Nixon in 1972.
McCain is a deeply flawed candidate. After his speech to La Raza in August, his support from Reps will decline even further. You can't out Democrat a Democrat. The contrast of the young, biracial stud against the oldest man ever nominated for the Presidency will be striking. It will be change versus the status quo, the past versus the future. And the difference in money will be enormous. McCain is going to take many Reps down ballot with him.
“From Audacity of Hope: ‘I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.’ ~ BO “
I couldn’t believe he said something so outrageous, so I looked it up and it seems like the quote was doctored.
Well, actually the approval rating is over twice as low as the President's, but let's just gloss over that for the purposes of this MSM propaganda piece.
Liberals keep deluding themselves every election season until they get their rear ends whooped after actual votes are cast. Didn’t they say the same thing about Monsieur Jean Francois Kerrie (who visited Vietnam during the war) ? With non stop 24/7 footages of burning cars, bodies, dead US soldiers, it should have been a landslide for Kerry.
It’s a good thing the next President of The United States isn’t being elected by “historians”, whatever those are.
>>>>I want lots of debates. We should demand them.
Newt proposed one-on-one debates along the lines of Lincoln-Douglas 1 1/2 years ago. He even did two himself as a kind of model (one with Mario Cuomo, one with John Kerry).
The major reason Newt never appeared in the Republican debates is that he was repelled by the circus-like nature of them. For a brief period he was spitting bullets of contempt every time he discussed those debates in public.
Gore won the popular vote and Kerry came very close to winning against an incumbent wartime president during good economic times. This will be more like Goldwater versus LBJ or Bush 41 or Dole versus Clinton.
One would think that if Mr. Lichtman's electoral forecasting models were so accurate, he might have spared himself the humiliation of running in a senate primary race where he ended up with 1% of the vote in 2006.
Yep! We have two candidates who are unelectable. McCain won because he took a bunch of winner-take-all primaries with like 30% of the vote when there were multiple candidates in the race. Obama took an early lead over Hillary when no one knew anything about him, and because she’s so unpopular. By the time the truth came out about Obama (i.e., that he’s a racist, Marxist, elitist fraud surrounded by crooks) his lead was insurmountable. Even so, Hillary staged something of a comeback and was winning more primaries by the end of the season. She fell just short of pulling off a victory.
I’m betting on McCain. He’ll lose a lot of right-wingers (like me) who will vote third party or write someone in, but that’ll be more than made up by moderate, white, working class Dems abandoning the Obamination.
I can see how they’d say that McCain doesn’t have a chance given Bush’s unpopularity (thanks, media for all the distortions) the price of gas, the war dragging on longer than we thought. BUT, Obama is a naive, inexperienced, possible secret Muslim who went to a church that is anti-American and race baiting. Obama is really a horrible candidate - he can do one thing and that’s read a speech. So how do the historians figure in all the hot buttons for Obama? At least with McCain we know what we’re getting.
Ever wonder who these dolts are who write revisionist history?
Ridiculous...and leftist propaganda....per usual.
OK. Sure. We can take this guys analysis to the bank.
Allan Lichtman recently published a history of the conservative movement entitled White Protestant Nation (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008). While I haven't had time to read the book, I have looked it over, and it seems to have been well-researched. However, Lichtman seems to be arguing that conservatism is essentially a white Protestant movement, a thesis with which most conservatives would vehemently disagree.
That's an interesting point and it could make an interesting "resolved" issue for debate. Roman Catholics are GENERALLY simultaneously morally conservative yet socially liberal.
Americans GENERALLY practice what is convenient. American priests and cardinals will grant Communion to pro-abortion politicians. It would start a radical sea change in the American zeitgeist if these same Catholic elites who protest the war, took the action of rejecting Communion to pro-abortion people.
BTW, Lichtman is an MSM, liberal hack masquerading as an historian.
“McCain shouldn’t win it,” said presidential historian Joan Hoff, a professor at Montana State University and former president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency. She compared McCain’s prospects to those of Hubert Humphrey, whose 1968 loss to Richard Nixon resulted in large part from the unpopularity of sitting Democratic president Lyndon Johnson.I guess they completely discount the chaos surrounding the Democrat nomination, the Chicago Convention protests, the intense split between the extremist McCarthyites, McGovernites and the old-line Humphrey Democrats. Those minor distractions, of course, were completely irrelevant...it all had to do with Johnson...They must be giving out doctorates of history like toilet paper.
Step away from the computer and go for a walk or something.
BS. Comparing the economy of today to a full blown depression is ridiculous.
“His system gives McCain a score on par with Jimmy Carter’s in 1980.”
Pretty lousy system he has there. First Carter was the incumbent, inept President during a bad economic period. No comparison.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.