If John Kerry loses the presidential election, the reasons will be obvious: war, terrorism, compromised on the central issue of the moment (Iraq), a campaign with no pizzazz (John Edwards, we hardly knew you!), loss of the soccer moms, and a high-speed slime machine that began dumping on him immediately after Super Tuesday,
If he wins, he will enhance his reputation as a political closer, the big horse who can only run from behind, coming from off the pace to win by a nose. There will be talk about how he turned up the heat on in the last six week, how he sharpened his attack, how he clarified his message and simplified his rhetoric. Further analysis will focus on how Democrats were able to mobilize the base for Kerry, how they ran an underground-railroad operation, registering an unprecedented number of voters and getting them to the polls to avenge Al Gore's bitter loss in 2000.
But if Kerry wins, it may be largely because George W. Bush confronts history and gets swallowed up. Presidents who lose the popular vote do not serve a second term. And that, more than any other reason, could be why Kerry stands on the west front of the Capitol in midwinter pledging to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Americans, who have a highly self-regarding view on their electoral system, don't like funky elections. And, for our purposes, funky can be defined as any election that gets decided by a court, commission, or the House of Representatives.
Since the inception of popular-vote tallies for presidential elections in 1824, four men have become president without winning the popular vote. The first three served a single term. George W. Bush is the fourth. And though more than a century has passed since the last funky election, there is an argument to be made that the essential character of the American electorate has not changed. Yes, African Americans and women can vote when they could not in 1888. Today there are polls and focus groups, targeting and segmentation, television ads and direct mail that confound and confuse the process, but we are at least as convinced today as we were then that we have invented the best political system in the history of mankind -- and that its real power lies in the voice of the engaged citizen. To have the dictates of that voice contravened or somehow transmuted offends a certain fairness that lies at the heart of the American myth.
And that, ultimately, is what Bush is up against.
Only about three-quarters of the states tabulated the popular vote in 1824, when Andrew Jackson won both the popular vote and had the most Electoral College votes, 99. But he did not have the 131 necessary for victory. John Quincy Adams, another son of a previous one-term president, had 83. Two other candidates in the race, William Crawford and Henry Clay, split the other 78 electoral votes. The decision went to the House of Representatives, which voted to elect Adams. Four years later, every state but South Carolina had instituted a popular-vote count to guide college electors. The results in 1828 were unambiguous. Jackson won the election by 139,000 votes and trounced Adams in the Electoral College, 178 to 83.
Almost half a century passes. It is 1876. The Civil War is over, slavery is outlawed, and the country has grown from 23 to 36 states. Rutherford B. Hayes, the Republican governor of Ohio, loses the popular vote by a quarter-million votes to Samuel Tilden, the governor of New York. A dispute erupts about the returns in three states: South Carolina, Louisiana, and -- drum roll, please -- Florida. Tilden is one state short of victory, but a congressionally appointed electoral commission awards all the votes to Hayes, who becomes president. As something of a concession, he pledges to serve only one term, and despite his credentials as a reformer and corruption fighter, he goes down in history as the beneficiary of one of the most corrupt episodes in American political history.
In 1888, it was the incumbent, Grover Cleveland, who won a majority of the popular vote but lost his re-election bid when Benjamin Harrison prevailed by one vote in the Electoral College. Cleveland failed to carry his home state of New York, and Harrison won Pennsylvania with the help of Republican Senator and political strongman Matthew Quay, who once said, “If you have a weak candidate and a weak platform, wrap yourself up in the American flag and talk about the Constitution.” Quay bought enough votes to deliver Pennsylvania for Harrison, and a 233-to-168 win in the Electoral College.
Four years later, Cleveland and Harrison faced off in a rematch. Harrison and Quay were no longer allies, having parted ways over how to divvy up the patronage spoils. This time around, Cleveland beat Harrison by 46 percent to 43 percent, a margin of 380,000 votes. Cleveland's Electoral College margin was 277-to-145, making him the only two-term president to serve nonconsecutive terms.
Another 100 years go by. The Supreme Court says stop counting the votes in Florida, and George W. Bush becomes the 43rd president on the strength of a 537-vote margin in that funky election.
Four years later, the Twin Towers are gone, Saddam Hussein is in jail, Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Bush seeks to persuade the American people to do what they have never done before: re-elect a president who lost the popular vote. If he wins, the reasons will be obvious. If he loses, my top three reasons will be Adams, Hayes, and Harrison -- all one-term Republicans who won fewer votes than their rivals.
Terence Samuel is the chief congressional correspondent for U.S. News & World Report. His column about politics appears each week in the Prospect's online edition.
