It was a close run thing. President Trump actually came closer to winning the presidency this year than Hillary Clinton did four years ago. Joe Biden carried the three states (Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin) that raised him above 270 electoral votes by only 43,637 votes at last count, much less than the 77,736 by which Trump carried the three states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin) that raised him above 270 in 2016.
By that narrow margin, America snapped a streak. Only once before in history have three consecutive presidents been elected and reelected and serve two full terms each. The political allies Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and the alternating partisan baby boom generation rivals Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in the last three decades. Never before has America had four consecutive eight-year presidencies, and the defeat of Donald Trump means that that cannot come to pass at least until 2052.
The early Virginia presidents, after Thomas Jefferson’s narrow and disputed victory over John Adams, were all elected and reelected by wide margins, to the point that only a single electoral vote was cast against the reelection of James Monroe in 1820. But the three most recent former presidents were reelected by underwhelming percentages of the popular vote and the electoral vote, and the current incumbent was, by a narrow margin in electoral votes, not reelected at all.
It seems that the days of presidents reelected by landslides, a familiar political phenomenon in my lifetime, are over. Actually, they were the exception rather than the rule in American history, a twentieth century and for the most part post-World War II experience. For the first hundred years of the competition between the Democratic party and the Whigs and the Republicans, no president was reelected with more than 56% of the popular vote — including Andrew Jackson in 1832, Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, and Theodore Roosevelt to his full term in 1904. Calvin Coolidge was elected to his full term with 54% in 1924 and would probably have won a second term with a larger percentage if he had chosen to run again in 1928.
Then we see a step increase in presidents’ reelection percentages. Franklin Roosevelt is elected to a second term in 1936 with 61% of the popular vote. Dwight Eisenhower wins a second term in 1956 with 57%. Lyndon Johnson wins a full term with 61% (pre-assassination polling suggests John Kennedy would have done nearly that well had he lived). Richard Nixon wins a second term in 1972 with 61%. Ronald Reagan wins a second term in 1984 with 59%. Note that our list includes both Democratic and Republican presidents, all of whom seemed to exceed what had been solid partisan ceilings in the past.
Why? Because they were seen as having delivered both prosperity and peace. Voters who lived through the Depression of the 1930s and World War II in the 1940s knew what war and economic collapse could do. They understood the horrifying damage it inflicted on people’s lives and the things they held dearest. They were ready to cross party lines and reward presidents who seemed to protect them from such scourges.
Voters born before 1930, with vivid memories of both the Depression and the War, were the vast bulk of the electorate up through the early 1980s. It is no coincidence then that the last president to win a reelection landslide was Ronald Reagan, born in 1911, who made a professional career in radio, movies, and television — entertainment media with universal appeal for those who remembered the Depression and the War.
It is no coincidence either that no presidential candidate since has won anything like the 59% of the vote Reagan won in 1984. The one who came closest was George H. W. Bush, who was elected in 1988 with 53.4% of the vote — a percentage no candidate has equaled since (Barack Obama came closest, with 52.9%, in 2008). Since the mid-1990s, when voters born before 1930 became an increasingly small and now vanishing percentage of the electorate, we have been in a political era with increasingly strong partisan polarization, increasing straight-ticket voting, and relatively little oscillation in partisan percentages in both presidential and congressional voting — and, to a lesser extent, voting in state and local elections as well. Margins have typically been narrow, with Democrats winning five of eight presidential elections starting in 1992 and Republicans winning majorities in the House of Representatives in 10 of 14 congressional elections starting in 1994.
In that environment, presidents have struggled to win reelection, successfully in 1996, 2004, and 2012, and in vain in 2020. None has won in a landslide. Bill Clinton was reelected with 49% of the popular vote in 1996, with polling indicating anti-Clinton attitudes among most of the 8% who voted for Ross Perot.
George W. Bush was reelected with 51% of the vote in 2004, buoyed upward by memories of his response to the 9/11 attacks. Barack Obama was reelected with 51% of the popular vote in 2012, the first president reelected with a lower percentage of the vote than he had won four years before (the others whose percentages dropped lost).
Polls had suggested that Clinton would win by a larger margin in 1996, and because of split opposition, he won the electoral vote by a solid 396-179 margin (one not equaled since). But in 10 states with 129 electoral votes (Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Wisconsin), Clinton ran behind the combined total for Perot and Bob Dole. (Nine of those states would go Republican in at least some subsequent presidential election.)
The 2004 election was so close that initial exit polls showing John Kerry leading George W. Bush, 51 to 48 percent, were widely believed, including by leading strategists for the two candidates. The percentages turned out to be correct, but assigned to the wrong candidates. Only three states switched parties between the two elections — New Hampshire switching from Bush to Kerry, Iowa and New Mexico from Al Gore to Bush, all by exceedingly narrow margins. Bush’s electoral vote victory was only 286-251.
Barack Obama, also reelected with 51% of the vote, did considerably better in electoral votes, winning 332 to 206. But this Electoral College advantage did not carry over into an advantage in House seats. While winning 51% of the popular vote in 2004 Bush had carried 255 House districts to Kerry’s 180, Obama with 51% of the popular vote in 2012 carried just 209 districts to Mitt Romney’s 226. This reflected a Republican advantage in redistricting but, even more, the effect of demographic clustering, with Democratic voters clustered in central cities, sympathetic suburbs and university towns and Republican voters spread more even around the rest of the country.
It has long been a rule of thumb among psephologists that a large voter turnout favors Democrats. Yet over the last quarter century, turnout has dropped in the two years when Democratic presidents sought reelection and turnout has risen sharply in the two years when Republican presidents sought reelection. Turnout fell 8%, from 104 million to 96 million, between 1992 and 1996. One reason: Turnout had risen sharply in 1992, when Ross Perot received 19.7 million votes; in 1996 his candidacy faltered and he won only 8.1 million votes, while Bill Clinton’s total increased over 1992 by 2.5 million and Dole won 94,000 more votes than Bush had that year. But it may also be significant that turnout dropped between 2008 and 2012, down 2%. Turnout appears to have risen in 2008-12 in some target states, but to have declined elsewhere.
The really big surges in turnout came in the years when recent Republican presidents have sought reelection. The largest turnout increase since World War II came in 1952, when turnout rose 27% as members of the G.I. generation, perhaps too young to vote in 1940, perhaps far from their homes in 1944, perhaps unenthused by the contest between presumed winner Thomas Dewey and incumbent President Harry Truman in 1948, suddenly streamed into the electorate in very large numbers. Enthusiasm for Republican nominee Dwight Eisenhower surely was a factor: He won 12 million more votes than Dewey had four years before, while Democrat Adlai Stevenson came very close to matching Franklin Roosevelt’s largest voting totals.
The largest percentage increases in turnout since 1952 have been in 2004 and 2020. Total turnout was up 16% in 2004, from 105 million to 122 million. George W. Bush won 11.6 million more votes than he had four years before, and John Kerry won 8 million more votes than Al Gore. The percentage increase was even larger in 2020, even though at this writing the final million or so votes in New York have not been tabulated. Turnout rose 23% between 2016 and 2020, from 137 million to almost 157 million. Donald Trump received 10.8 million more votes than he had four years before, and Joe Biden won 14 million more votes than Hillary Clinton.
What accounts for these rises in turnout? Both the 2004 and 2020 elections focused on Republican presidents who evoked very strong feelings. Very strong negative feelings on the part of partisan Democrats and cultural liberals, feelings sympathetically portrayed and amplified in traditional mass media. And — though this was less noticed — very strong positive feelings on the part of partisan Republicans and cultural conservatives, feeling often ignored and commonly belittled in traditional mass media, or simply not understood.
Despite (or because of) the increased turnout, partisan divisions in these two pairs of elections changed relatively little, even as the percentage of votes cast for non-major party candidates fell by more than two-thirds. As noted above, only three states switched parties between 2000 and 2004, as Bush’s percentage rose from, 48% to 51%, while Kerry like Gore won 48%. Bush’s electoral vote margin was narrow, 286 to 251, but reasonably secure; some Democrats charged that voting machines were sabotaged in Ohio, without whose electoral votes Bush would not have won. But no one plausibly argued that Bush’s 118,000 vote, 51% to 49% margin there should be overturned.
The interval between the 2016 and 2020 elections saw more oscillation in partisan percentages in various states than the 2000-04 interval, but those oscillations were only modest in historic perspective. Donald Trump lost ground especially in metropolitan areas where high-credential voters had previously been Republican, as such voters in metropolitan Atlanta, Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth and Phoenix began voting more like similar voters in the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast. At the same time, Trump gained ground among Hispanic voters, most visibly in Miami and the Lower Rio Grande Valley, but elsewhere as well. This was no closer a contest in popular votes than the 2004 and 2012 reelections of the two preceding presidents, but in this case the incumbent finished 3.9 percentage points behind rather than 2.5 points and 3.9 points ahead.
But as noted in the first paragraph of this article, 2020 was an extremely close election in terms of electoral votes. It is said that in the weeks before the election, Trump did not expect to win in 2016, and that he was lucky that a margin of just 77,736 votes gave him the electoral votes of three states and made him the 45th president. This year, Trump seems to have expected to win, but he turned out to be unlucky when a margin of just 43,637 votes deprived him of the electoral votes of three states that would have made him the fourth consecutive president to win a second term.
The 2020 elections showed both parties falling short of their goals. The Democrats won the presidency, but by an exceedingly narrow margin, narrower than the one by which they lost it four years before. They almost lost their majority in the House and, even if they win both Senate seats up in Georgia runoffs, they will have only a 51-50 majority in the Senate.
The Republicans of course lost the presidency by a margin whose narrowness is likely to be overshadowed by the 4 percentage points they ran behind in the national popular vote and remain far short of winning the office with a majority that can command universal respect. Winning reelection for president has become a tenuous enterprise, accomplished by narrow margins and with the risk of failure even in good times, as the memory of a nation whose presidents could hope to win a second term by landslide majorities slips further into the distance.
