Contrary to a widely held popular belief, political history doesn’t anoint incumbent presidents as automatic winners or even presumptive favorites. The numbers show that most presidents fail in their efforts to maintain a long-term hold on the affections of the fickle public.
Of the 43 men who served as president before the current incumbent, only 16 won two consecutive elections.
Among the others, five died during their first terms, seven incumbents declined to run, five tried but failed to win their party’s nomination, and 10 won the nomination but lost their bids for reelection. What’s more, three former presidents (Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, and Theodore Roosevelt) attempted to make comebacks and roared out of retirement as third-party candidates; all three failed miserably in November, winning between 10 and 27 percent of the popular vote.
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The numbers look even worse for second terms if you remove the early “cocked hat” presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe), who easily won reelection before the emergence of the modern two-party system. Washington and Monroe, for instance, both eased into second terms without campaigning and without facing even token opposition. With these early chief executives withdrawn from the equation, 70 percent of those who have served as president since 1825 (26 of 38) failed to win two consecutive terms.
Some of these one-termers counted as obvious failures, rejected by big majorities of their contemporaries and winning scant respect from historians. Even at the time, no one expected John Tyler, James Buchanan, or Andrew Johnson to renew their leases on the White House. But other presidents who lost bids for a second term played big roles in history and have earned many admirers throughout the generations—their list includes John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Grover Cleveland (who came back from his second-term loss to win a non-consecutive victory), William Howard Taft (who returned to Washington as chief justice of the Supreme Court), and George Herbert Walker Bush.
Moreover, two powerful presidents generally labeled “great” or “near great” by historians found themselves nonetheless thwarted in their ambitions to win reelection. Both Harry Truman and Lyndon B. Johnson served as vice presidents who succeeded to the presidency upon the death of wildly popular incumbents (Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy), then won a full term in their own right. Widely expected to seek reelection, both men fared poorly in early primaries (Truman actually lost in New Hampshire in 1952 to the little-known Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver) before withdrawing as candidates—and insisting that they’d intended to withdraw all along.
Of the 16 presidents who won two consecutive terms (or four consecutive terms, in the case of FDR), nearly all of them count as historical giants and successful, significant chief executives. The only two arguable exceptions would be Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77) and George W. Bush (2001-09), and prominent academics have recently led a major resurgence in Grant’s historical reputation while Bush admirers await a similar reevaluation for that undeservedly reviled war leader.
The inevitable course of any reelection struggle makes the race a referendum on whether the public wants another four years like those they’ve just experienced. And history shows that whenever once-elected presidents seek a second chance, more often than not the people say no.
