Congratulations Obama

Congratulations to Barack Obama on winning a second term. Conservative pundits thought that was utterly impossible. Obama won 26 states and the District of Columbia. Only two states switched parties, with North Carolina and Indiana going back to the Republicans. Once again no President has won the election without also winning a majority of states since Jimmy Carter achieved this in 1976. I find that winning the election while winning only a minority of states is quite possible, but the way that votes nationwide swing from election to election makes this particular scenario unlikely. Obama again won all the Kerry states, all the Gore states, 9 out of 10 Dukakis states, and most 1992 and 1996 Clinton states outside the South. Obama is the first Democratic President since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote in two elections. FDR won four terms, and won a majority of the popular vote in all four. Since then until this year Democratic Presidents have either been assassinated in their first term (John F. Kennedy), declined to run for a second full term (Lyndon Johnson), been defeated at their run for a second term (Jimmy Carter), or failed to win a majority of the popular vote for their second term or their first term for that matter (Bill Clinton). Presidents have been term limited since the 1940s to two terms when a constitutional amendment was passed limiting the number of Presidential terms. Many felt that FDR’s four terms went against the precedent set by George Washington when he declined to run for a third term and all other Presidents followed suit at the end of their second term until FDR ran for a third term in 1940. FDR ran for a fourth term as well in 1944 in the middle of World War II and won the narrowest popular vote victory of his Presidential career but still an Electoral College landslide. Sadly FDR only completed less than four months of his fourth term before dying suddenly. This paved the way for Vice President Harry Truman to preside over the end of World War II. This in turn paved the way for the famous Dewey defeats Truman headline when a newspaper in the 1948 Presidential election famously called the election incorrectly when in reality Truman had defeated Republican nominee Thomas Dewey. Truman’s victory was not anticipated because Dewey previously had a large lead because the Democrats had been suffering from an uneven economy despite the post-war economic boom. The Presidential term limit was brought in to enshrine what many saw as a sort of constitutional convention that had lasted for over a century. Because of the term limit Obama can’t run for a third term. I’m not sure what impact this has on the chances of the Democrats retaining the White House in 2016. The Democrats will need a new candidate who can take Obama’s appeal and get-out-the-vote machine with them. Romney’s campaign now admits that their internal polls were skewed Republican because that is what they thought the electorate would look like. I personally knew all along that the public polls had the composition of the electorate right. Republicans hoped that Romney would be like Reagan and defeat a Democratic President (Jimmy Carter in the case of Reagan) who was struggling with a poor economy. Of course this dream of Republicans didn’t work for two reasons. Firstly, the electorate is much more Democratic-leaning then it was in 1980. This fact is reflected in the strong support for Obama in the Northeast, Midwest, and west coast that was conspicuously absent in 1980 for Carter. Some have called Obama the Democratic Reagan. This is an interesting concept. It is true in the sense that both inherited a bad economy, both were unpopular during a large part of their first term because of the bad economy, both suffered mid-term election losses for their party in their respective first terms but both also managed to hold onto the Senate in the two respective midterm elections, and both then went on the win re-election to a second term. It can also be argued that ideologically Reagan and Obama complement each other, Reagan with strong conservative convictions on certain issues and Obama with strong liberal convictions on certain issues. So congratulations to Obama, now the hard work for Obama, the Democrats, and the Republicans begins.