Presidential Incumbency Isn’t Really That Valuable (cont’d)

Elections
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden celebrate at their election-night victory rally in Chicago, Ill., November 6, 2012. (Jim Bourg/Reuters)

Battleground states have decided many presidents’ reelection campaigns, for good and ill.




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lsewhere today I explore the overall trends in reelection campaigns of incumbent presidents. Here are charts summarizing the battleground states for each such election, beginning with 1832, the first year for which adequate popular-vote totals are available. States in purple were flipped to the incumbent, those in light green were flipped by the challenger away from the incumbent.

1832: Andrew Jackson

Jackson lost major ground in Kentucky, the home state of his opponent, Henry Clay, but gained overall due to significant improvements in New England as his opponents were no longer running an Adams, while Jackson replaced John C. Calhoun with New York’s Martin Van Buren on his ticket.

1840: Martin Van Buren

Van Buren, dealing with the aftermath of the Panic of 1837 and following three terms of Democratic rule, faced a united Whig fusion ticket of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler after the failed 1836 experiment with Harrison and other Whigs running separate regional campaigns. Comparing the two-party vote with the overall 1836 vote with all the Whig candidates counted together, Van Buren lost support in every battleground, with heavy erosion in multiple regions of the country.

1864: Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln’s reelection was aided by the fact that most of the states he had lost in 1860 seceded, and his enormous growth in Missouri was aided by the fact that for the most part, only the pro-Union parts of the state went to the polls. Progress on the transcontinental railroad (including the election of Leland Stanford as California’s first Republican governor) swung the West Coast heavily towards the Republican ticket. But Lincoln lost a good deal of ground in states such as New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, where anti-war sentiment was strong.

Ulysses S. Grant, 1872

As with Lincoln and secession, Grant’s national numbers are subject to Reconstruction-era shifts regarding which states were voting. Missouri’s Unionist edge was gone with the return of ex-Confederates to its electorate by 1872, whereas the black electorate of Louisiana was strongly pro-Grant as long as it lasted. Winning New York and New Jersey back turned Grant’s reelection into a landslide.

1888: Grover Cleveland and 1892: Benjamin Harrison

The two Harrison–Cleveland races, coming at a time of decay in public faith in two parties that were evenly divided in support, should be considered together. The 1888 race was particularly stable: only three states shifted three or more points in either direction. Not shown here, Harrison stacked the Electoral College by adding six new states, only to lose two of them to a third-party Populist candidacy. The Populists drew heavily away from Cleveland in the West, which is why you see a big swing to Harrison in 1892 even as he was losing ground nationally. The South overall was drifting more to the Democrats in both of these races as Jim Crow became more formalized.

1900: William McKinley

McKinley basically ran in place nationally in his second campaign against William Jennings Bryan, but earned major shifts in the West, as Utah moved en masse to the Republican column (where it has mostly stayed ever since) and Bryan lost even his home state of Nebraska.

1912: William Howard Taft

The states in dark green were 1908 Taft states that went to Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. The schism in Republican ranks was catastrophic.

1916: Woodrow Wilson

Putting the Republicans back together made 1916 close again, but not quite close enough. The West remained more volatile than the rest of the country.

1932: Herbert Hoover

A few heavily Catholic New England states bucked the national trend to go Democratic in 1928, and a few of the old Yankee New England states stayed with Hoover in 1932. For the rest of the country, the onset of the Great Depression led a massive shift to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1936: Franklin Roosevelt

FDR’s lopsided 1932 victory did not leave a lot of battlegrounds in 1936, but he won almost all of them, even long-red holdouts such as Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

1956: Dwight Eisenhower

The politics of race in the South were still unstable in 1956, as Eisenhower gained significant ground in Louisiana while collapsing in South Carolina. Overall, he won 27 out of 30 battlegrounds with a solid across-the-board reelection.

1972: Richard Nixon

Nixon made his most dramatic gains in 1972 by scooping up most of the George Wallace voters from 1968, but he gained ground in every battleground state except for George McGovern’s home state, and his double-digit gains included multiple northeastern states that had voted for Humphrey in 1968.

1980: Jimmy Carter

Carter lost ground everywhere but Rhode Island. The 1980 campaign in Mississippi, which gave rise to enduring myths, resulted in more retention of support for Carter than most of the South.

1984: Ronald Reagan

Reagan defied assumptions that he had nowhere to go but down after 1980, although the shift of California, Pennsylvania, Washington, and Iowa towards the Democrats even amidst the 1984 landslide would prove ominous for Republicans down the road.

1992: George H. W. Bush

Bush, running amidst economic malaise and race riots in Los Angeles and with the Cold War suddenly a non-issue, was the last incumbent to lose. He lost ground everywhere but North Dakota, most of all in Bill Clinton’s home state of Arkansas.

1996: Bill Clinton

Forty-one battleground states now looks like an impossibly broad regional map. Note that Clinton gained more electoral votes than he lost in the five states that flipped, because he won Florida. His worst state relative to 1992 was Kansas, home of Bob Dole.

2004: George W. Bush

Here we finally reach the red-blue map we know today: Bush gained ground mostly in battlegrounds he had won in 2000, and lost ground mostly in battlegrounds he had lost (plus Ohio, which decided the election). Colorado would be a bad sign for Republicans. Still, only two battleground states (Alabama and Tennessee) shifted more than four points.

2012: Barack Obama

Obama lost ground everywhere except for Hurricane Sandy–ravaged New Jersey, where he was famously greeted by a Chris Christie hug. Among the “blue wall” states, his erosion in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania would yield fruit for Republicans four years later.

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