I don't know if Hillary's on that level. Historical trends suggest that a party does worse in the third term seeking the White House than in the second term. Even Papa Bush's 40 state win with a national margin of 7.8% paled in comparison to Reagan's 18.2% in 1984. Plus, it isn't clear that Democrats can be as effective without Obama on the ballot. It would be in keeping in historical trends for Hillary to lose the General Election by about five points.
Your reasoning makes sense to me, but... who is she going to lose to? (Presuming she does get the Democratic nomination in the first place.) Christie seems to be out for the foreseeable future. Most of the nationally prominent Republicans are popular with their fans but seem to be unelectable nationally even if they don't self-destruct while campaigning, as seems all too likely. Who is left? An aging Jeb Bush (whose wife doesn't appear to want him to run)? Or some competent and charismatic dark horse who's going to pull a Jimmy Carter? The last seems the most likely, but I'll be damned if I can see who that's going to be. XD
One of the things that could make 2016 have a break with precedent would be Republicans choosing a historically bad nominee.Eminently possible. In many respects, Richard M. Nixon was tailor-made to win in 1960. He was smart, ruthless, and conventional. He was simply... ugly. Physically ugly. He might have been seen as a fine President, except in the South after raking the segregationist Democrats over the coals. JFK offered much the same, and was a more convincing speaker -- and he looked more like a movie star than like a mobster.
Had the Democrats nominated some politician with big flaws in 1960, then Nixon would have followed Eisenhower.
The Republicans so far have a 'quarterback controversy'. The Democrats have none. I'm not saying that the Republican nominee will be a compromise candidate who successfully unites factions of the GOP at the convention while offending too many non-Republicans soon afterward. Maybe the Republican nominee will offer some "(insert state name) Miracle", only for the "miracle" to have some huge faults. That's how Dukakis failed.
As for Paul Ryan -- he proved himself as a campaigner in 2012: he was awful. For good reason the House of Representatives is not the springboard to the Presidency. Except for those Congressional Representatives who represent at-large districts, they often show that they can't run good campaigns. That is why most Presidents and Vice-Presidents are recent Senators or Governors.
Gerald Ford illustrates the weaknesses of someone who had not been either a Senator or Governor -- someone who wins a statewide election. Had Ford ever been a Senator or Governor he would have shown that he could win statewide in a politically-diverse state. He never did. He made huge mistakes running for his first election campaign for President. He figured out how to campaign, but too late.
Sitting and recent Congressional Representatives have fared badly as VP nominees. Bill Miller (1964) and Geraldine Ferraro (1984) went down with politicians running incredibly-bad campaigns. Jack Kemp would have probably been as good a President as anyone since FDR... but he could not rescue Bob Dole. He had never been a Governor or Senator. Paul Ryan... he's either cabinet material or a potential Speaker of the House.
Here's a good test. It has worked well for a very long time:
(The Lichtman test, deleted for brevity)
Thank you. They could still fail.
Unless something happens to her... or if Barack Obama. In the first case the democratic field is wide open. Robert Kennedy seemed to have the 1968 Democratic nomination wrapped up -- until he was assassinated. In the second case we have Joe Biden as President, and he gets to stumble around and becomes the default nominee if he chooses to run.
What seems to matter is that the Presidential nominee have the nomination as a certainty before the Convention. Barack Obama solved that problem well before the 2008 Convention.
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Possible. More likely, Hillary Clinton could co-opt them. She has nothing to lose by attracting young, promising Democrats to her cause.
Hillary Clinton can run an aggressive campaign against poverty as Barack Obama dared not. Republicans could have easily cast a new War on Poverty by Barack Obama as a spoils for African-American and Hispanic voters ("You can vote for Obama and a bigger welfare check for lazy slobs -- or you can get tax cuts from the Republican nominee for yourself and more jobs"). Barack Obama wisely chose to appeal to middle-class members of minority groups who can influence the poor of their own group.
Some of the biggest concentrations of poverty in America are among white people in Appalachia and the Ozarks. Those poor white folks could never vote for the exotic egghead Barack Obama.
She already has the Obama apparatus intact. That will be a huge political asset.
Enacted in the first term, implemented in the second. At that, Lichtman seems ambiguous.
A scandal would be that cronies of the Obama Administration built corruption into the program and derived a profit from it, or that large donors got lucrative contracts in a thinly-hidden
quid pro quo. Scandals implode after considerable time.
The two strongest areas for Barack Obama have been economic stewardship and foreign policy. Hillary Clinton gets no credit for the economy, but she gets it for foreign policy. Such would be extremely strong.
Charisma counts for at most two of the keys. If Jeb Bush should be up by 5% in October, then the answers to the keys are not what they are now. Maybe the economy is in a meltdown. Maybe Barack Obama has become a sudden failure as President.
