Can the 44th President be re-elected in 2012?

[Mr. Morden]

No, he's never said that he would run for one term.  He was asked about whether he'd consider serving for just one term, and he responded that it was too early to talk about running for reelection.  But that's the standard boilerplate response that all the candidates give.  None of them is going to say "I will run for reelection" before they've even won the first time, as they don't want to remind the voters that they might end up getting stuck with them for as long as 8 years.

[Mr. Morden]

I doubt it if it is a Republican. No party has ever held the White House for four consecutive terms outside of FDR. The public just gets tired of the same party each year. If a Democrat wins then they can be reelected. Unless McCain does really, really well in his first term, I just dont see the GOP winning ANOTHER election in 2012. It just wouldn't seem possible, or the Democrats will be in real trouble.

That's what I am thinking. Actually, it wasn't since 1828, anyways and even then there wern't two clear-cut parties yet (1828 was a brokered election)....after the fourth loss, the Federalists ceased to exist.

What?  Aside from FDR/Truman and the Democratic-Republicans of the early 19th century, we've also had the post-Civil War GOP and the turn of the century GOP (McKinley-TR-Taft).  So that's four times when we've had more than 3 consecutive terms of the same party.  So of the 7 times that a party has successfully won 3 consecutive terms, they've successfully extended that to 4 or more consecutive terms 4 times.

[Mr. Morden]

What do you mean by "4 terms with 2 presidents WHERE each president came from different tickets"?  You mean where the two presidents were never on the same ticket together?  What difference would that make?

[Mr. Morden]

Of the 7 times that a party had held the presidency for three terms and was going for a fourth term, the guy running for the 4th term was the incumbent president in 6 of those cases.  The only exception was Taft running in 1908, and he (obviously) won.

[Mr. Morden]

OK, if you mean this situation: A president serves two full terms, then has a successor from the same party win the party a third term, and that same guy runs for a second terms (which would be a 4th term for that political party), the only cases are:

James Madison in 1812, successfully reelected
Martin Van Buren in 1840, defeated
George H. W. Bush in 1992, defeated

But that's so few cases in which it could have happened, that I don't think it really tells you anything about whether, hypothetically, McCain could win reelection in 2012 if he were elected in 2008.  That's what this conversation was originally about.  AHDuke said "No party has ever held the White House for four consecutive terms outside of FDR." (which is obviously untrue).  You added the Democratic-Republicans of the early 19th century, and I was saying no, there are other examples as well.  Of the times that a party has won three consecutive terms, they've gone on to win a fourth term about half the time.

Now yes, you can slice the historical examples even thinner by adding in different conditions about who was an incumbent in which elections and so forth, but then you only get three examples of this even being possible, which is not enough to draw any conclusions from.

[Mr. Morden]

OK, now I understand what you were talking about.  I misunderstood.  You weren't saying that if McCain wins in '08, he'd be doomed in '12.  You were saying that if he does manage to pull out victories in both years, the Dems would look like perpetual losers.  Gotcha.