James Taranto: Bush Doesn't Need to Carry Ohio to Win
James Taranto, editor of href="http://www.OpinionJournal.com">OpinionJournal.com and co-editor of"Presidential Leadership: Rating the Best and the Worst in the White House" (Wall Street Journal Books, 2004), in the WSJ (July 27, 2004):
Even though John Kerry has yet to break out of a dead heat in the polls, some Democrats are convinced he's going to beat President Bush in a landslide. Chuck Todd of The Hotline explains why:"Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent," he writes in The Washington Monthly."In recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins." Since Mr. Todd thinks a Bush landslide is out of the question -- itself a premature assumption -- a Kerry landslide is all but inevitable.
But there are other ways of interpreting the trend. In the five 20th-century elections when challengers beat incumbents, only one of the winners, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, had a landslide-level popular majority (57.4%). Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 both failed to surpass 51%, and Woodrow Wilson in 1912 and Bill Clinton in 1992 managed just 41.8% and 43%, respectively.
Anyway, past elections are of limited value in predicting future ones. As in sports, streaks and slumps in politics go on only until they end. We keep hearing that Ohio is a crucial state for President Bush because no Republican has ever won the presidency without it. Yet while it's probably a good bet that Mr. Bush will either carry Ohio or lose the election, the recent past has seen plenty of similar streaks broken.
Mr. Bush was the first Republican since James Garfield in 1880 to win the White House without carrying California. That record would not have fallen had Al Gore received a few thousand more votes in Florida -- but in that case, Mr. Gore would have become the first Democrat ever elected without carrying Missouri.
As it was, the Show-Me State became the most durable bellwether in America, having last backed a loser, Adlai Stevenson, in 1956. Missouri took that torch from Delaware, which voted for Thomas Dewey in 1948, then backed winners from 1952 through 1996 before falling to Mr. Gore in 2000.
In the process, George W. Bush became the first Republican to win the presidency without carrying Delaware since Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Mr. Bush was also the first president since Harrison to win election without a popular-vote plurality....