Ghosts of 1968 & 1980 to haunt Obama re-election?

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It’s easy to see why news of a potential Democratic primary challenge to President Obama should both concern Democrats and delight Republicans. History shows that those who are forced to fight for their party’s base are often doomed to one-term presidencies.

In the last fifty years, the four Presidents who faced strong primary opposition did not return to the White House the following year: Johnson (1968), Ford (1976), Carter (1980), and Bush (1992) while those who didn’t face primary challenges often won big: Johnson (1964), Reagan (1984) and Clinton (1996).

A President who has to campaign for re-election in the primary has to spend time and money trying to sell themselves to their base while neglecting the political center and moving away from the center to placate those voters, giving the challenger’s strategists valuable ammunition to use to sway more moderate swing voters in the fall.

In three of the four races where incumbent Presidents lost after primary challenges, the winning candidates won by comfortable margins, often reversing long-standing voting patterns against the incumbent President’s party:

Richard Nixon took the White House in 1968 after Johnson quit his re-election bid when Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy’s primary challenge, driven by strong liberal anti-war sentiment, showed surprising strength, including carrying the early New Hampshire primary. Democrats, who had won all but three White House contests in the previous forty years and were usually able to count on strong Southern support (including landslide wins in 1932, 1936, 1940, 1944 and 1964) got hammered, carrying just 13 states and 191 electoral votes.

Ronald Reagan’s winning 1980 campaign surged after Carter spent months fending off a strong primary challenge from liberal Senator Ted Kennedy, who carried his fight with Carter to that year’s Democratic National Convention. Where Republicans had only won the White House four times in the previous fifty years, Reagan rolled to the White House in a sweep of 44 states, carrying 489 electoral votes. Since 1980, Republicans won the White House in five of the last eight elections.

Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992 after Bush fought off a strong challenge from the right by conservative commentator Pat Buchanan. After the GOP won the White House three times in a row, Clinton won 32 states with 370 electoral votes and carrying a number of states which had gone for both Reagan and Bush in the previous three elections (including California, Illinois, Pennsylania, Illinois and Wisconsin – states which GOP Presidential candidates haven’t won since).

Much of Obama’s re-election potential will rest upon his ability to do what he did in 2008: keep traditionally blue states while fighting aggressively for swing states and forcing the GOP to defend its hold on states it normally relies upon, including Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia.

With polling continuing to show very weak support for Obama among independents, he can’t afford to lose his base if he wants to be competitive in the swing states necessary to win re-election. If there’s trouble on the left in the form of a challege for the Democratic nomination next year, it may be the beginning of the end for his re-election prospects could be in serious trouble.