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By John Fortier
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Posted: 05/30/07 06:35 PM [ET] |
President Bush’s supporters have likened him to Harry Truman, an unpopular president who will be vindicated by history. But for congressional Republicans, the Truman parallel may be all too real: an unpopular war and an unpopular president not running for office lead to congressional losses for the president’s party.
Close your eyes. Imagine a sitting president whom voters have given another four years in a hotly contested, close election.
He has engaged the country in a war which he argues is part of a larger, several-decade struggle, but the war does not go as well as planned and public opinion begins to sour on the president and the war. Not far into the new term, the president’s job approval numbers have dropped to the middle to low 30 percent range, and they remain at that low level for the next several years. At the midterm election, the president’s party loses around 30 seats in the House and five or six Senate seats.
Presidential candidates from the opposing party vow to end the war.
Now, open your eyes. It is Harry Truman, and it is George W. Bush. The parallels are eerie. They are the two modern presidents who have had sustained periods of very low public job approval. Using Gallup poll numbers, Truman’s job approval rating dropped significantly in the early part of 1950, and they essentially remained in the 30s, or sometimes even 20s, for the remaining nearly three years of his presidency. Similar Gallup numbers show that for almost the past two years, Bush has averaged in the middle to low 30 percent range.
We have had other presidents with unpopular periods, but none as long-lasting as Truman and Bush. Richard Nixon’s job approval rating plummeted to the 20s, but he spent only his last year with ratings below 40 percent. Jimmy Carter had a couple of nine-month periods where his job approval dropped below 40 percent, but did not have the unenviable streak of bad ratings that Bush and Truman have endured. President George H. W. Bush lost his groove late, dropping below 40 percent for only a five-month period leading up to the election.
Lyndon Johnson faced similar circumstances; he had an unpopular war on his hands, and his job approval rating dropped during his last year in office. But even though the Vietnam War was not popular, Johnson remained much more popular than Truman and Bush, mostly remaining above 40 percent in his job approval rating.
On the war, in 1952, two pre-election polls showed that 43 percent thought that the Korean War was a mistake versus 37 percent who think it was not. In the most recent similar Gallup poll, 57 percent of Americans think the Iraq war was a mistake, while 41 percent think it was not.
So with such a legacy, how did Truman’s Democratic Party perform in the 1952 elections? It lost 22 seats in the House and two seats in the Senate — this on top of the substantial losses in the 1950 midterm election. The party did not bounce back from its midterm loss; its problems continued.
The continuing unpopularity of the war explains Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) tempered expectations for the 2008 election. He believes that it will be tough for Republicans to make gains. The House will be similarly difficult.
Someday, historians may laud Bush and Truman together. Perhaps even in the short run, Bush will turn around his popularity and his party will benefit. But if he remains in these long doldrums of public opinion, his party may suffer more congressional losses as Truman’s did 55 years ago.
Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. |
