Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Useless Statistics

Much like baseball, politics has a statistic for everything. I'm sure you could find how left-handed politicians did when facing off against right-handed incumbent Senators in off-year elections.

One such statistic has been making the rounds lately: since 1956, no President has been reelected while getting less of the Electoral College vote than he did when first elected. I did a quick check on this.

Eisenhower: 1952 - 442, 1956 - 457
Nixon: 1968 - 301, 1972 - 521
Reagan: 1980 - 489, 1984 - 525
Clinton: 1992 - 370, 1996 - 379
W. Bush: 2000 - 271, 2004 - 286

Arguably you could include Johnson in this as well. He and Kennedy were elected with 303 votes in 1960 and Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in 1964 with 486 votes.

However, this doesn't really mean much other than the opposition ran bad candidates against an incumbent or things were going fairly well (sometimes both). FDR passed his 1932 total (472) in his 1936 reelection (523) but fell in both his third term (449) and fourth term (432) elections. Wilson only barely squeeked by Charles Hughes in 1916 (277) by 3,800 votes in California after romping Taft and Roosevelt in 1912 (435).

Barak Obama won in 2008 with 365 Electoral College votes, which means that he can lose 95 votes and still win reelection. I personally think that 365 is impossible to achieve again but 270 is very possible. Statistics like this make for amusing parlor games, but are not viable in reality. After all, President Kerry would like to remind everyone how that if the Washington Redskins lose their last home game before the election, the incumbent party also loses the White House (they lost 28-14 to the Green Bay Packers).

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