Comparing the Bush and Reagan Eras

By Ruy Teixeira, The Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. Posted December 2, 2004.

From the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation:

In this edition of Public Opinion Watch:
(covering polls and related articles from the weeks of Nov. 22-28, 2004)

• Comparing the Bush and Reagan Eras
• No Honeymoon for Bush, No Parity on Party Identification for Republicans
• How Important Were the Fast-Growing Counties to Bush's Victory

Comparing the Bush and Reagan Eras

Ron Brownstein had an interesting column, “GOP's Future Sits Precariously on Small Cushion of Victory" in the Los Angeles Times last Monday that put Bush's reelection victory in some much-needed historical context. He pointed out:

Measured as a share of the popular vote, Bush beat Kerry by just 2.9 percentage points [actually now down to 2.7 points]. ... That's the smallest margin of victory for a re-elected president since 1828.

The only previous incumbent who won a second term nearly so narrowly was Democrat Woodrow Wilson: In 1916, he beat Republican Charles E. Hughes by 3.1 percentage points. Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4.5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.

In that 1916 election, Wilson won only 277 out of 531 electoral college votes. That makes Wilson the only re-elected president in the past century who won with fewer electoral college votes than Bush's 286.

Measured another way, Bush won 53 percent of the 538 electoral college votes available this year. Of all the chief executives reelected since the 12th Amendment separated the vote for president and vice president – a group that stretches back to Thomas Jefferson in 1804 – only Wilson (at 52 percent) won a smaller share of the available electoral college votes.

But, even more interesting to me, since I've been pondering the comparison between the Bush era and the Reagan era, is the following point he makes about what a reelection victory has usually meant to the incumbent party and what typically has followed that re-election victory:

Throughout American history, the re-election of a president has usually been a high-water mark for the president's party [emphasis added]. In almost every case, the party that won re-election has lost ground in the next presidential election, both in the popular vote and in the electoral college.

The decline has been especially severe in the past half century. Since 1952 there have been six presidential elections immediately following a president's reelection. In those six races, the candidate from the incumbent's party has fallen short of the reelection numbers by an average of 207 electoral college votes and 8.4 percentage points in the popular vote.

Because his margin was so tight, Bush didn't leave the GOP with enough of a cushion to survive even a fraction of that erosion in four years. Even if the GOP in 2008 matches the smallest electoral college fall-off in the past half century – the 99-vote decline between Reagan in 1984 and George H. W. Bush in 1988 – that would still leave the party well short of a majority.

Very interesting stuff indeed. And it suggests that comparing the GOP's previous reelection victory and the current one is an exercise with more than academic implications.

Start with the obvious: Reagan got 58.8 percent of the popular vote in 1984, besting his Democratic opponent by 18.2 percentage points, compared to Bush's 2.7 point victory margin, and carried 98 percent of the electoral vote, compared to Bush's 53 percent. Indeed, if you put the two elections of the Reagan era together, we find Reagan averaging 54.8 percent of the popular vote with a fourteen-point victory margin and 94 percent of the electoral vote, compared to Bush's average of 49.4 of the popular vote, a 1.1-point victory margin and 52 percent of the electoral vote.

Ruy Teixeira is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation.

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