Presidential Politics

During the course of my life, it seems like people have made generalizations about the different parties' success at winning presidential elections--for a while it was said the G.O.P. had done better, during the period when Jimmy Carter's one term came amid 20 years of G.O.P. administrations (20 out of 24 years, with Carter's term making up the other four). However, if we take a longitudinal view of the matter, since World War Two up until 2017 when Obama's next term will end, the two parties are exactly even. In fact, the White House has switched hands every eight years in that period, with the two exceptions balancing each other out.

If we start with Truman (although Roosevelt won the election and served a few months before dying, I'll count the beginning of the post-Roosevelt era from the beginning of that term, which I trust is a benign enough decision as far as its implications go), there were 8 years D (Roosevelt/Truman), 8 years R (Eisenhower), 8 years D (Kennedy/Johnson), 8 years R (Nixon/Ford), 4 years D (Carter), 12 years R (Reagan then Bush), 8 years D, 8 years R, 8 years D (up until the end of Obama's coming term, in 2017).

So it looked like the Republicans had a little advantage if you were around when there were 8 years of Nixon/Ford, Carter, then 12 years of Reagan/Bush. But from a wider angle, it can be seen that there were two times when the party held the White House for only one term during our time period, one each for the Democrats and Republicans. If we draw a line between the Carter--Reagan period and the Bush--Clinton period, they basically cancel each other out, each being a one-termer followed by a two-termer from the other party. The fact that Bush followed another Republican doesn't have much significance if we do the math from Truman through Obama, which shows that there will have been 36 years of Republican administrations and 36 years of Democratic administrations in the period from 1945--2017.

Roosevelt was clearly a special case, since he was elected to four terms, and since he left office that has been made illegal. Before Roosevelt it was an entirely different era, before World War Two, and it seems reasonable to designate the period beginning with the first Truman administration as an "era," although I am not being too rigorous or placing too much importance on that. My thinking is basically  that, since presidential terms are four years and there can  be two for any president, any trend will take a long time to identify, and 72 years is probably a long enough time, whereas things were too different before that to lump in the data with current phenomena. So that's my specimen--1945--2017.

If we accept that as a reasonable sample, then the conclusion seems to be that the Republicans and Democrats basically trade off the White House every 8 years, with no party having much of an advantage, or really any long-term advantage. I am pretty skeptical about the claims currently being made that the G.O.P. is down for the count, if for no other reason than because Romney only lost by about three percentage points. Maybe the demographics are changing, as has been constantly pointed out recently, but there's no reason to think the Republicans can't figure it out, make some adjustment, maybe run a Latino woman, that sort of thing. Not that I think my observations here can help us predict the future very much, there are a lot of variables, but the numbers show that the two parties have split the White House down the middle for 72 years (or will have by 2017, anyway).