Is this true? Any incumbent presidential candidate who polls under 50%

[in_cog_ni_to]

this close to an election NEVER WINS??? Some talking head said that the other day and I was wondering if it's true. Anyone know?

If it's true, the chimp is finished.

[GOPNotForMe]

1. If you're talking approval ratings....

I think Truman was the only one to be reelected with an approval rating below 50 percent.

[NewYorkerfromMass]

3. because then, like now, dems are underpolled.

most of the new voters are dems.

[ramapo]

2. Nothing's true until it happens

n/t

[genius]

4. The polls two weeks before the 1948 election said Truman would lose

However, I'm not sure all the data was collected that close to the release date. Communication and polls were different then.

[leftofthedial]

5. 9-11 changed everything

actually the coup of 2000 changed everything

[soleft]

6. Here's a link to the Mark Shields article -

He shows that the vote on election day for incumbents is usually what they've polled at and challengers usually do better

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/11/point.spread/index.html

[pmbryant]

8. That's exactly what the numbers show

I've looked at the poll data going back 30 years or so, and it's very true that incumbents pretty much get what they polls they will get. Sometimes they get less. They never get more.

So if Bush is at 48% or under, and if this pattern holds, he will lose. (Unless 3rd party candidates take over 4% of the vote, and I find that possibility to be unlikely. 3rd party candidates will do worse than they did in 2000, when they got about 3.5%, IIRC.)

--Peter

[earthside]

7. Read This.

Ignore the Point Spread

If anyone tells you that the latest authoritative national poll shows President George W. Bush either running 4 percentage points ahead of or 2 points behind Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry, pay him no attention. Ignore the messenger completely. ... History shows that the percentage of the vote that an incumbent president gets in the major polls before Election Day is an accurate predictor of the percentage of the vote the incumbent will win on Election Day. Thus, in Molyneux's judgment, the "incumbent who fails to poll above 50 percent is in grave danger of losing his job." In the four most recent elections where an incumbent president sought re-election -- Bill Clinton in 1996, George H.W. Bush in 1992, Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 -- in the three major polls of the broadcast networks and their newspaper partners, the incumbent won the same percentage of the actual vote (or less) as he had received in the polls in three elections. Only Ronald Reagan, who had polled 58 percent of the vote and then actually won 59 percent of the vote, exceeded the average of the three network surveys. The numbers of the challengers -- a list that includes third party candidate Ross Perot twice -- run better on Election Day than they do in the pre-election measures of public opinion. The average increase on Election Day in the actual vote for a challenger to a president is 4 percentage points.

Mark Shields, CNN - October 13, 2004

[speedoo]

11. Also read what Charlie Cook says:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=132&topic_id=1076604&mesg_id=1076604

[grace0418]

9. I personally don't think that any precedent set

at any previous election will apply to this one. Whether it's the polls, approval ratings, what Missouri does, what Ohio does, nothing. This election is like no other we've seen so we can't be worried about precedents, good or bad. We can only worry about what we do in the next 2.5 weeks.

[dolstein]

10. Thanks to Nader, Bush doesn't need to get 50% to win.

Thanks again Ralph. Go f*** yourself!

[tritsofme]

12. You could call 50% an arbitrary number

Clinton and Reagan were in the mid to high 50% range in terms of approval, while Poppy and Carter couldn't get their heads above 40%.

The argument that has been made for several months is that no incumbent with an approval rating so low has ever won an election, and that no incumbent with an approval rating so high has ever lost.

Truthfully, we won't know until November 2.