| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Political scientist Dave Hopkins has a nice item revisiting the topic of electability and former Vice President Joe Biden. Hopkins suspects that a less well-known candidate might've drawn more media attention as the presumptive nominee over the past few months, but that most likely President Donald Trump's problems are driving the election. I think that's broadly correct. Which reminds me that I've been meaning to write a column that none of you are going to believe. I'm a fairly strong proponent of the idea that when an incumbent president is on the ballot, the out-party candidate doesn't matter much, at least by Election Day. And one of the reasons I think that is because I still suspect that the last two candidates to defeat a sitting president, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, were probably below-par general-election candidates who won despite their liabilities. As I said, you're not going to believe me. Reagan and Clinton were both excellent orators. And both, of course, won two general elections and were popular for the bulk of their presidencies; in fact, other than Dwight Eisenhower, they're the only two presidents in the polling era to serve eight years, leave as popular presidents, and regularly hit 60% approval or better outside of their honeymoons. But everything after their initial election had to do with how they handled the presidency as well as external events that were only partly their responsibility. Let's walk through their initial election years. Clinton defeated an unusually weak Democratic field, as George H.W. Bush's (temporary) surge in popularity during the Gulf War scared off most of the party's strongest contenders. Clinton then got hit with multiple controversies just before the primaries and caucuses started. He was accused of dodging the draft to avoid serving in Vietnam, and was then mired in a sex scandal. His introduction to the nation was a post-Super Bowl episode of "60 Minutes" in which he basically confessed to cheating on his wife. Although Clinton had numerous strengths as a campaigner, and gained plenty of support from party actors, he lost most of the early events, including several to a former senator, Paul Tsongas, who ran on a message of fiscal conservatism in a Democratic nomination battle in the middle of a recession (no, it didn't make sense back then either). Even after defeating Tsongas and wrapping up the nomination, Clinton lost in a few states to former California Governor Jerry Brown, who was running as a fringe-type candidate after having dropped out of politics. Clinton's failure to impress lasted until the Democratic convention, and helped give independent candidate Ross Perot enough momentum that Clinton sometimes polled in third place nationally that spring. Clinton was still able to win, but his eventual plurality of some 5.6 percentage points was hardly impressive given that Bush was even less popular throughout 1992 than Trump has been so far this year. As for Reagan? Clinton's problems were personal; Reagan's difficulty was ideology. Moderates and the few liberals remaining within the Republican Party were reluctant to rally behind a conservative leader in 1980, just as they had hesitated to back Barry Goldwater when he won the Republican nomination in 1964. Reagan, already on his third run for the presidency, was thought to be a warmonger and an extremist. As a result, one of his primary rivals, Representative John Anderson, ran an independent campaign. Anderson wasn't as successful as Perot (who Bush mistakenly invited to the debates in 1992, thereby legitimizing his effort), but he did poll above 20% for much of the spring before fading and finishing with less than 7% of the vote. Jimmy Carter was less popular than either Trump or Bush during most of 1979 and 1980. Yet he was able to remain competitive in the polls until late in the campaign. It took people who were unhappy with Carter a long time to come around to the alternative. Then Reagan won by almost 10 percentage points against a president who was under 40% approval. That's not a disaster, of course, but it suggests that people voted for Reagan because he was the available alternative, not because of any particular appeal. Neither of these narratives is proof that Clinton and Reagan were weak general-election candidates. But I think that's what the evidence suggests — and that, in the end, it didn't really matter who was running because the incumbent had already lost. 1. Seth Masket at Mischiefs of Faction on electors and the Electoral College. 2. Also at Mischiefs: Matthew Green on Molly Ball's biography of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 3. Paul Frymer at the Monkey Cage on the DC statehood debate. 4. Errin Haines on Black women and the Democratic Party. 5. And Jeff Singer on Tuesday's New Jersey House primaries. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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