2016: The Old Switcheroo
by Alex Thurston

A lot of people have compared Obama’s run this year to the final two seasons of the West Wing, in which a charismatic young congressman upsets a Washington insider (Jeb Bartlett’s vice president). The parallels are striking, but they may be getting ahead of themselves: those West Wing seasons provide a blueprint not for how to defeat an incumbent of the other party, but for how one party can hold the White House for more than eight years.

A lot of people talk about wanting to see Democrats succeed Democrats. FDR supposedly set the standard for this: he was so great, the theory goes, that the country kept on electing Democrats out of gratitude. But the historical record suggests that a leader’s greatness doesn’t necessarily benefit his party. Churchill was great, right? The British rewarded him with an electoral defeat even before World War II ended. Truman, who acceded to the Oval Office on FDR’s death, fought a re-election battle in 1948 so tight that, as we know from the famous photograph, newspapers called the election for his opponent. In 1952, seven years after the death of the man who lifted America out of the Great Depression and won World War II, his successor was so unpopular that he did not even run.

In the post-war era, elections where a sitting vice president competes have been the most closely fought, bar none: 1960, 1968, and 2000 were all decided by less than one point in the popular vote. George HW Bush’s triumph over Michael Dukakis in 1988 is the obvious exception to this rule - and, incidentally, the only time when a sitting vice president won (we’ll talk about Gore in a moment). But after seeing the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, I’m convinced that Bush’s victory hinged on the use of some of the dirtiest campaigning in American history as well as Dukakis’ pronounced weaknesses as a candidate. With a stronger candidate, Democrats would have been able to exploit the structural weaknesses of the GOP’s position in that election.

Here’s another way to put it: since FDR, only once has a party held the White House for longer than 8 years, even the dreaded Republicans.

Americans are fickle. We love outsiders. Dwight Eisenhower, fixing Washington’s mess. John F. Kennedy and the freshness of youth. Jimmy Carter. Ronald Reagan. Barack Obama.

Incumbents tend to win, and they tend to win big. Eisenhower 1956. Johnson 1964. Nixon 1972. Reagan 1984. All of those were 15-point victories or greater.

But after 8 years in the White House, Americans are bored of you no matter what you’ve accomplished. Even a successful administration carries burdens, and one dogged by war, recession, or scandal can be a weight around your neck (Johnson/Humphrey 68, Nixon/Ford 76). As vice president, you have big responsibility but little ownership over what transpired in the previous eight years. Your position, politically, is complex and tenuous. How far can you go in criticizing the president without looking like a hypocrite? How far can you go in campaigning with him without looking like you’re just a clone, a wannabe? Meanwhile, the “outsider” can hit you freely.

Yes, Democrats by rights won the White House in 2000 in an election that confirms my theory on closeness of VP-versus-outsider elections but seems to overturn my theory about it being difficult for the VP to win. But it didn’t have to be that close. Let me throw out a counterfactual question: if Bill Bradley had upset Gore in the Democratic primaries, could he have scored a more decisive victory over George Bush?

Luckily, we probably won’t be facing those kinds of questions in 2016. Assuming Obama wins re-election, Biden will be 73 in 2016, and my feeling is that he will not run. That will leave the field, to an extent, open. So here’s my secret formula for holding the White House: have a Democratic “outsider” upset an insider in the primaries. Best of all would be to have Biden actually compete in the primaries and lose to a young charismatic Democrat from the West, especially a woman or a Latino.

If you want real political theater, the outsider could hit the Obama administration on some of its failures, then stage a reconciliation with Obama around the time of the convention and campaign with him throughout the fall. That worked pretty well with Obama and the Clintons this fall, eh? Picture that on steroids.

This is also a decent way to keep moving the country left. The outsider, especially coming from the West, could criticize the Obama administration for not doing enough on the environment, not doing enough on alternative energy, etc. Find me a lifelong gun owner and we’re in business.

That leads me to my first practical suggestion for you post-election: keep your eye open for young leaders. We need to identify them soon. You think this campaign was long? Bullshit. Richard Nixon was running for president from the moment he lost in 1960. People started talking about Ronald Reagan as presidential material in 1966. People were forecasting a Clinton presidency in the 1990s as early as 1986. It’s not too early to start watching people, figuring out who might be our outsider eight years from now. Because if history serves as any guide, no matter how well Obama does or how popular he is we’ll have trouble holding the White House in 2016 unless we switch our game up and keep em all guessing. 

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