Almost impossible to knock off a first term incumbent

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

sample sizes ffs

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

In the past century, this has only happened four times (Hoover, Ford, Carter, H.W. Bush), and of those four, only one of those times (Carter) did the incumbent's party control the White House for no more than four years. Food for thought.

there have been only 25 elections in the past century, and only 15 of those included a first-term incumbent running for reëlection (and that's counting those with partial terms)

so your ~only 4~ statistic is in fact over 25% of a very small sample

[SUSAN CRUSHBONE]

I guess the thread should've said "first-term incumbent who is serving the first term for his party." That would have made a lot of these responses unnecessary.

Yeah, Carter in '80 proves it CAN be done, but pretty much everything that could've gone wrong did go wrong for him.

that would make the sample size even smaller