About a week and a half ago, I predicted that President Obama would not be reelected. It's incautious to make such a prediction this far out, but I made it, so I'm standing by it. (I also still believe that John Kerry will defeat George W. Bush in 2004.)
I gave my rationale for the prediction in my earlier post, but I thought I'd try to bring a little more data to bear. You might think that would be easy, but the study of the modern presidency and modern presidential elections is complicated by what's known as "the small n problem." Fact is, there have been so few presidents and so few presidential elections in the era of the modern presidency--say, since FDR--that it can be hard to generalize.
Here's one thing I can tell you for sure, though: Of the five guys whose approval numbers were roughly the same as President Obama's at this point in their presidencies--LBJ, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and HW Bush--only Reagan went on to serve another term. (LBJ opted out, and Ford, Carter, and HW Bush all lost.)
So, why can't Obama repeat Reagan's success? Because at this point in 1983, the economy was beginning to roar. The election year, 1984, saw the fastest rate of GDP growth in 25 years. From the beginning of 1983 to election day in 1984, unemployment dropped by about three percentage points.
Nothing remotely resembling that is going on now.
The other model one hears of is Harry Truman. He actually went into 1948 as a fairly popular president (above 50%), but by the spring he was only in the high 30s. He surprised everyone, though, by winning reelection after running a whistle-stop campaign against the "do-nothing" Republican Congress.
So why can't President Obama just do that?
While the "give 'em hell, Harry!" stuff makes for great political legend, the fact is that Harry Truman's political recovery coincided with an economic recovery. With the end of World War II, the economy in 1946 and much of 1947 contracted dramatically. In 1948, however, the economy enjoyed a real growth rate of 4.4%, and unemployment rates between 3.4% and 4.0%. Without those numbers, I don't think Truman could have bounced back the way he did.
If the economic forecasts are correct, Truman's election-year economic numbers are the kind we won't see again for years. That makes a 2012 repeat of 1948 very unlikely.
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