WITH MORE THAN SEVEN MONTHS between now and Election Day, President Bush and John Kerry already are in full battle cry. Once the smoke over this election clears (which, last time, took a long time), we will have the answers to such questions as: Will Bush suffer the same fate as Herbert Hoover?

Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution (indeed named for Hoover), notes that six of the nine elected incumbent presidents since 1912–Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton–won a second term. Two of the three who didn’t win–Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush–faced a third-party challenge. The other non-winner, Hoover, lost in a head-to-head contest with Roosevelt in 1932.