Opinion: Bush’s shadow will hang over the ’08 race

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Voting patterns are not governed by immutable laws of physics -- they can change. Still, the column today by our colleague Ronald Brownstein makes a persuasive case that on Election Day 2008, one polling number will count above all others: President Bush’s approval/disapproval rating. And if that’s the case, Democrats almost assuredly can get ready to celebrate on Inauguration Day 2009.

In his piece, Brownstein explores the relationship between voter attitudes toward a retiring president and their choices in the election to succeed him. He noted that network exit polls found strikingly similar patterns in the contests to replace Ronald Reagan in 1988 and Bill Clinton in 2000. In each case, 88% of voters who disapproved of the outgoing president voted against his party’s presidential nominee -- George H.W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000.

Now, as both Reagan and Clinton were ending their second terms, more voters -- by a fairly healthy margin -- approved of them than disapproved. Against this backdrop, the elder Bush won the presidency, and Gore won the popular vote but lost the race in the Electoral College system.

Barring a dramatic change of circumstances, the 2008 election will transpire in the shadow of a retiring two-term president much less popular than Reagan or Clinton. In the most recent Gallup/USA Today poll, George W. Bush’s approval rating stood at 29%, with 66% disapproving. As Brownstein wrote, if voters next year divide along the same lines evident in 1988 and 2000, Bush’s current rating would translate to a landslide popular vote of more than 63% for the Democratic nominee.

What would it take for Republicans to avoid that fate and hold the Democratic ticket below 50% in 2008?

Quite a big drop in both Bush’s disapproval figure and the share of those voters who end up supporting the candidate for the opposing party.

Brownstein did the math, and here’s a scenario that would allow the GOP nominee to squeeze past 50% of the popular vote: 1) Bush whittles down his disapproval rating to 56%; 2) the proportion of those disapprovers who back the Democrat drops to 74% (remember, based on the ’88 and ’00 votes, the share of those who were discontented with the guy leaving office and supported the other party’s nominee was 88%).

Mathematically, that adds up. The rest of the presidential campaign will determine whether it is a viable political equation, too.

As intrigued as we are by this numbers-crunching, we feel compelled to note -- again -- that historical trends have been known to shift. One aspect of the ’08 race will clearly be different from the ’88 and ’00 contests: the nominee of the party occupying the White House will not be as closely linked to the outgoing president because he will not be the vice president (as the elder Bush and Gore were). Thus, whomever the GOP picks can more easily disassociate himself from Bush, the younger.

More significantly, the Democrats appear on the verge of taking a leap into the unknown by nominating the first woman or the first African American for the presidency. The candidacies of Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama each would introduce elements into the political calculus that could roil the precedents that Brownstein examines. But there’s no denying that his calculations lay out a daunting landscape for the GOP.

-- Don Frederick