This is Life!: Revolutions Around the Cruciform Axis

Handicapping the Presidential Election

We all want a crystal ball on the future. Impatient cusses that we are, we don't want to wait till Election Day in November, but want some reassurance that the agony of anxiety we have about whether our candidate wins or loses will have a favorable payoff.

So, you are going to hear all sorts of predictions based on the facts of past elections. You know, the "No one has been elected President who hasn't dined at a Dairy Queen on the Fourth of July" or some such twaddle. In an Opinion Journal piece online James Taranto notes:

As in sports, streaks and slumps in politics go on only until they end. We keep hearing that Ohio is a crucial state for President Bush because no Republican has ever won the presidency without it. Yet while it's probably a good bet that Mr. Bush will either carry Ohio or lose the election, the recent past has seen plenty of similar streaks broken.

Want to learn some of the once-authoritative predictors of who would win the White House? Read on.

Mr. Bush was the first Republican since James Garfield in 1880 to win the White House without carrying California. That record would not have fallen had Al Gore received a few thousand more votes in Florida--but in that case, Mr. Gore would have become the first Democrat ever elected without carrying Missouri.

As it was, the Show-Me State became the most durable bellwether in America, having last backed a loser, Adlai Stevenson, in 1956. Missouri took that torch from Delaware, which voted for Thomas Dewey in 1948, then backed winners from 1952 through 1996 before falling to Mr. Gore in 2000.

In the process, George W. Bush became the first Republican to win the presidency without carrying Delaware since Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Mr. Bush was also the first president since Harrison to win election without a popular-vote plurality.

Perhaps it augurs well for John Kerry that neither Harrison nor the two earlier "minority" presidents, John Quincy Adams and Rutherford Hayes, won re-election (though Hayes didn't run). But in order to keep that streak going, Mr. Kerry would have to become the first president since Lincoln to win in November after being nominated at a convention in his home state.

He also would need to win the White House as a sitting member of Congress, something only three men have done: Rep. Garfield in 1880, Sen. Warren G. Harding in 1920 and Sen. John F. Kennedy in 1960. And here's a streak that might give Mr. Kerry pause: All three died in office.