At last count there were roughly 100,000 people running for president next year.Okay, so maybe there aren’t quite that many people running, or maybe I’m just not good at counting. But still, there are a lot of people who think they’d make a good president.Next year is an interesting election year since there’s no incumbent running. Barry Obama has been elected twice and despite hysterical conspiracy theories that claim otherwise, I suspect he has no plans to trash the Constitution and stay in power. (He’ll probably just return to Kenya to practice his particular brand of socialist Islam, right?)So that means we’ll have someone new.But the interesting thing about having someone new in the White House is that even though many of us think we’d like to have someone new, when push comes to shove, the person that’s already there often ends up being re-elected.
It’s good to be the incumbent. There are a number of reasons that's true, but perhaps no reason is more important than the simple fact that we know who the incumbent is.That may seem obvious, but when faced with the decision of choosing between a known entity and an unknown entity, most people are going to choose the known entity.A brief look at history proves this. In the past eleven presidential elections in which an incumbent has been up for re-election, the incumbent has won eight times. So only three out of the past eleven times has the country evaluated a president and decided that he needed to be replaced.This is consistent with how the country began, as well. Five of the first seven presidents were re-elected.It’s especially puzzling when we think about the past three presidents, all of whom have been re-elected.Clinton, Bush and Obama all endured motivated, vehement opposition to them and their re-election campaigns, but all three won. Millions of dollars, warnings of the calamities to follow, and talented challengers weren’t enough to overcome the incumbent.Because no matter how bad we think the incumbent is, at least we know who he is. We’ve had four years to take a look at him, think about him, see how he handles things, see what his deficiencies are, and see what kind of president he is.The challenger, on the other hand, is unknown. How’s this guy going to react in a crisis? Can we count on him? Does he have any real ideas? Is he honest, or he is telling us what we want to hear? Do we like him because he’s great, or because he’s not the President? It’s much easier to like someone when viewing them through rose-colored glasses. And it's easy to campaign, but what's going to happen when he (or she, hopefully!) has to govern?So sometimes it seems we’re close to choosing the challenger. Clinton, Bush and Obama were all behind in polls during the summer of their re-election year. But then Americans really started paying attention. The challengers had a few missteps and their shine wore off a little.But the president just kept on being president. He kept on handling crisis after crisis. He kept on reminding us why we elected him in the first place. He kept on being what all presidents must be: the steady, reliable, unflappable leader. Plus, let's not forget, the president knows what the job entails. The challenger can only guess.We like that. So we re-elect him.And if we liked the president even before the re-election campagin, then lookout! That’s how you end up with an election like 1984 when Ronald Reagan won 49 of the 50 states on Election Day. Poor little Walter Mondale probably thought he had a chance. He probably thought he was a good guy, had good ideas, and had enough charisma, likability, and charm to put him over the top and into the White House.But Reagan was already in the White House. He was already the man in charge, making decisions, being presidential, reminding people that they were better off with him than they were before him, and maybe even warning them of what might happen if they made a horrible mistake and chose Mondale.That was the end of the road for Mondale, even though we liked him. He was a good guy. He served our country for a long time. He’d even been vice president. We gave him a good, hard look, thought about electing him—even put him ahead in the polls for a little while—but then we remembered Ronnie.He was the president. We knew him. We trusted him. We liked him. So we stayed with him.And there was nothing that Mondale could do about it.PREVIOUS POST: My Daughter Graduated High School?IF YOU LIKED THIS POST I BET YOU'LL ALSO LIKE: Interesting Elections from American History+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++