Jeez FDR looks like Grandpa Munster in his last daysI wouldn’t say that.
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Jeez FDR looks like Grandpa Munster in his last daysI wouldn’t say that.
Allan Lichtman gave the incumbent party eight keys against them (five needed to maintain White House).I think Ford would have beaten any Democrat bar Carter.
Allan Lichtman gave the incumbent party eight keys against them (five needed to maintain White House).
* Poor midterm performance (1974--144 seats) vs. the previous midterm (1970--180 seats)
* Nomination contest: always the kiss of death
* Poor long-term economy: real per capita doesn't exceed or equal previous two terms.
* No major policy change
* Scandal: Watergate
* No Foreign/Military Success
* Foreign/Military Failure: the Fall of Saigon
* Incumbent is not historically charismatic.
Working for the incumbent administration:
* Incumbent President running for reelection.
* No significant third party candidate.
* Economy not in recession.
* No social unrest.
* No historically charismatic challenger.
It's conceivable that Gerald Ford could have potentially won the electoral college but he was going to lose the popular vote to an opponent.
I would question some of the western states you have in Humphrey's column. It is true that Carter was not the ideal candidate for the West, but neither was Humphrey--too "old-fashioned" for the kind of young voters who propelled Jerry Brown and Gary Hart and Dick Lamm to electoral victories in state elections there. (Nor indeed was Ford the favorite Republican candidate in that region--a Reagan-Brown or Reagan-Church or Reagan-Udall matchup would be more to the taste of most Westerners.) In particular, I can't see Humphrey carrying MT (where Ford beat Carter by 7.44 points in OTL) or CO (where Ford beat Carter by 11.47 points) or even NV (where Ford beat Carter by 4.3 points). One should note that Humphrey didn't do very well in any of these states in 1968--he trailed Nixon in MT by 9.01, in CO by 9.14, and in NV by 8.16. About the three West Coast states of CA, WA, and OR I'll only say that they would have been close, and I'd say the same for NM where Humphrey did very poorly in 1968. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election_in_New_Mexico The same with OH and IL, where Carter did poorly in the suburbs of Chicago and Cleveland--but did better in the southern parts of each state than any national Democrat (except LBJ) had done in recent memory. I'm also not by any means sure Humphrey wins in MO, where Carter did very well in the rural part of the state (the map at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_States_presidential_election_in_Missouri looks incredible today) or IA where Humphrey had done very poorly in 1968. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election_in_IowaIf you look at pictures of Humphrey in 1976-78, you can see he was clearly at the end. His cancer was pretty severe by the time '76 came. But lets butterfly his cancer and he decides to run. I think he'd pick a moderate southerner to balance the ticket, so perhaps he picks Fritz Hollings (a loose cannon but was actually pretty lenient on civil rights for a deep south politician) or Fred Harris. Humphrey runs a competitive race but I don't think a 15 point margin would be possible to sustain. I think the map would look something like this on election night.
View attachment 712079
Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) / Fritz Hollings (D-SC) - 311 EVs
Gerald Ford (R-MI) / Bob Dole (R-KS) - 227 EVs
I would take Lichtman's "keys" with a grain of salt. In 2000, he said "yes, they forecast a Gore victory, but they only refer to the *popular* vote, which Gore did win." In 2016, he said that the fact that the keys favored Trump was vindicated by Trump's Electoral College victory--even though Trump lost the popular vote..Allan Lichtman gave the incumbent party eight keys against them (five needed to maintain White House).
* Poor midterm performance (1974--144 seats) vs. the previous midterm (1970--180 seats)
* Nomination contest: always the kiss of death
* Poor long-term economy: real per capita doesn't exceed or equal previous two terms.
* No major policy change
* Scandal: Watergate
* No Foreign/Military Success
* Foreign/Military Failure: the Fall of Saigon
* Incumbent is not historically charismatic.
Working for the incumbent administration:
* Incumbent President running for reelection.
* No significant third party candidate.
* Economy not in recession.
* No social unrest.
* No historically charismatic challenger.
It's conceivable that Gerald Ford could have potentially won the electoral college but he was going to lose the popular vote to an opponent.
Well, first off, the last time an incumbent party faced a primary contest and won was 1880. I don't know if Reagan's challenge was the thing that killed Ford but it's historically the kiss of death. The party never fully unified behind Ford and Reagan never campaigned for him. Richard Norton Smith, Ford's speechwriter, believed that it was the latest jobs report that really did in the Ford campaign. It dipped in the last weeks.I would take Lichtman's "keys" with a grain of salt. In 2000, he said "yes, they forecast a Gore victory, but they only refer to the *popular* vote, which Gore did win." In 2016, he said that the fact that the keys favored Trump was vindicated by Trump's Electoral College victory--even though Trump lost the popular vote..
I'm not even as sure as I once was that the Reagan challenge hurt Ford so much. Yes, it did reveal the divisions in the party, but it also got some people participating in Republican politics who had not done so before--and a majority of them did end up voting for Ford in November. . .
I do like Allan Lichtman's Keys program and have referenced it quite a few times, although Litchman himself says it doesn't forecast the popular vote victory but rather the eventual winner of the election.
He's basically moved the goalposts. He used to say it predicted the popular vote winner, and used that to explain away the fact that it had failed to predict the Electoral College winner in 1876, 1888, and 2000. Only in 2016, after he predicted a Trump victory did he suddenly say that it now predicts the Electoral College winner.
Jeez FDR looks like Grandpa Munster in his last days