Labor Day has finally arrived, and with it the final push to Election Day in a one-for-the-ages presidential race that looks like a dead heat. For those on the left giddy with Joe Biden’s departure and the residual afterglow of a convention they say was filled with joy, and those on the right panicking due to Donald Trump’s diminished standing in the polls, history is, as always, instructive. A trio of presidential elections, each eight years apart, in the last half-century should provide an appropriate dose of sobriety for the optimists and hope for the pessimists.
In 1988, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis won a highly competitive primary and departed the Democratic National Convention with a massive, widely reported 17-point lead over Republican George H.W. Bush. He then proceeded to lose ground with each succeeding week to the point where it was obvious by mid-October that he would lose. He had come across as soulless and technocratic in his debate with Bush – famously showing no emotion when asked what he would do if his wife was raped and murdered – and staged the worst political stunt in history, riding around in a tank with a goofy-looking helmet for all the world to see. When the votes were tallied, Dukakis lost in a near-landslide. His final margin of defeat was 8%, meaning he had cratered an incredible 25% between the DNC and Election Day. The lesson here is that polls on Labor Day regarding a candidate not yet fully known, vetted, or understood by voters can take a dramatic turn when so much is riding on a debate, as it certainly is with Kamala Harris. Dukakis tried to distance himself from his own liberal record and came across as inauthentic. The VP will face the same trap if she similarly attempts to distance herself from her own clearly expressed progressive worldview.
Many will also remember the presidential election eight years earlier, recalling that challenger Ronald Reagan scored a stunning landslide victory over President Jimmy Carter in 1980. But what most don’t remember is that, despite the widespread view that Carter was in over his head, an economy choked by stagflation, and repeated foreign policy failures, Reagan and Carter were essentially tied heading into the final stage of the campaign. But in the last week before Election Day, an electoral dam burst, and Reagan slaughtered Carter by 10% and won 44 of 50 states. This speaks to the issue of how undecided or wavering voters make up their minds in the end. An unpopular president (in this case, vice president) seeking (essentially) re-election can maintain a respectable standing simply by virtue of the many advantages of incumbency but will face a harsh verdict when voters take the time to really think through whether they want another four years of what most of the country views as economic, cultural, and international decline. Harris will in the end have to somehow separate herself from the record of her own administration, a heavy lift even for the most skilled politicians.
Does Trump Have Reason for Optimism?
Eight years before the Reagan-Carter shocker was the election of 1972, resulting in a landslide so prodigious that it made Reagan’s two overwhelming victories look like squeakers. Despite being almost as reviled by the left as Trump, President Richard Nixon, who had won narrowly four years earlier, swept 49 states. His victory was in large part due to his opponent, George McGovern, the most radical candidate ever to receive a major party nomination. Once the country understood the South Dakota Senator’s quasi-socialist, pacifist worldview, he never stood a chance – and was trounced by a margin of 23 points. Democrats accused of backroom dealing in the past had vowed to open up the primary process, and the result was a candidate obviously unsuited for a general election. McGovern was running far to the left of middle America in the aftermath of the violent cultural upheaval of the 1960’s, not dissimilar to that of 2020 and since, and he was facing an electorate getting fed up with crime, cultural degradation, and violence in the streets and on college campuses across the land. Sound familiar?
The great statesman Winston Churchill once declared that those who fail to learn from history are bound to repeat it. On the other hand, Henry Ford famously opined that history is bunk. Take your pick. The world changes, but people don’t. So perhaps the operative expression as we face another election, which even the most elderly among us view as the most important or defining of their lives, comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes. The first part might, to the uninitiated, sound like a Harris word salad – “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again” - but the words thereafter speak truth to the reality of life down through the ages: “there is nothing new under the sun.”
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