I’m guessing that my stress around the 2020 Presidential election is manifesting itself through constantly thinking about Presidential trivia.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about one term Presidents. Lately, I’ve been thinking about their opposite. Is there any pattern to those Presidents that successfully served for two consecutive full terms? In our current time, it’s pretty much considered a given that a President is somehow considered a failure unless they serve two full terms. This belief has led us to the point where a President barely even has a chance to catch a breath before starting to campaign for reelection. In fact, I believe that Donald Trump started his reelection campaign within a month of his inauguration.
So, in our history, how common is it for a President to complete two consecutive terms in office? Once you take a look at it, you see some interesting things.
Let’s start with the special cases. As seems to be always true when talking about Presidents, Grover Cleveland is special. He served eight years in two nonconsecutive terms. He gets bonus points in that he actually won the popular vote three times (lost the electoral college one of those times). He and FDR are the only Presidents to have won a popular vote more than twice. Let’s also throw out the Presidents who were elected twice but died during their second term, thus not completing the full eight years. Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley meet those conditions.
Excluding those, the first pattern occurs in the early history of our country. Let’s call it the Parade of the Virginians. Four of the first five Presidents were from Virginia. They all served eight years. They are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. For the 36 year period of 1789 through 1824, 32 year of the years were led by a President that served a full eight years. The non Virginian John Adams is the only exception to this.
This kind of makes sense. Virginia, along with Massachusetts, was considered a leader of the revolution. Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. James Madison wrote a good chunk of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They were a tight knit group. Their opposition, the Federalists, imploded, so they didn’t have a lot of competition. That was a unique time in history where a small group of men could dominate Presidential politics.
Let’s skip ahead and talk about current times. Amazingly enough, you see the same pattern. Let’s call this the Parade of Media. Not counting Donald Trump, since the jury’s still out on him, four of the last five Presidents served the full eight years. They are Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W Bush, and Barack Obama. The only exception during this time is George H W Bush. Just like at our country’s founding, for the 36 year period from 1981 to 2016, 32 of the years were led by a two term President.
This time there’s no state or even party pattern. Two are Democrats and two are Republicans. Presidents came from California, Arkansas, Texas, and Illinois. I honestly don’t know why incumbents have such an advantage right now. I can make a guess. Starting with Reagan, politics in general and Presidents in particular have figured out how to maximize the use of media. Whether it’s as simple as Reagan’s message of the day or the toxic slurry that Trump pumps out, they have figured out how to manipulate the media to ensure that Presidents are always on the front page. Granted Trump is a special case and these are ‘special’ times, but just count the number of mentions that Trump gets in the media versus Biden. Even on the so-called liberal media sites, it’s not even close. With Trump being the incumbent plus the media chaos that swirls around him, Biden for the most part is lost.
So, the beginning of our Democratic experiment and its current state (a completely different ongoing experiment) have generated a lot of consecutive two term Presidents. Am I making something out of nothing. Are two term Presidents the norm?
Well, for all of the rest of the Presidential elections, the 156 year period between 1825 to 1980, there were a grand total of five Presidents that served two consecutive terms. They are Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt (who gets credit for being elected to four consecutive terms but only lived for a couple of months in his fourth term), and Dwight Eisenhower.
That seems weird. We have four Presidents in the first 36 years. We have four Presidents in the last 36 years. And then only five Presidents in the 156 year period in between? What’s going on?
Well, first of all, mortality. No President died in office until William Henry Harrison, in 1841. The last President to die in office was John Kennedy in 1963. In fact, while no Presidents died during the two 36 year periods, eight Presidents died during that middle 156 year period. Weirdly enough, it’s not like they died in clusters. They were very evenly spaced, which lowers the probability of completing two terms. Every President that was elected in a year divisible by 10 from 1840 to 1960 died in office (ie 1840, 1860, 1880, 1900, 1920, 1940, 1960).
There are some odd cases. Taft got robbed by Teddy Roosevelt. If Roosevelt hadn’t run as a third party candidate, in all likelihood Taft would have cruised to reelection. I’ve already mentioned that Cleveland got screwed over by the electoral college. In my previous post, I’d mentioned that some Presidents only wanted to serve one term (Polk, Buchanan, Hayes). Nixon was well along on his way to a landslide reelection victory and didn’t need to have anyone break into the Watergate Complex, thus dooming his second term.
So, what does it all mean? What does it mean to the prospects of Trump’s reelection?
I have no idea.
Everybody vote!
dorkenstein 