The Presidential Elections of Our Lifetimes, Reconsidered
Will November 5 be the most consequential election of our lifetimes? It sure seems that way, right now, but every four years it can seem that way.
So, we decided to look back and, with the perspective of time, consider how consequential each election in more or less our lifetimes turned out to have been for the United States and for the world.
Our leanings are decidedly liberal, but consequential does not necessarily mean furthering peace, human rights or the lives of the poorest among us. Ronald Reagan’s first election proved, for example, quite consequential, though we were not fond of the consequences.
Your conclusions may vary. Let us know where you think we went wrong.
The 20 elections since 1948, near the beginning of our generation, are listed here from least to most consequential:
# 20 1976 Carter defeats Ford.
Jimmy Carter brokered a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and elevated the significance of human rights in American foreign policy. But oil grew scarce, and gas lines grew long. Iran took American hostages, and the attempt to rescue those hostages was an ignominious failure. Plus, a recession arrived just before Carter ran for reelection. Gerald Ford was a relatively benign Republican, and it might have been better had he been in office when things went off the rails.
# 19 2012 Obama defeats Romney.
Barack Obama did not get all that much done in his second term, due, in part, to Republican control of Congress and, perhaps, a tendency toward aloofness. Indeed, his administration probably under-stimulated the economy in these years after the Great Recession. Would a Romney presidency have deterred the rise of the Tea Party and, ultimately, the ascension of Trump?
# 18 1956 Eisenhower defeats Stevenson.
Although his vice president was a young conservative firebrand, Richard M. Nixon, incumbent President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a moderate and would, in his farewell address, warn against the “military-industrial complex.” Adlai Stevenson II, however, had run a genuinely progressive campaign, calling for a nuclear-test-ban treaty with the Soviet Union and increased social spending.
# 17 1992 Clinton defeats Bush.
Bill Clinton failed to pass a national healthcare plan and was retrograde, at best, on criminal-justice reform. He did, however, preside over the longest economic expansion in American history. But that expansion and focus on globalization may have come at the cost of hollowing out American manufacturing and enabling the fiscal and social degradation of the rust belt.
# 16 1948 Truman defeats Dewey.
Liberal Republican Thomas E. Dewey wasn’t very different politically from moderate Democrat Harry Truman, and both were quite different from Progressive Henry Wallace and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. So the greatest significance of this election might have been that losing Republican vice-presidential candidate, California Gov. Earl Warren, was available to be selected by Eisenhower to guide, as chief justice, what became probably the most liberal Supreme Court in history.
# 15 1996 Clinton defeats Dole.
Bill Clinton handled the breakup of Yugoslavia skillfully, but again failed to pass a national healthcare program. And his sexual relationship with a young White House intern led to an impeachment and trial, as the country entered a period of growing partisanship, even tribalism.
# 14 1960 Kennedy defeats Nixon.
John F. Kennedy sent military advisers to South Vietnam and authorized the hapless Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. But he did manage to convince the Soviet Union to withdraw its missiles from Cuba–in exchange for a pledge not to invade Cuba, again. And after the somnolence of the Eisenhower years, he brought energy and excitement to the American project. Beyond that, Kennedy’s time as president was, sadly, too short to judge. Nixon was more experienced. He also might, based on his later performance, have proven more warlike.
# 13 1984 Reagan defeats Mondale.
Ronald Reagan, perhaps already slowly sinking into dementia, deserves at least some of the blame for the Iran-Contra scandal. But, as a hawk and staunch anti-Communist, he was able to sign a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev–a treaty for which a Democrat like Walter Mondale might have been attacked.
# 12 1952 Eisenhower defeats Stevenson.
Many Democrats wanted former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president as a Democrat. So the ideological gulf in this election was small. Eisenhower said he would go to Korea. He did, and the war ended. Maybe Adlai Stevenson II, a liberal intellectual and governor of Illinois, would not have had the credibility to accomplish that. But Stevenson might have better countered the hysterical Red Scare conjured up by Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy.
# 11 1988 Bush defeats Dukakis.
George H. W. Bush ran a particularly ugly campaign against Michael Dukakis, and no progress was made on social issues at home. But Bush’s experience in foreign policy resulted in relatively measured responses to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and the fall of the Soviet Union. It is hard to imagine the inexperienced Dukakis being that adept.
# 10 2004 Bush defeats Kerry.
George W. Bush continued the disastrous Iraq War, despite not having found any of the weapons of mass destruction that he had used to justify that war. Senator John Kerry, although he had voted to give Bush the right to attack Iraq, said during the campaign that his goal would be to reduce the number of American troops in Iraq within six months of taking office.
# 9 1968 Nixon defeats Humphrey.
Richard M. Nixon did not begin the hugely bloody American involvement in Vietnam. But he spread the conflict to Cambodia and kept it going for his entire time in the White House. Hubert Humphrey did not oppose American involvement in Vietnam, but we might wonder whether he would have seen its futility sooner than Nixon. Nixon also rearranged global politics by opening relations with China at the end of his first term.
# 8 2008 Obama defeats McCain.
The election of the first Black president had tremendous significance for the United States, given its despicable history of slavery, segregation and discrimination. It obviously didn’t, however, mean that American racism was finished, as some had hoped. And Obama, unlike his Democratic predecessors, succeeded in passing a national, albeit limited, healthcare program.
# 7 1972 Nixon defeats McGovern.
The election was not close. What followed was Shakespearean. First Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after being caught accepting bribes in the White House. Richard Nixon chose Gerald Ford to replace him. Then in one of the more dramatic moments in U.S. history, Nixon himself was forced to resign for having covered up a break-in at the Watergate in an effort to spy on the Democrats. Ford became president and was left finally to concede defeat in Vietnam.
# 6 2020 Biden defeats Trump.
Despite hyper-partisanship and a slim legislative majority, Biden was able to pass some highly progressive legislation, helped the nation recover from a once-in-a-century (we hope) pandemic and restore the country’s traditional alliances. But his most important accomplishment was preventing the return of Donald Trump to the White House, where a second term likely would have been even more disastrous than the first.
# 5 1980 Reagan defeats Carter.
This election, in which Ronald Reagan defeated then President Jimmy Carter was not close. And after the Reagan Administration broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike and passed substantial tax cuts (the highest marginal income tax rate in the United States went from 70 percent in 1980 to 28 percent in 1988), it began a period in which the wealth of the highest earners in the U.S. grew many times faster than that of the lowest earners. Reagan also presided over sharp increases in military spending and sharp cuts in government programs for the poor.
# 4 2016 Trump defeats Clinton.
Donald J. Trump was, in some fortunate ways, ineffective as president, and his administration did get Covid vaccines out at “warp speed.” Nonetheless, Trump made many absurd and dangerous statements on the pandemic. And the country had to put up with four years of foreign-dictator worship, dissembling and nonsense and one day of violent insurrection. Partisanship was and remains exacerbated. Public discourse was and remains debased. And Trump, thanks in part to some hypocritical machinations by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, was able to appoint three new Supreme Court justices, which led directly to a sharp rightward turn on the Court and an overturning of the Roe v. Wade protection of a right to an abortion. Hillary Clinton, a stable and experienced moderate becoming the first female president would have been consequential in itself.
# 3 1964 Johnson defeats Goldwater.
In fairness, some of Lyndon Baines Johnson’s accomplishments came as he completed Kennedy’s previous term as president. But the civil rights and “Great Society” legislation (including Medicare) this master legislator forced through an often hidebound Congress changed the course of American history. Had the conservative Goldwater won this election we would have gone backward rather than forward on civil rights, and it’s hard to see Goldwater, a hawk, as turning away from the military buildup in Vietnam that ruined the end of Johnson’s term. More than 58,000 U.S. soldiers would eventually die in that war, along with more than three million Vietnamese.
# 2 2000 Bush defeats Gore.
George W. Bush’s misuse of the anger provoked by the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the United States-–based on false claims that the Iraq leader Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction-–led to an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, among the largest blunders in American history. It succeeded in dissipating the goodwill the U.S. gained after the Sept. 11 attacks and encouraged a couple of decades of additional Islamic extremism, terrorism and endless war. Al Gore had a strong claim to having won the 2000 election, and having his wisdom and experience in the White House likely would have significantly changed the first decade of the new century. Bush’s war in Afghanistan, though easier to justify, would prove even more intractable.
# 1 2024 Trump versus Harris.
This, of course, is the only election on this list upon which we do not yet have the benefit of hindsight. And it must be kept in mind that it is always easy to see the current election as among the most consequential ever. However, we do have reason to believe that Trump’s far-right backers might be less ineffectual this time—as evidenced by their “Project 2025.” And he, or his family–as evidenced by the 2021 attack on the Capitol–might, if they gain power, never agree to peacefully surrender it.