George W Bush, narrowest "re"-election in history?
Sun Mar 20, 2005 at 05:27:05 PM PDT
Inspired by
DavidNYC's post about research sources, I've gotten around to checking out something I've suspected for a while. Looking at all the popular vote results in US presidential elections since 1824 (before that, the EC wasn't completely chosen by popular vote, so the PV was considered meaningless), it appears that as a percentage of the popular vote,
George W. Bush was elected to another term by the narrowest margin of any incumbent in history. Some "mandate". Data is below the fold.
I looked at the
Wikipedia page on US presidential elections for all elections I could spot where an incumbent was reelected. That includes all the elections where someone was elected for a second time consecutively, plus it includes Johnson's election in 1964 (he was incumbent because as VP, he succeeded Kennedy after Kennedy's assassination). The data is from the individual Wikipedia pages about the elections from those years and is tabulated below.
It's possible that I missed some other elections where a VP succeeded into the presidency and then was reelected. Anyone know of any? Of course there are also elections like 1992, where an incumbent (Bush 41) ran for reelection and lost, but I don't count those. (Update: added T. Roosevelt, Coolidge, and Truman. Also added numerical ranks).
| year | winner | pv% | loser | pv% | margin | rank |
| 1832 | Jackson | 54.20 | Clay | 37.40 | 16.80 | 7 |
| 1864 | Lincoln | 55.00 | McClellan | 45.00 | 10.00 | 10 |
| 1872 | Grant | 55.60 | Greeley | 43.80 | 11.80 | 9 |
| 1900 | McKinley | 51.60 | Bryan | 45.50 | 6.10 | 14 |
| 1904 | Roosevelt | 56.40 | Parker | 37.60 | 18.80 | 5 |
| 1916 | Wilson | 49.40 | Hughes | 46.20 | 3.20 | 16 |
| 1924 | Coolidge | 54.30 | Davis | 29.00 | 25.30 | 1 |
| 1936 | F. Roosevelt | 60.80 | Landon | 36.60 | 24.20 | 2 |
| 1940 | F. Roosevelt | 54.80 | Willkie | 44.80 | 10.00 | 11 |
| 1944 | F. Roosevelt | 53.50 | Dewey | 46.00 | 7.50 | 13 |
| 1948 | Truman | 49.70 | Dewey | 45.30 | 4.40 | 15 |
| 1956 | Eisenhower | 57.60 | Stevenson | 41.70 | 15.90 | 8 |
| 1964 | Johnson | 61.00 | Goldwater | 38.40 | 22.60 | 4 |
| 1972 | Nixon | 60.70 | McGovern | 37.50 | 23.20 | 3 |
| 1984 | Reagan | 58.80 | Mondale | 40.60 | 18.20 | 6 |
| 1996 | Clinton | 49.24 | Dole | 40.71 | 8.53 | 12 |
| 2004 | Bush | 50.73 | Kerry | 48.27 | 2.46 | 17 |
