At 80 the president will test the advantage of incumbency to its limits
Even bearing in mind the tendency of people on the left to political doom-mongering, it is striking how many Democrats are uneasy about the wisdom of Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term as president of the United States. Polls show more than half do not think he should run. This is mostly not because of his politics. It boils down, of course, to his age.
In the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan twinkled away similar concerns by saying he wouldn’t hold his opponent’s youth and inexperience against him. But in 1984 Reagan was only 73. Biden would be 82 at the start of a second term, and it is surely legitimate to ask if an octogenarian can cope with the demands of a presidential campaign, never mind the pressure of governing for another four years.
Democrats’ anxiety is made worse by their apparent lack of confidence in Kamala Harris, the vice-president, who, for unavoidable actuarial reasons, would be statistically more likely to assume the presidency than almost all of her predecessors but has a net disapproval rating of 12 per cent, even worse than that of her boss. Nikki Haley, a Republican presidential contender, said last week that a vote for Biden would effectively be a vote for Harris because she did not expect Biden to survive for a whole second term.
In 2020, Biden faced the same set of questions, but his party’s doubts were put aside because Scranton Joe, the old-style blue-collar patriotic Democrat with an infectious smile, was regarded as electoral kryptonite for Donald Trump, who was no spring chicken himself. Sometimes Biden’s 2020 run was presented — including by his supporters — as akin to breaking the emergency glass: the point of the campaign was simply to defeat Trump, who was presented as a uniquely toxic threat to what Biden frequently calls the “soul of America”. With that goal achieved, surely, some commentators thought, Biden would step back, his historic task complete. His would be a transitional presidency.
Such commentary was always naive. The kinds of people who win the presidency do not willingly lay aside their power. You have to go back to 1880 to find a president who served a single full term and chose not to seek re-election. But perhaps that president — Rutherford Hayes, a Republican from Ohio — could have been a useful model. To his supporters, Hayes’ contested victory in 1876 was necessary to save the soul of the nation from white Southerners who only 15 years earlier had launched an insurrection to break up the country. Having won, Hayes had done his job. He pledged to serve only one term and he was as good as his word.
It is true Lyndon Johnson shocked the nation in April 1968 by announcing he would not seek the Democratic nomination for president. By Biden’s standards, Johnson was a babe in arms — he would have been only 60 when the next term began in 1969 — but having come into office after John F Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson was already technically in his second term. He was also worried about his health (he died of a heart attack at 64, just four years later) and, unlike Biden, would have struggled to win the nomination as the country was roiled by the war in Vietnam.
Harry Truman chose not to contest the election in 1952, but had already served almost two full terms after Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945. Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Warren Harding after the latter’s death in 1923, also chose not to seek what would technically have been a third term. But “Silent Cal” was so uncharismatic that his decision barely caused a political ripple.
Rutherford Hayes was the last president who chose not to seek re-election
Lyndon Johnson was already technically in his second term when JFK was assassinated
The narcissism that impels politicians of all stripes to think it is in their country’s interest for them to stay in office for as long as possible no doubt explains why Hayes’ example is so rare.
Winning a second term is usually a way for a president to burnish their reputation. It is surprisingly common for presidents to be unpopular in the second half of their first term (the stage Biden is at now) but to rebound after re-election. At this stage in his presidency, Reagan was even less popular than Biden, with an approval rating of only 41 per cent. He went on to win a landslide, feel-good victory in 1984 with, in my view, the most brilliant campaign slogan in US history: “It’s morning again in America.” Despite the Iran-Contra scandal, which might have felled a weaker president, Reagan left office in 1989 with a now-unimaginable approval rating of 63 per cent. Much the same was true of Bill Clinton, who weathered the storm of impeachment to leave office also with a 63 per cent approval. There can be little doubt that had Reagan or Clinton been permitted to run for a third term they would have won. But there is a powerful political incentive for parties to renominate sitting presidents: they generally win.
There have been 59 presidential elections since the antique US constitution came into operation in 1788. Of the 33 that featured sitting presidents, the incumbent won exactly two thirds of the time. In “open-seat” presidential elections where there is no incumbent, the party that holds the White House has won only half the time.
This striking empirical finding holds up even when we control for other factors, such as war or the state of the economy. Political scientists also estimate that incumbency provides a boost of between 4 and 6 per cent in the popular vote.
Biden and the first lady arrive on the South Lawn at the White House in January
An incumbent has a winning playbook to follow. They can almost always raise money easily, can make actual decisions rather than just promise things and always have an audience wherever they go. At least as important, though, may be the attitude of voters. In most scenarios, since the popular vote has historically usually matched the Electoral College vote — the groups of electors that represent each state — most people have already cast their ballot once for the president and are susceptible to the argument they need to be given the chance to, in Biden’s words, “finish the job”. Hence slogans such as “I still like Ike” in 1956, or “Nixon. Now more than ever” in 1972. Risk-averseness feeds into this, especially in troubled times. In 1864, Abraham Lincoln’s re-election campaign warned voters not to “swap horses while crossing a stream”, a version of which was repeated by Roosevelt in 1944 and (less convincingly) by George HW Bush in 1992.
Presidential elections featuring incumbents are also disproportionately represented among the most lopsided in US history. Of the elections where the popular vote margin was estimated to be greater than 15 per cent, 12 out of 15 have featured incumbents.
Most of these have been thumping victories for a president seeking a second term, including Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower in 1956 and Reagan in 1984. But sometimes incumbents have suffered crushing defeats. Voters get to know a president, so when they really blow their chance, it can be hard to recover. This was what happened in 1932 to Herbert Hoover, whose decisions and demeanour made him the scapegoat for a catastrophic economic collapse. He lost by 18 points.
Democrats may well be studying the 11 examples of presidents who have defied the trend by seeking re-election and failing. The most recent case was that of Trump. In a highly polarised environment, are one-term presidencies the new normal? There are good reasons to think Trump’s defeat was an outlier. Having failed to win the popular vote in 2016, he neglected to broaden his coalition as Reagan and even Clinton managed to do, in part because his angry persona was regarded by a clear majority of voters as unpresidential.
While most presidents seeking re-election have portrayed themselves as the safe choice, Trump clung to his insurgent status and offered only continued chaos. Biden will use all the trappings of presidential authority to make a conventional case for himself.
Inflation and crime would present challenges for any Democrat, but unemployment is at a record low, and in any case, a party is better off facing economic headwinds with an incumbent.
In a rematch against Donald Trump, 76, the age factor will be somewhat neutralised for Biden
Which brings us back to Biden’s age and what that says about the party that looks likely to renominate him without significant opposition. The president’s physician published a full health check on February 16, which concluded that he remained “fit for duty”. But the 97 per cent of Americans who are younger than the president, including the slightly more than half of voters who would like to back a Democrat, watch him with bated breath, as they would one of their own elderly relations. In a rematch against Trump, 76, the age factor will be somewhat neutralised, as long as Biden remains fit. Any other opponent is likely to offer a generational contrast.
Democrats are in a bind. Had Biden followed Hayes’ example and said one term was enough, the party would have thrown away the advantage of incumbency and possibly faced a bitter nomination battle. Instead, they are piling all their chips on a candidate who has already exceeded the average life expectancy for American men by seven years. Precedent shows that nominating the incumbent is usually the smart choice. But the incumbent has never been anywhere near this old before, and history cannot tell us how voters will react to that.
Source: The Times
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