How significant is personality in Presidential elections?

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Winners of the White House have always had a leadership personality in the past several decades. They need to be persuasive and charismatic enough to win over the swing voters. Exceptional public speaking skills is a must.

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It apparently didn't matter the last two times. We elected an ego maniac who talks about America as a "downright mean country" and whose wife claimed "for the first time in my adult life I was proud of my country." His personality is that of a freeloader and a leech. He grew up on welfare, got into Harvard because of affirmative action, his loans were paid for because of grants funded by wealthy tax payers, defended ACORN who helped people lie in order to get money from the government and ran prostitution rings with girls as young as twelve, and after spending two years in the U.S. Senate decided he should be the most powerful person in the world. If that isn't a self-indulgent hypocritical, lowlife, then I don't know what is.

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"Personality" is hard to quantify.  One analyst who posits a mixture of economic and noneconomic factors is Ray C. Fair, Predicting Presidential Elections.  He was wrong in 2012, 1992, 1960, but otherwise has been accurate back to 1916.

If you look at the Atlas national percentages chart, you will see the percentages for either party rarely move below 40, and above 60 only four times (1920, 1936, 1964, 1972).  Hard to say "personality" was the factor -- rather party trends, incumbent advantages or disadvantages, economic factors.  Remember that the P election is not a national popular vote, but a state by state contest, where one has to get 53 percent to make the Electoral College irrelevant. Obama 2008 52.87, Bush 1988 slightly over 53 -- highest recent is Reagan 1984, 58.77.

Re 2000, Gore plus Nader equals a national popular vote majority.  Bush the Younger did not win except in NH and FLA. 

Would you agree then that presidential candidate's personality can hurt them as well? I'd say there are times it hasn't mattered such as 1936, 1964, and possibly 1972. In most elections though it has the potential to be the decider.

[barfbag]

It apparently didn't matter the last two times. We elected an ego maniac who talks about America as a "downright mean country" and whose wife claimed "for the first time in my adult life I was proud of my country." His personality is that of a freeloader and a leech. He grew up on welfare, got into Harvard because of affirmative action, his loans were paid for because of grants funded by wealthy tax payers, defended ACORN who helped people lie in order to get money from the government and ran prostitution rings with girls as young as twelve, and after spending two years in the U.S. Senate decided he should be the most powerful person in the world. If that isn't a self-indulgent hypocritical, lowlife, then I don't know what is.

Having a bad day?

Oh don't mind me, but what I said was true.