October in an election year tends to be a bad month for incumbents seeking reelection. Going back fifty years, we have six decent comparisons to this cycle – 1956, 1972, 1980, 1984, 1996, and 2004. On average, the late September margin in the Gallup poll of registered voters closed by six to seven points in favor of the challenger. Only in the year 1956 did the incumbent expand his lead.
(I’ve excluded 1964 and 1976 because LBJ and Ford were not incumbents in the typical meaning of the word, and 1992 because Ross Perot’s jumping in and out of the race skewed the data.)
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President Obama’s average margin in late September’s Gallup poll of registered voters was just three points over Mitt Romney, 48-45. So, history suggests he has reason to be nervous.
And perhaps more nervous than even history would advise. Obama faces three distinct problems this month.
First, and most obviously after Wednesday night: He is up against a superior debater. It is not just that Romney had an “on” night and Obama had an “off” one. Rather, this was one of the most lopsided debates in modern American history. For instance, go back to watch Kennedy-Nixon I in 1960 or evenCarter-Reagan in 1980, and you will see that, while one candidate had an advantage, it was at least a competitive battle. Wednesday night belonged to Romney — beginning, middle, and end. One could argue that Clinton defeated Dole this handily in 1996, but it is a rare spectacle indeed to see an incumbent president so thoroughly dominated. Reagan in 1984, George H.W. Bush in 1992, George W. Bush in 2004 could be said to have “lost” at least their first contests, and Gerald Ford famously said that Eastern Europe was not under Soviet domination in 1976, but Obama’s performance on Wednesday is unique among incumbents in how uniformly awful it was from beginning to end.
This is a change of pace for the Republican party. Over the last quarter century the GOP has nominated two Bushes, a Dole, and a McCain. All were decent and honorable men, but none was nearly as articulate in debate settings as Mitt Romney, whose ability to communicate his vision for the country seemed to rival Ronald Reagan’s. And, even then, Reagan struggled in the first debate of 1984, and his performance in 1980 did not obviously exceed Carter’s until near the end. His famed “there you go again…” quip did not come until the final third of the debate, breaking up what had been an otherwise repetitive and unpersuasive back-and-forth between himself and Carter; and his “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” question did not come until his closing statement. So, you could very easily say that Romney’s performance on Wednesday was the best from a Republican nominee since the tradition of televised debates began in 1960.
Read more at The Weekly Standard
