PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ANALOGIES – THIRD PARTIES AND FORMER PRESIDENTS

By Ken Grossberger, PhD

There is much discussion about how the 2024 US Presidential elections will play out, and media types have pushed several comparisons to prior elections, seemingly in an attempt to predict the future from the elections of the past. Analogies are usually not perfect, but there are a few that might be instructive. Three-way presidential races, where there are viable third party candidates or independents, and races between current and former presidents, upset the balance between the two major parties and lessen the predictability of the outcomes. The “third” candidate becomes a mediating variable that is hard to analyze. A brief review of the history of such elections sheds light on such unpredictable contests.

The election of 1860 was a 4-way contest between Abraham Lincoln and 3 Democrats at a time that the country was seriously polarized due to sectional differences arising from the slavery issue and the states’ rights argument. Sen. Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois (against whom Lincoln ran in 1858 for the Illinois Senate seat) represented the northern Democrats, John C. Breckenridge (incumbent Vice President of the United States) drew support from the southern states, and John Bell of the newly formed Constitutional Union party gained electoral votes from the border state region. Lincoln won almost all the electoral votes in the north, the three Democrats split the rest, and Lincoln won the presidency.

In 1892 former President Grover Cleveland, Democrat, came back to challenge incumbent Republican President Benjamin Harrison (who beat Cleveland in 1888). In this return contest Cleveland won back the presidency, the only person in US history to have 2 unconnected terms in the White House. The third party candidate in the race, James B. Weaver, representing the Populist Party, won almost 9% of the vote and carried a few western states, which may have hurt Harrison.

The 1912 election was the race of the 3 presidents, one past, one current and one future. Former President Theodore Roosevelt ran against his old protégé William Howard Taft and won 27% of the vote. President Taft, the incumbent Republican, ran third with only 23% of the vote and only 8 electoral votes. Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs won about 6% of the vote. Roosevelt and Taft split the Republican vote, and New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat, won the election with only 41% of the popular vote but an electoral landslide.

The presidential election of 1948 was famous for the biggest media faux pas in American history when the Chicago Tribune prematurely published a headline that stated: “Dewey Defeats Truman”. Incumbent President Harry S. Truman beat New York Governor and former prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey by a fairly comfortable margin in the electoral college. Truman was not that popular and the third party candidate, Dixiecrat South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond denied Truman a sizable portion of the southern Democrat vote. After attempts to get him to drop out of the race the Democratic Convention nominated Truman, who went on to win by waging a strong campaign.

There was a similar outcome in the 1968 presidential race but this time the Democrat split gave the election to the Republican former Vice President Richard M. Nixon. Democrat Gov. George Wallace of Alabama ran on the American Independent ticket and won 5 southern states, denying Democrat and incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey the electoral votes of those states and a significant portion of the popular vote.

In 1992 independent Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, won 19% of the vote, most of it from incumbent Vice President Republican George H.W. Bush, giving the election to Democrat Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. Perot scored one of the highest third party totals in US history. Ironically Bush had a national approval rate of 81% following the 1991 Gulf War, only to see his popularity dwindle to only 37 percent of the vote in the election.

The election of 2024 may be a mix of these scenarios. There is a viable third party candidate I Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, who is drawing about 10% in many polls, but not enough to be in contention for any electoral votes in the swing states. He appears to be taking more votes from Biden than Trump as we see a shift of a few points in the 5-way polling (including 2 other third party candidates), as opposed to the head-to-head data showing Trump with about a 2 point lead over Biden.

The post June 27 debate polls show a slippage in Biden’s support, most notably in the swing states, where Trump now leads outside the margin of error in 8 of 14 critical states. Worse for Biden is that New Hampshire, Minnesota and Virginia, which have voted Democrat in recent elections, are now within the margin of error. There will be more to come with the polls following the assassination attempt on Trump.

Predicting the future from the past is always a lesson in objectivity and thought, and this election is no different.

PAPER TIGER REDUX

by Ken Grossberger, PhD

President Biden’s foreign policy mantra is to avoid escalating current conflicts. To use his favorite word: don’t. Don’t do anything that will upset America’s enemies, don’t properly defend American troops abroad, don’t do everything possible to protect American interests, and certainly don’t upset the not-so-mainstream media, upon whom his re-election, in large measure, depends. But history sadly shows us that such weakness causes the very escalation such policies seek to avoid. Trying not to risk expanding conflicts generally leads to expanding those conflicts. One word admonitions scare no one and accomplish nothing, except to make the United States look ridiculous. The US is confronted with multiple wars and serious threats, yet the White House seems oblivious to the lessons of history.

English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously engaged in a policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler prior to WWII in an attempt to avoid a major conflict. Hitler had taken the Rhineland, Austria, and part of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Chamberlain met with Hitler to appease him in order to avoid war and both signed the Munich Agreement in 1938. Hitler agreed to no more territorial acquisitions and Chamberlain stated, “I believe it is peace in our time.” But in 1939 Hitler took the rest of Czechoslovakia and then invaded Poland, starting WWII.

By the 1850’s the US Congress had made several agreements between northern states and southern states about the extension of slavery as the country grew westward including the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Compromise of 1850. The war with Mexico, ending in 1845, reignited the slavery issue as Texas would be entering the union as a slave state. Northern abolitionists opposed the extension of slavery and southern slaveholders insisted on it. The Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857 made the situation much worse by ruling that Congress did not have the authority to prevent the extension of slavery into the new territories. President James Buchanan, a northern Democrat with southern sympathies took office in 1857 but failed to resolve the slavery issue, taking a passive stance and leaving the issue to the radicals on both sides of the issue. He did not run for re-election in 1860, eleven southern states seceded and the Civil War started in April of 1861. More Americans lost their lives in this conflict than in all other wars combined. Buchanan didn’t think those states had the right to secede, but he did nothing to stop them, nor to resolve the conflict. He left office in April 1861 with the country in shambles.

There are other historical examples. The price of weak leadership is extraordinary, but the Biden White House is trying to make sure that whatever we do, we do nothing to expand any of the currently expanding conflicts. We don’t want to further upset anyone. We issue warnings and have demonstrations of force but do little. Evidently the policy is we can get mad at them, but we don’t want them to get mad at us.

The Biden administration is preoccupied with how our enemies feel, so the president makes sure the US doesn’t overreact, even when American interests and American friends are under assault. Terrorist organizations have attacked American bases in the middle east over 100 times, Russia has killed thousands of Ukrainians in a war of conquest, the Chinese Communist Party is working overtime to wreck the US economy and on October 7 Hamas put on a freak show that would have embarrassed the Gestapo. There are college students demonstrating in support of this ridiculous terrorist organization. How crazy do you have to get before these students see how bad this is? Biden does not want to upset these college demonstrators and the Palestinian supporters either, so he simultaneously supports a middle east ceasefire to call attention to the plight of the Palestinians but then states again he is “rock solid” behind Israel. Then no one gets mad at him or the US. But as it turn out everyone is mad at America.

Weakness solves nothing, and as Sen. Kennedy (R-LA) stated “more sheep is not going to solve the wolf problem.” Biden cannot ignore the consequences of appeasement and inaction. This toxic dissonance results in bold moves by American enemies abroad, and nationwide demonstrations at home. Biden has the same title as Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, but he is not in the same league.

The Big Dance

The art of lying is such a staple of politics that we accept it as a natural act, like the rising of the sun. Thus most national elected officials have dismal ratings in the polls: the President, Vice President, the leaders in the Senate (both parties) and the leaders in the House (both parties). Trust is a thing of the past and many of those who vote strain to choose the least damaging of the worst.

The Biden team is an example of such deceit, on steroids (as the President likes to phrase things). So he clearly thinks he conjured up the big rhetorical flip taking the Republican-manufactured sarcastic term “Bidenomics” and now uses it as a symbol for this miraculous economy he keeps touting. As his team cherry picks through the data for good stuff (“it’s working” Biden whispers) and ignores the bad stuff (e.g., huge spikes in the cost of just about everything and the dramatic increase in the national debt), he is performing the rhetorical choreography of the “the big dance” designed only to make his administration look good. So Bidenomics is better termed Bidenoptics. Every time he whips out his Bidenomics double talk, he is dancing. The border is closed, he knew nothing of Hunter’s business deals, etc. He continues to dance through the political tulips.

Even more embarrassing is White House Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s recent statement that the record setting sea of illegal immigration at the southern border in December is typical for the end of the year. Or “we need Congress to pass comprehensive immigration” as an excuse for the dramatic increases in border crossings under the Biden administration. These deflections are in line with today’s political word games, based on the dance, and not the truth. The American public is being waltzed down the proverbial road because the Biden team, like too many politicians, will continue to blame the person who put the cookie jar on the kitchen counter, not the person who put his hand in it. The same goes for the economic scene where Bidenomics has hit the middle class and working poor pretty hard. The White House excuse machine is not going to talk people out of their pain with some not-so-clever reverse sloganeering. Politicians have a political blind spot: all they have to do is get the right frame, the right explanation, the palatable clarification or the rhetorical justification, and no one will notice that what they say just isn’t true. They’re dancing, and we the people get a continuous show.

Is there a day of reckoning coming? Will the voting public finally reject the old school politics of deception and vote the rascals out? Are voters finally exhausted from the dance and looking to demand substance only? Lincoln might not fare well in today’s political environment, Franklin Roosevelt might. Reagan did. Carter didn’t. But those leaders were from different eras where there was at least a modicum of civility and restraint. Not that they didn’t have their own brand of shenanigans, or rhetorical sleight of hand. But nothing like the psychotic rearranging of reality of the Biden-Trump era.

Will this be the election cycle where voters dump the fibbers and elect the truth tellers? Perhaps the adults in the room will manifest themselves in such a way that this election will be more about self-interest and the needs of the county, and not power and cosmetics. But in the meantime time the big dance continues.