George W. Bush’s electoral margin of victory in 2000 was the closest of any modern presidential race: 271 to 266. Interestingly, since World War II the winner of of only one other presidential race received fewer than 300 electoral votes: Jimmy Carter in 1976 (297 to 240). Mr. Carter wasn’t re-elected.
I had read one theory to the effect that George W. Bush is a wartime president, and the electorate tends to support the incumbent in time of war. It’s interesting to look at the 1944 election, when Franklin Roosevelt was running for his fourth term and this nation was deep into World War II. Mr. Roosevelt received 53.4% of the popular vote — hardly a mandate — and less than he had received in 1940, when the United States had not yet entered the war.
These statistics come from the good offices of the Roper Center and the University of Connecticut.
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I’m not sure WW2 and FDR are an appropriate analogy — I’d guess more like what might have happened had LBJ had sought re-election. While WW2 touched many more American households than the current war does, there was much greater popular support for it. WW2 could boast religious pacifists who volunteered, and I don’t think we’ve seen anything along those lines in Iraq or Afganistan.
Shelley, that’s what astonished me when I looked back at the 1944 results. The American public in 1944 was wholeheartedly behind World War II, and yet it reelected Roosevelt by a fairly thin margin. If I had to guess I would have thought that FDR would have received 58-60% of the vote — a number comparable to Johnson in 1964 or Nixon in 1972. Put another way, if FDR didn’t receive a “don’t change horses” boost in the middle of what was a far more important war than the current one, I don’t see President Bush getting that boost.