Nearing Election Day, the presidential race is tight. A strong performance in debate has eased concerns about the challenger’s fitness, and the incumbent is hobbled by a weak economy. But the public still seems split.
That’s the story now — but it was the story in 1980, too, when Ronald Reagan went on to win 44 states and President Jimmy Carter carried just 41 percent of the popular vote.
In other words, this seeming tie is what it looks like when an incumbent president is heading for defeat.
President Obama’s strategy also resembles that of Carter, who sought to discredit his challenger as unfit for the job. Like Mitt Romney this year, Reagan cut through that assault with a strong debate performance (if not as one-sided as Romney’s first encounter with Obama).
Yet in 1980 the public still seemed to remain split — right up to Election Day.
In short, the current polls fit the pattern we’d expect if Obama were going to lose.
OK, there are not a lot of incumbent presidential losses for comparison. Carter is one of only three elected incumbents to lose since William Howard Taft’s 100 years ago.
Herbert Hoover was hit with the Great Depression early in his presidency and had effectively lost before he even ran for reelection. The first George Bush was knocked out by Ross Perot’s potent third-party bid, which fatally ate into the incumbent’s support.
Unlike Hoover, Obama can at least blame the weak economy on a predecessor of the other party; a good part of the public seems to have bought that argument. Nor will a third-party candidate split his support. So our president, like most incumbents, remains very competitive for reelection.
The reasons incumbents run strong across America’s electoral board are many.
First, the public has already passed favorable judgment on them — that’s how they got to be incumbents. And most of the public is loathe to admit making a mistake the first time ’round, so an incumbent’s mistakes have to be pretty big before the public is willing to admit it made one.
Second, incumbents get the lion’s share of media attention and have a far greater ability to shape its content than do challengers.
And all these advantages help incumbents raise more money — politics’ lifeblood.
Perhaps most important, Americans like to back a winner, and incumbents almost always do win — so many people’s default answer in pre-election polling is to support the incumbent they already know and more than likely have already supported.
Only as an upset starts to look possible do more and more folks start to reconsider. For that reason, much of the public only get to know the challenger late — if they bother to know him at all.
With all these advantages, it is no surprise that incumbents’ re-elections, even at their worst, are usually close right down to the wire. It also means that if an incumbent is going to lose, the public is almost always going to break late for the challenger.
One debate, or even all the debates, won’t determine this race. But the encounters have already allowed the public to get to know Romney far better and more favorably than all the campaigning leading up to them.
And, on the only level playing field available, Romney has proved a decisive point: that he is at least Obama’s equal — something most challengers never accomplish.
So, yes, the race is still too close to call, and events can still reshape it. But what we’re seeing now is how things have to look if Obama is going to lose, just as it was for Carter 32 years ago.
J.T. Young served in the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget from 2001 to 2004 and as congressional staff from 1987 to 2000.