The political circumstances of the summer of 2024 have been unprecedented. But is an unprecedented election year in itself unprecedented?

The first race in 112 years between an ex-president and his successor featured the earliest debate in history between candidates for the highest office, which resulted in catastrophe for a sitting president whose obvious infirmities could no longer be denied by his willfully blind party and his camp followers both in his employ and in the media. There was an assassination attempt that missed the ex-president by a millimeter. Then came the departure from the race of the chief executive and presumptive Democratic nominee, after which the new Democratic nominee raised $300 million in a week’s time, erased the ex-president’s small but persistent lead that had dated back six months, and then took the lead herself a week after.

As I write in the beginning of August, we have no idea what other novelties will greet us as the general election unfolds. So anyone who thinks he knows how the election will turn out is operating on hope, fear, and fantasy. Speculation is pointless, due in large measure to the distressing qualities of the candidates themselves.

Donald Trump is a wildly undisciplined man with a penchant for self-destructive political behavior that he is assured isn’t at all self-destructive by the army of sycophants that surrounds him. Living in that kind of ego-stroking echo chamber is hardly a recipe for success in a tight race. Trump remains in a certain amount of legal limbo, possibly subject to imprisonment in September for his convictions in New York state and the slight chance that a trial on insurrection charges might actually commence before Election Day.

To some extent, Trump benefited from his legal troubles. They bound Republicans to him by convincing them he was being railroaded and helped him raise hundreds of millions of dollars before the Kamala Harris surge in late July wiped out his and the GOP’s financial advantage. But that benefit has already been collected, as everyone inclined to believe he was being treated unjustly has already joined his team while most others were either thrilled by his comeuppance or discomfited by revelations of his poor personal conduct. And in a race that will likely be decided by the 6 or 7 percent of the American electorate that has not yet made up its mind, reminders of his past four years may be unhelpful to him.

As for his rival, it is hard not to conclude that, given her public flameout as a primary candidate in 2019 and her record as vice president since 2021, Kamala Harris is the most unimpressive major contender for the highest office since Gerald Ford in 1976. She has no positive achievements of her own, there is little positive to be said about the administration in which she served, and she has partial ownership of her team’s most electorally damaging failure—the ongoing disaster at the U.S.–Mexico border. She is obviously, viewed from a distance, a far better candidate than Joe Biden was due to his unique liabilities, but her own liabilities are bound to become an issue before November and stall her momentum.

So, yes, this is a presidential year like no other.

But I would argue that nearly every presidential race in my lifetime—I’m 63, and so this is the 16th I’ve been alive for—was the most unprecedented in American history up to that moment. I can think of only three—1984, 1988, and 1996—that have followed relatively conventional patterns and whose outcomes viewed from a historical remove appear to have been set even before the candidates began to contest against each other.

That means 13 out of the past 16 elections have been, in one way or other, bananas. Which means what we should expect is that all presidential elections will be bananas—and not that they will be conducted with Marquis of Queensbury rules, feature solemn exchanges on issues, and show off this country at its finest.

And yet, as we enter every election cycle, we get seduced into believing the country is going to be faced with serious candidates, serious choices, managed by serious political professionals with serious ideas about serious approaches to domestic and world affairs. We are charmed by the possibility of large-scale popular support for genuinely substantive candidacies only to be reminded, over and over and over again, that a substantive candidacy is about as likely to prevail in a primary or in an election as George R.R. Martin is to finish his Game of Thrones novel series.

That is what the history of the past six decades demonstrates. So allow me to present a brief, and somewhat potted, account of the modern presidential election.

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In 1964, Lyndon Johnson was running in the wake of the first assassination of a president in 62 years, a national trauma that practically ensured a favorable outcome for Johnson in November. What was not assured, though, was the massive margin he would rack up after the GOP convened in San Francisco (yes, a Republican National Convention in SF, and at a place called the Cow Palace, no less).

Rather than choosing a safe mainstream Republican, insurgent conservatives maneuvered to get Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater the nomination. That grassroots revolt would be a significant development, the beginning of a trend in both parties away from backroom-pol dominance. But Goldwater’s principled anti-government libertarianism was so mismatched to the national mood that LBJ won by 22 points, took 44 states, and secured 486 electoral votes. This followed a razor-thin 1960 outcome in which Richard Nixon actually won more states than John F. Kennedy; four years later, after the assassination and the Goldwater extremism problem, 25 states flipped from Republican to Democrat (three went the other way). Bananas.

Then, 1968. LBJ was running for president. He had a bad night in New Hampshire, the first primary state, narrowly winning against Eugene McCarthy. Hearing footsteps from his dreaded rival, Robert F. Kennedy, the sitting president who had won that massive landslide a little more than three years earlier quits the race. 

Race riots follow the assassination of Martin Luther King in April. Two months later, RFK is assassinated. Vice President Humphrey becomes the nominee at a convention marked by violent leftist protests and hundreds of arrests by goonish Chicago cops. On the other Democratic extreme, segregationist George Wallace runs third-party. Richard Nixon, the GOP nominee, speaks soberly about the challenges facing the country and trumpets a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. By Election Day of the most tumultuous year of the 20th century, Nixon is elected by half a percentage point.

Over the next four years, the Democratic Party rewrites its rules and empowers its grass roots, and the party nominates its own Goldwater, South Dakota Senator George McGovern, in part after the front-runner, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, cratered his own campaign after seeming to have cried bitter tears in front of reporters due to attacks on him in a New Hampshire newspaper. McGovern picks Senator Thomas Eagleton as his vice president, and 17 days after the convention Eagleton drops out and is replaced by Sargent Shriver (a Kennedy brother-in-law) because, it is discovered, Eagleton had been hospitalized with severe depression and had received electroconvulsive therapy. That was the first modern switcheroo, the second being the Biden-Harris swap this year. Bananas. Nixon may have presided over a stalemate in Vietnam and terrible economic news, but he wasn’t an unambiguous anti-American leftist like McGovern, and he proceeded to win 49 states with a margin of 23 points. Oh, and in June, some men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

That break-in led eventually to the only presidential resignation ever, in August 1974, followed by Gerald Ford’s pardon of Nixon, which ended Ford’s honeymoon and sent him into a downward spiral in public opinion he could not recover from. Out of nowhere, the governor of Georgia, a sometime evangelical pastor and brother of another, began wandering around Democratic America suggesting he had a secret sauce to win. He said he would never lie. Derided by Washington pooh-bahs as “Jimmy Who?,” Carter was polling 30 points ahead of Ford by the time the Democratic convention was over. Ford then found himself in the fight of his life at the Republican convention as a surging Ronald Reagan captured the spotlight. In the end, Ford closed the gap with Carter, but at their one debate, Ford garbled an answer and said there was no Soviet dominion of Eastern Europe (he meant the Soviets hadn’t broken the spirit of Eastern Europe, but whatever). Jimmy Carter became president in 1976 as the first “outsider” candidate of the modern era.

In 1980, the bloom is off the Carter rose. The economy is slow, inflation is rising, two ecological disasters (Three Mile Island and Love Canal) terrify Americans, the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan, and the Iranian revolution has led to 52 Americans being taken hostage in Tehran. Ronald Reagan wins the Republican nomination around the time that a hostage-rescue mission goes horribly awry in the Iranian desert. In their one debate, Carter says he takes advice on nuclear matters from his 12-year-old daughter, while Reagan swats away a charge of being extremist with the words “There you go again.” Reagan also asks Americans if they’re better off than they were four years ago. A man who became famous as a second-rank movie star ends up winning 40 states. Carter lives decades longer, bitter and increasingly anti-Semitic, somehow blaming Jews for his defeat.

So that’s five crazy elections. Then we have two predictable outcomes in a row. In 1984: a surging economy, Americans feeling good for the first time in decades, and a president who said it’s morning in America. One bad debate performance on Reagan’s part gave Democrat Walter Mondale hope he can turn things around on the grounds that Reagan was slipping mentally (sound familiar?), but it didn’t stick. Reagan, like Nixon 12 years earlier, won 49 states, only this time because Reagan had promised and delivered. Americans were better off than they had been four years earlier.

In 1988, George H.W. Bush ran as a kinder, gentler version of Ronald Reagan, who had a 60 percent approval rating when he left office. The Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, didn’t have much to offer. Despite an ectopic life for the Dukakis candidacy in the summer in which at least one poll had him ahead by 17 points, Bush took Election Day by 8 points.

Four years later, the unprecedented returned to politics. A morally compromised candidate named Bill Clinton was exposed as a philanderer—which once would have been thought the kiss of death. But his wife went on 60 Minutes with him to deny it, an episode that helped him claim a second-place finish in New Hampshire that supposedly meant he was the “comeback kid.” He survived another “he can’t survive this” moment when a letter surfaced in which he had backed out of a commitment to an ROTC program during the Vietnam War. Even though he would be facing a Republican president who was an unambiguous World War II hero and who had successfully prosecuted the Desert Storm War kicking Iraq out of Kuwait, Clinton still won his party’s nomination. Meanwhile, a Texas billionaire named H. Ross Perot popped up on cable TV talking about the evils of the deficit and was suddenly running for president on a third-party line—and, in June, was leading both Clinton and Bush in a Time magazine poll with 37 percent (they both had 24).

Then Perot got out, and then two months later got back in, and all the while Bush had no message to run on and had no idea how he had gotten himself into these messes. Clinton won 43 percent of the vote to Bush’s 37 and Perot’s 19. A strong argument can be made, and has been made, that Perot cost Bush the election even though he didn’t win a single state. Not exactly unprecedented—Wallace had had an effect on Humphrey, although if you add Wallace’s electoral-vote tally to Humphrey’s, you still don’t get to the winning number of 270—but in January 1992, you would have been put in a mental institution had you accurately predicted any of this.

Perot returned to the presidential platform in 1996, but this time the election was very much like 1984; the economy was in good shape, Americans were in a good mood, Republicans nominated someone in Bob Dole without a lot to recommend him, and the results in Clinton’s favor were basically a foregone conclusion despite a surge in Republican electoral support two years earlier in the midterm of 1994.

And then, again, the unprecedented struck.

Al Gore was the nominee of the Democratic Party in the wake of Bill Clinton’s scandal, impeachment, and acquittal relating to his sexual dalliance with a 21-year-old intern. That was a new set of circumstances. And there was a similar what-the-hell quality to the other side, since the GOP nominee had the same name and half the genes of the last Republican president. George W. Bush, governor of Texas, led Gore by double digits in polling dating back to the middle of 1999. Gore clawed his way back after a successful convention and the race tightened—but Bush-campaign staffers were so serene about the outcome that they actually chose to spend serious money trying to win the state of California rather than dedicating every resource they had to Florida. Then, five days before the election, the most successful “late hit” in opposition-research history was dropped: Bush, who had had a drinking problem and had been famously on the wagon for 15 years, was discovered to have had a drunk-driving arrest in 1976.

It sounds banal now, but the available evidence is that the evangelical base of the GOP was shocked by the news and lost some of its enthusiasm for Bush. The race came down to Florida, a state full of evangelicals. At first, it appeared Bush had won, and Gore conceded to him. But it turned out the ballots in one county with a lot of Jews in it had been printed in a hinky fashion, and 3,000 votes had been cast for America’s most famous anti-Semite, Patrick J. Buchanan. Gore rescinded his concession and, after 36 days of absolute chaos and multiple recounts, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the clock with Bush ahead. He became the president. Democrats believed the election had been stolen, a charge that would become de rigueur on both sides of the aisle throughout close contests in the 21st century.

The result in 2004 was the reelection of an incumbent, George W. Bush, but not without all kinds of unprecedented events preceding it. One involved a new kind of ideological-partisan hit, when Democratic candidate John Kerry found himself under assault on the grounds that his record as a Vietnam War hero had been a lie. Democrats reared in outrage, but 250 Swift Boat Veterans declared Kerry was unfit to lead, and at least one person under his command said Kerry had lied about a secret mission he had never actually undertaken. No one had ever questioned the standing of a decorated veteran in this way, and conventional opinion was that Americans would see it as a slander. But since Kerry had first become famous for his later opposition to the war and advocacy of the idea that America had committed war crimes during it, he could not easily escape the shadow the Swift Boat Veterans had cast upon him.

The other unprecedented hit was about George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, and claims aired on CBS News that Bush had been derelict and had been covered for. The evidence provided by CBS—a letter—was a forgery, demonstrated by the fact that it had been composed in a computer font, not on a typewriter, and that in any case the font in question hadn’t even existed in 1972. The backlash led to the firing of the CBS news anchor Dan Rather, one of the most respected figures in the history of television news, and it arguably helped whipsaw a declining Bush back into the lead of an election he would win with a mere margin of 16 electoral votes (better than the margin of 1 he’d managed in 2000, but still). Again, you would have been institutionalized in January 2004 if you had predicted any of this.

Listing the unprecedented facts of the 2008 election properly would take a book, so here are some notes. The wife of the last Democratic president was the front-runner for her party’s nomination, itself a dumbfounding fact, until a young black senator only three years into his first term came from 25 points behind (with the help of TV’s most popular daytime talk-show host, Oprah Winfrey), lapped the wife in the primaries, and won. His elevation to mythic status was almost instantaneous, and by the Democratic convention, Barack Obama had become so rock-starrish that his acceptance speech was delivered in a stadium before 80,000 people. Six weeks before the election, the American financial system nearly collapsed under a Republican president, and if it hadn’t been game over already, the contest become a TKO right then. Obama won the first landslide since George H.W. Bush in 1988.

Like 2004, 2012 ended up featuring the reelection of an incumbent and therefore should not seem unprecedented, but it was nonetheless. For the first time in American history, a sitting president won his second term scoring fewer votes than he had winning his first. He got 70 million in 2008 but 66 million in 2012. (By contrast, George W. Bush improved on his vote total from 2000 to 2004 by 22 percentage points.) This was a telling indicator of the growing weakness of the Democratic “coalition of the ascendant” trumpeted by Democrats and liberals in the wake of 2008—which did, in fact, prove over time to be neither a coalition nor ascendant. But for Democrats, happy with the notion that their dominance of politics was literally predetermined by demography, it certainly was pretty to think so.

So, 2016. Donald Trump, down an escalator, never before in politics, defeats 12 Republican A-list candidates, and insults war heroes and grieving Gold Star parents and judges of Mexican descent. All this before a tape emerges of him talking about grabbing women where they should not be grabbed. Hillary Clinton, back again, is revealed to have likely misused her government email while secretary of state so profoundly that the FBI director conducts an investigation into her that he drops and then reopens 10 days before the election. She wins the popular vote by 3 million, and Trump wins the Electoral College. Not unprecedented, as the same happened with Bush and Gore, but still crazy.

And, of course, 2020, with a race interrupted by a pandemic that shut the country down, astounding levels of mail-in voting, a Democratic candidate who didn’t campaign, and a Republican president who didn’t seem in emotional or policy command of the circumstances into which the country had fallen. Biden wins with exactly the same Electoral College margin as Trump while winning the popular vote with 81 million, by far the largest in American history. The second-largest? Trump in that same election, with 74 million votes. Trump won’t accept the results, files more than 60 lawsuits alleging fraud and prevails in none of them, while acolytes and crazy people and courtiers support his ludicrous claims. Finally, there’s a rally on the day the electoral count is to be certified in the Senate. The rally leads to a riot, and the riot leads to Trump’s second impeachment—which he survives and then uses as the beginning of his third campaign for president, in which we are mired right now.

Thus endeth our potted history, though we will surely be able to add 2024’s chronicle when the dust clears after November. The point here is that our political discourse on what is and is not normal in American politics is corrupted by wishful thinking, a desire to believe America is more sincere about these matters than it actually is, and that the people who run for office and the people who work for them and the people who write about all this have been laboring under a collective delusion for most of my lifetime that American politics is a serious business. It’s not, at least not at the presidential level. What’s serious is what happens after all the unprecedented madness, when the elections end and the governing begins, may God help us all.

Photo: AP Photo

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