THE DEMOCRATS' PROBLEM
ROBERT D. STACEY CHARLOTTE OBSERVER - The first Republican to win a presidential election was Abraham Lincoln. Since that initial success, the GOP has won 23 presidential elections compared to just 14 for the Democrats.
Since the Civil War only four Democrats -- Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt and Samuel Tilden -- have won a majority of the popular vote. (Tilden in 1876, lost the Electoral College vote and never became president.)
It has been 32 years since a Democrat won a majority of the popular vote. The last to do so was Carter, who won a whopping 50.1 percent of the votes in 1976. He defeated Republican incumbent Gerald Ford, the man who pardoned Richard Nixon and carried the burden of Watergate and the Vietnam War into the election. . .
Like the 1976 contest, all conditions point toward an easy Democratic victory this November. George W. Bush, the Republican incumbent, suffers from abysmal approval ratings -- below 30 percent in some polls. The economy is weak and appears to be entering a recession. And the presumptive Republican nominee, John McCain, while certainly something of a maverick, is quite close to the president on the one issue causing him the most damage -- the war in Iraq.
Yet right now in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up, McCain and Obama appear to be in a dead . . .
The fact is Democrats historically have struggled to win the White House and have found ways to lose contests that presumably they should have won. Since Lincoln, Americans have tended to see the presidency as primarily a Republican institution. It's not that Democrats cannot win, but they seem to have more negative voter assumptions to overcome.
{source:e-mail}
