History Is Not On Hillary’s Side

Judis concedes that Democrats will be vulnerable in 2016:

The chief obstacle that any Democratic nominee will face is public resistance to installing a president from the same party in the White House for three terms in a row. If you look at the presidents since World War II, when the same party occupied the White House for two terms in a row, that party’s candidate lost in the next election six out of seven times.

The one exception was George H.W. Bush’s 1988 victory after two terms of Ronald Reagan, but Bush, who was seventeen points behind Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis at the Republican convention, was only able to win because his campaign manager Lee Atwater ran a brilliant campaign against an extraordinarily weak opponent.

Larison agrees:

When a president has mediocre or poor approval ratings, as Obama probably will have at the end of his term, it becomes almost impossible for a candidate to find the right balance between approval and criticism. That is because it becomes much more difficult to win over alienated voters without further demoralizing one’s own core supporters. Even in cases of extreme presidential unpopularity, most candidates for the nomination don’t want to be seen as trashing or repudiating the president. Most partisans that vote in primaries remain supportive of the president at least as long as he is still in office, and so the eventual nominee has to cater to that. An added difficulty is that the presidential party’s nominee usually is very closely aligned with the administration on policy, so that it is only too easy for the other party to use the administration’s failings as a bludgeon against the nominee. That attack becomes even easier when the nominee is very closely associated with the administration or even served as a part of it.

There’s another possibility: that the economy will keep growing so as to make a dent in the lives of those passed over by the recovery so far; that the ACA will win more recruits and, with some enthusiastic backing from a Democratic nominee, could even be an asset in the next election; that a deal with Iran averts war in the Middle East; and that, once the public gets a sense of the actual alternatives to Obama – more war; more secrecy; less healthcare security – the mood might shift. I’m not predicting this, and I basically agree with John and Daniel. But the public mood is restive and fickle. It could turn yet again.

(Photo: By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)