The four-year club: the presidents who lost reelection
Donald Trump has spent his life in the most exclusive clubs: he burned the nights of his youth in the legendary Studio 54 in New York and later founded golf clubs that demand almost € 400,000 of initial fee from their new members. Of course, in 2016 he became part of the very exclusive club of US presidents, which has only been accessed by 44 people in history, but if his defeat is confirmed in the elections he will enter an even more select society . One in which he would have preferred not to take part: that of the presidents who lost their reelection.
Since George Washington in 1792 convinced Americans to give him four more years in power, only 10 presidents have failed at the polls. A story that begins with Washington's successor, John Adams, who was the first president to live in the White House and also the first to leave it after just four years. Adams lived long enough to see his son John Quincy Adams become president, but he died before he knew that he, too, was going to be fired after a single term. His last words on his deathbed were to the man who had defeated him: "Thomas Jefferson is still alive." He did not know that his rival had died hours before.
Adams Sr. was harmed by internal fights in his party and Adams Jr. by accusations of corruption, but the next loser was removed from the position for what has later been the most common reason for dismissal among presidents: the economic crisis. Martin Van Buren won the 1836 election handily, but just months after being sworn in, the Panic of 1837 broke out, sweeping banks across the United States, causing money to lose its value and prices to skyrocket. It mattered little to the voters that Van Buren had just arrived and that the blame had more to do with the policies of his predecessor. In 1840 the voters sent him home, and did the same when he ran again in 1848.
In the next twenty years, no president was defeated at the polls, but two of them could not even stand for reelection because their parties refused to re-nominate them: Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce. In 1868, it was President Grover Cleveland who took the disappointment of being evicted after only four years: it was a bitter defeat, as he drew more votes than his rival Benjamin Harrison, but still lost by the electoral system. However, four years later, Cleveland took revenge on him by defeating his successor. To this day, he is the only president who has returned to the White House after a defeat.
The first loser of the last century was William Howard Taft. According to historians, he himself was the first who did not really want to be president. He was happier as a judge, but both his wife and his predecessor, Teddy Roosevelt, had other plans for him. It seems incredible that in just four years his relationship with his former boss could deteriorate so much, because it was Roosevelt who condemned him to defeat when the former president appeared against him in 1913, dividing the Republican vote and granting an easy victory. to the Democrats.
Luckily for Taft, the loss of the White House had a very positive indirect consequence: Eight years later, President Harding granted him his true dream and appointed him Chief Justice. He is the only person who has held both positions, although Taft knew which he preferred: "I don't even remember that I was president."
When Herbert Hoover became president in 1928, he did not know what was coming to him. During the campaign he had said that the US was "closer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of a country." It was as if those statements had tempted fate: He hadn't been in the White House for a year when the crash of 29 destroyed the US economy and sent millions into poverty. Hoover saw the unemployment rate multiply by eight and the income of the families fell 40%. Americans did not like his response, and in the 1932 election he lost in 42 of the 48 states.
No president lost reelection again for the next 44 years, but when Gerald Ford's turn came, he didn't have it easy. Voters hadn't even chosen him as Nixon's vice president, but he had to replace first Spiro Agnew after being convicted of tax evasion and then the president himself when he resigned over the Watergate case. Although Ford had managed to recover from his unpopular decision to pardon Nixon, he entered the 1972 presidential elections with a sluggish economy and the dire images of Saigon falling to North Vietnam.
As long as Trump does not join this select club of losing presidents, the latest partner is George Bush Sr. Eight months before the 1992 elections, the US military had wiped out Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, and President Bush had an approval rating of 89%. It seemed impossible to defeat him, and many top-tier Democrats chose not to show up and wait four more years. Bill Clinton, a fairly unknown southern governor, managed to win the primaries and four months before the presidential elections he could already see Bush's popularity plummet to 29%.
The president was paying the price of a negative economic situation and was also having an open war within his party for having broken his star electoral promise not to raise taxes. Clinton led the polls throughout the campaign, and while Bush was reluctant to believe it, voters on Election Day confirmed that they wanted change. Despite the disappointment, the farewell letter left to his successor in the Oval Office of the White House is an example of good taste that should be remembered these days: “I wish you and your family the best. Your success now is the success of the country. You have all my support".
