On The Trail

The Other Incumbent Rule

Why Kerry must win convincingly Tuesday.

LA CROSSE, Wis.—The past six years have not been kind to political rules of thumb. During the primary season, a candidate who leads in both the polls and in fund raising on Jan. 1 is supposed to be guaranteed the nomination. Ask Howard Dean about that one. In the general election, the national popular vote is supposed to coincide with the vote in the Electoral College. Ask Al Gore how that went. And during midterm congressional elections, the president’s party is supposed to lose seats in the House. About that one, ask Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

The next political axiom to be tested will be polling’s “incumbent rule,” which dictates that undecided voters break overwhelmingly for the challenger on Election Day. (Another way to put it is that an incumbent president’s polling number typically equals or exceeds the percentage share of the vote he’ll receive.) Because most final state polls show President Bush polling below 50 percent in nearly every swing state, history is on John Kerry’s side Tuesday. But recent elections have shown that past performance is no guarantee of future results.

What’s more, if the election turns out to be close, there’s another way incumbency could be the determining factor in the election, as Randy Broz, a Democratic strategist and fund-raiser for House candidates, pointed out to me last week. This rule, call it the “other incumbent rule,” favors President Bush. In the unlikely scenario of “another Florida”—litigation or just a long recount in a decisive state—the president, by virtue of his incumbency, will hold a decisive public-relations advantage. During the 2000 recount, Republicans cried that Al Gore was trying to “steal the election” from Bush based on nothing more than the fact that the TV networks had declared Bush the winner on Election Night. Had Bush been a sitting president, the outcry would have been more persuasive. Trying to oust a wartime incumbent through litigation would be nearly impossible.

Kerry will need to win clearly and convincingly at the ballot box in order to unseat Bush, and for what it’s worth, most reporters seem to think that he’s going to do it. The Kerry campaign staff is confident, and it appears to be genuine, rather than bluster. “I never told anyone in 2000 that Al Gore was going to win by 6 points,” Bob Shrum—taking a shot at Karl Rove’s record in election forecasting—told reporters on the campaign plane. For the past week or two, the campaign has spoken confidently of winning “big states”—presumably Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—that would assure Kerry the presidency.

By Monday evening, reporters from news organizations that have colleagues traveling with Bush started saying that the Bush folks have clammed up, or that they seem unusually tight. Kerry’s final events had a giddy air. The traveling press credentials for the night’s last “major rally” in Cleveland featured a head shot of longtime Kerry spokesman David Wade, who gladly autographed a few. To the New York Daily News reporter, he wrote, “At least you’re not the Post.” And to the New York Post, he tweaked the paper’s veep “scoop” by writing, “Go Kerry-Gephardt!” I heard rumors of, but did not witness, a dancing Mike McCurry. I even read it as a sign of confidence that traveling press secretary Allison Dobson was eager to join a proposed Electoral College betting pool. Teresa Heinz Kerry’s slightly unusual political talk in Cleveland—about an America that is “young” and “imperfect” but “growing,” and how Kerry knows America’s “thorny parts” as well its idealism—came across as charming rather than ludicrous.

In Toledo, at a midnight rally that Kerry dubbed “the first stop of Election Day,” Gen. Tony McPeak criticized the Bush administration for wrapping itself in the flag to hide its “incompetence.” “You wanna shoot ‘em, you gotta put a hole in the flag,” McPeak said. “We got a guy in John Kerry who stands in front the flag. He says, you gonna hurt that flag, you’re gonna have to run through me.”

When Kerry arrived here in La Crosse for a photo op at 1:25 a.m. Central time, a man in the crowd held aloft a scrawled sign reading, “Tomorrow Is Here, President Kerry.” Kerry leapt into the crowd of a couple hundred people, clutching and grabbing and high-fiving hands. He seemed to realize that this was it, his last full day as a presidential campaigner. Just a couple weeks ago in Des Moines during a joint appearance with John Edwards, Kerry had walked down a catwalk next to his running mate, who was reaching down into the crowd enthusiastically with both hands. Kerry, by comparison, touched a voter’s hand only occasionally, and only at the end of the walk did he extend both arms to clasp hands with anyone. This time, Kerry eagerly embraced the throng for 20 minutes, perhaps not ready for this day to end.

Predictions are dangerous, but I’ll make one: Tuesday night, the incumbent rule holds, and on Jan. 20, we’ll have a new incumbent.