You missed even Dubya, who won by a bigger margin even if he should have been defeated.
No, he most certainly should not have.
if we had only known back then the damage that he was doing to America...
Like what?
Dubya, 2000 48%
Dubya, 2004 51%
If it is any consolation the 3% gain was weak for someone who did much campaigning (Eisenhower didn't campaign much in 1956).
That's why Eisenhower gained less than Dubya did.
This is a diverse lot. In theory one expects an incumbent President to achieve his promises while convincing some who didn't vote for him the first time that he isn't that bad. He satisfies his original voters or he fails completely -- like Carter or Hoover. If people tire of the agenda, like the third-term-in-all-but-name of Ronald Reagan that the elder Bush tried to win, then incumbency is no asset.
Well, isn't that how the elder Bush won California and Illinois and Vermont and the Presidency and sh**t?
Hoover ran on the economic achievements of his predecessors -- "a car in every garage and a chicken in every pot" in 1928, and had nothing to run on in 1932. Carter made promises of some administrative reforms including zero-based budgeting and didn't get them. To win re-election he had to make fresh promises to win over new constituencies, and such is impossible.
When you put it like that, every President who doesn't accomplish everything he promised in his first election loses (if that was so, Obama would lose a landslide). Carter and Hoover both lost because of the economy, not because of zero-based budgeting or whateverthefock.
President Obama wins by a larger margin if
Obama will almost certainly not win by a larger margin. The chances of it are infinitesimal.
(1) significant third-party candidates cut into right-leaning votes at the expense of Mitt Romney. Just take a look at how Virgil Goode does in Virginia. Goode seems to be a good cultural match at least for the Mountain South -- far better than either Obama or Romney. If he runs in Georgia and Missouri he siphons away enough right-leaning votes in those states to flip them to President Obama.
Polls always overstate the support of third-party candidates. They can only make a difference in a
really close election or if they get invited to the debates. In that sense, Johnson is a much greater threat than Goode (Goode mathematically cannot win, he's not on enough ballots, and in that sense he won't get invited to the debate, period).
(2) Romney collapses as a candidate. We just haven't seen that yet, and I am not going to call that until I see it.
It won't happen. Romney is a professional candidate and you have to remember 40-45% of the country goddamn
hates Barack Obama and will vote against him no matter what; the number for Obama is something like 25-30%. The remainder mostly kind of like Obama. If Romney can sway them (which he should be able to do if he has more money), than he can win, a landslide.
...Barack Obama was a horrible match for the political culture of much of America and still is.
Not really. He won, remember?
It is hard to imagine any Presidential candidate winning by as large majorities in so many states and losing by as large majorities in so many.
Not really; the trend of polarization has been much commented on and it was much worse at, say, the turn of the century (1900). It was imagined and it was not surprising.
He can still win while some of the huge margins by which he won in 2008 get pared (he won by 20% or more in eleven states and by 15% to 20% in six others), he loses by similar margins in states that he lost by 14.9% or more, and campaigns effectively enough in the swing states to win what he must. He could conceivably gain electoral votes while losing some of the huge margins that he won by in California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
Yes, but there doesn't seem to be a coherent reason for
those particular states to trend heavily anti-Obama, is there? I can just as logically say he can lose lots of votes in swing states. When you ignore logic, you can say whatever you want.
