Assuming Hillary wins, what is the likelihood she does two terms? Anyone interested in doing some forecasting/wild speculation on this? I was just looking through past administrations and 16 years of uninterrupted rule by either party isn’t common.
Since WW2, Reagan/Bush is the only time a party even got three consecutive terms in the White House. But it's all tiny sample sizes and historical quirks, so who knows.
Yeah, it really depends on how you draw the lines. Reagan/Bush is also the only time since Jackson/Van Buren it's happened without a President dying in office. (Unless you think Hayes actually won the 1876 election.)
If I start in 1976, the D's and R's both will have had five terms in office when Obama leaves.
If I start in 1952 and end in 2008, the R's will have held the Presidency for nine of fourteen terms. 1968-1992 is R's with five of six.
Since the inception of the Republican Party they've gone 22-17. Before Clinton they were 20-13.
It's odd to look at historical trends for just the Presidency, considering the Democrats dominated Congress for 40+ years. They likely would have won the 1940 and 1944 elections without FDR as the candidate. Their control over the South was something that only recently shattered and as quickly the GOP's seeming hold on it has faded.
Congress has pretty much been opposed to or at minimum been a thorn in the side to the President since 1938. Even when his party has been in power. Barely any President has gotten much more than a year of a Congress favorably in line in what he wants to do. It's why so many Presidents "shifted" to foreign policy as their focus. (And Nixon basically ignored domestic policy from the get go.)
Neither party should really be looking at 2012 or 2016 as being all that important in the scheme of their party's design moving forward even with the Supreme Court situation. 2020 matters not just because redrawing the districts, but because it's going to also going to be the last with the clear D advantage in the Electoral College if we assume zero changes in the party's positions. The states they've started flipping they have to move more into their fold. And vice versa for the R's.
One area it'll be interesting is if the D's going after VA, NC, GA, etc. allows a kind of backdoor for the Trump/Santorum jobs/trade-focused populism to bolster the R's back in the Rust Belt which they had played even in not too long ago and where the D's have kinda abandoned that focus as they assumed the states out of play. (Snyder, Scott Walker, etc. benefited from some of this.) And if the D's breakup the Religious Right's powerbase, does that help free the R's from having to kneel as much? The rise of the Religious Left doesn't get a lot of play, but there are megachurches that are Democratic money bases that could become vote bases. And we'll forever assume the D coalition won't fight it out at some point.
All that said, I assume D's losing in 2018, increases Hillary's re-election chances in 2020. Like it did for Obama.
Assuming Hillary is the D nominee this year. Something we shouldn't presume as Sanders could still...especially after the indictment I mean.
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