A second presidential term is the ultimate trophy in American politics. But those who win it often see it as something more: a chance to change the country — or at least its national government — to make it more to their liking.
Influenced by both an inner circle and throngs of fervid supporters, second-term presidents hear the word “mandate” and believe the voters have given them new and almost limitless leeway to deliver marching orders to the nation.
In reality, swing voters in key states tend to tell a different story — one that spotlights the voters’ own personal circumstances, including whether they see themselves as “better off” or not.
The highly unusual circumstance of 2024 was the presence on the ballot of a former president, Donald Trump, who was defeated in 2020. This year, he came back — the first former president to seek a new term in more than a century. His opponent was the current vice president, Kamala Harris.
But for a crucial slice of the electorate, the comparison was not between Trump and Harris but between memories of the last four years and memories of the pre-COVID years that preceded them. For these voters, Kamala Harris was a reminder of hardships visited on working class families of all kinds by the COVID year and the post-COVID inflation spike that drove up prices on everyday goods such as food, gas and shelter. Trump offered a version of the pre-COVID economy that sounded good by comparison.
These voters’ focus was and is on the most recent conditions they have to deal with. Their viewpoint on the government is the current government and how it relates to them. That is why such voters talk about the price of eggs so much more often than the fate of Ukraine or perceived threats to democracy.
But once a vote is cast it can mean anything the winning candidate wants it to mean. And that means Trump is living a second-term president’s dream. He has democracy’s seal of approval. So he and those feeding his thoughts can live their dream, hearing a flourish of trumpets and imagining overwhelming popular support for their agenda across the board.
Trump in this campaign has promised or hinted at many ambitious proposals for his second term. These include sweeping new tariffs, the deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, new loyalty requirements for federal employees, altered military alliances abroad and deep cuts in federal regulations as well as federal spending and taxes.
As a candidate, Trump has often suggested he could accomplish these things by fiat. To be sure, he will have the power to rescind executive orders issued by President Biden once Biden has left office.
But beyond that there will still be roles for the Congress and the federal judiciary. Both may be more compliant this time around than they were when Trump first took office; but both can be expected to defend the share of decision-making power granted them by the Constitution.
These are among the obstacles that await and eventually confront any president’s real or imagined mandate from the people.
Lessons from past presidents elected to a second term
Historical review finds presidents who served two terms have typically found their trophy term more difficult to manage than their first. It is rare for a president to be remembered more for his second term’s achievements than for those of his first.
That has in no sense dimmed the luster of a second term, any more than it offers consolation to those who have been denied one. In good health, presidents all but automatically seek reelection. It is the most obvious vindication and confers democracy’s seal of approval.
Moreover, remaining the party standard bearer to the end of a first term usually helps hold the president’s party together as a voting unit in Congress. In general, it should minimize or mask divisions within the party that can be fatally magnified by battles over the nomination (such as the contest between President Jimmy Carter and Sen. Edward Kennedy in 1980). Not having a clear continuity clouds the reelection prospects of a party’s candidates up and down the ballot.
So there is little doubt an incumbent will run again, in good health, and offer his party its strongest suit. It’s just that the reality of those dearly desired second terms has rarely been as fulfilling as promised. As a general rule it has not even equaled the positives of the first term. And, not infrequently, they have brought reversals that even marred the first-term legacy they were meant to burnish.
Half a dozen since World War II
Such has been the case for each of the six presidents who have won a second elected term since World War II. That includes the most recent three: Barack Obama, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. (This was the first time three presidents had served second elected terms since the early years of the Republic, when Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe all won back-to-back terms between 1800 and 1824.)
All six of the postwar presidents who won a second elected term before Trump came to Washington with a sense of transformation or even revolution driven by popular demand – much as Trump himself did in 2016. For Dwight Eisenhower, the World War II general, the big change was the return of the Grand Old Party to the White House. “Ike” was not a particularly partisan figure and might have been nominated by either party. But he was nonetheless the first Republican chief executive in a generation, taking the oath 20 years after the Great Depression had first lifted Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House.
Eisenhower’s first-term mandate was to end U.S. involvement in the Korean War and hold the fort against Soviet incursions and influence in Europe. He had been the supreme commander of NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization), which grew out of the World War II alliance whose combined forces he had commanded in winning that war. For most Americans he symbolized both war and a return to peace, a commitment to resisting Communism but also to domestic economic prosperity and traditional social and family life.
Reelected in a landslide in 1956, Eisenhower found fewer dragons available for slaying in his second term. The Supreme Court order against segregation in public schools had spawned “massive resistance” in the South and the president was caught in the conflict when he sent an elite force of airborne troops to Little Rock, Ark., in 1957 to protect children integrating a high school in the face of angry crowds.
The postwar economic boom was losing steam in the late 1950s, and resurgent labor unions helped Democrats expand their majorities in both chambers of Congress in the midterms of 1958. The Senate majority that would pass the major civil rights legislation of the 1960s was largely a product of that midterm. Eisenhower’s legacy was also bruised when he was unable to help his vice president, Richard Nixon, succeed him in the Oval Office. Nixon lost narrowly to Democrat John F. Kennedy.
Nixon would have a measure of revenge later on when he won the presidency in 1968 and again in 1972, carrying 49 states in his landslide reelection year. But Nixon would also come to symbolize the notion of a second-term curse on presidents, plunging from his 49-state victory to an ignominious resignation just two years later in August of 1974. Nixon’s reelection campaign had been guilty of a variety of “dirty tricks,” including burglarizing the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office complex. Investigations by law enforcement and months of nationally televised hearings in the Senate forced Nixon out on the brink of impeachment.
Reagan: A hard act to follow, even for Reagan
After the shorter presidencies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, the nation turned to former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan in 1980 and gave him his own 49-state reelection landslide four years later. There was talk on realignment in those days, talk of the Republicans becoming a permanent majority as they added seats in the South and won over blue collar voters in multiple regions.
But Reagan found himself a hard act to follow in his second term. Having passed deep tax and spending cuts in 1981 and given new life to many conservative ideas and initiatives on social policy, Reagan had to compromise with congressional Democrats to move versions of his legislative program in his second. His tax reform in 1986 was largely written by Democratic and moderate Republican committee chairs, and his foreign policy hard line softened considerably as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
Reagan in 1988 was the only two-term president to hand over the keys to the White House to a member of his own party since Ulysses Grant in the 1870s. But his successor, George H.W. Bush, lasted only one term. He was defeated by Democrat Bill Clinton, who would pass major trade and crime bills but fail in his effort to reform the health insurance system.
Clinton was an exception to the usual pattern of two-term presidents in that his biggest setback came in his first term, with the 1994 midterm elections costing Democrats their majorities in both chambers. It was also that election that installed the GOP in the majority of House and Senate seats and governorships in the South for the first time since Reconstruction – a dominance the party has held ever since.
Clinton still managed to win reelection in a three-way contest in 1996 but he found the road rocky in his second term as well. Although he survived an impeachment trial in the Senate in 1999, the scandal of his affair with a White House intern dominated the news for nearly two years.
The ambivalence with which the nation seemed to regard Clinton was manifest in the closer-than-close presidential election of 2000. The determinative electoral college vote of Florida came down to 537 votes, and that made George W. Bush president.
Bush’s presidency was struggling in 2001 when the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, intervened and subordinated all other issues and concerns. Bush would rocket to 90% approval in the Gallup Poll and retain enough of that support to win a second term in 2004. But his second-term agenda, headlined by an effort to restrain future growth in Social Security costs, did not find much purchase in Congress, despite GOP majorities in both chambers. When Bush’s second midterm election came around, his party took what he himself called a “thumpin” and fell to minority status in both chambers.
By 2008, Bush’s military incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq had lost much of their avenging angel momentum. Worse yet, a meltdown in mortgage-backed securities sent Wall Street into a panic and spurred a highly unpopular federal bailout for investors. Angered and frightened, many voters turned to the Democrats and their fresh-faced hero, Barack Obama.
Obama not only reunited the Democratic voting base of that had been Republican mainstays in recent decades. Years past, he won states such as Indiana and North Carolina. He managed to enact a health insurance reform his party had long been pushing for, along with new restraints on Wall Street investors. But after his reelection in 2012 he too fell victim to the “lame duck” status that has made it increasingly difficult for second-term presidents to dominate the news or move the electorate.
It is hard to imagine a president who took office with more of an outpouring of voter emotion than Obama. But by the midpoint of Obama’s second term, much of this adulation and energy had dissipated, and the usual payback had begun. Obama had lost the House in 2010 in crushing fashion. He then lost the Senate in 2014 and with it the chance to confirm a Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court when a vacancy occurred in 2016. Obama’s second term served as a prelude to Trump’s first.
Trump Redux: A whole new world?
Trump differs from other presidents who have contemplated second terms in that he does not carry a functioning administration into office with him as he would have as the incumbent in 2020. He will have to start over, but not from scratch. His allies have been hard at work finding new personnel for the executive branch of government’s thousands of appointive positions. There are also lists of prospective federal judges who can expect to be confirmed by the new Senate majority.
(The only other president to return to office after an interruption was Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, defeated in 1888 but returned to office four years later.)
It is not unusual for second-term presidents to find themselves with majorities in both chambers in Congress, or for those majorities to be led by the president’s allies. These encouraging voices on Capitol Hill are eager to be heard in support of the party leader who has, presumably, made their own success possible. The support of such a choir can make it seem as though the usual restraints – the checks and balances of our system – have been suspended. It suggests anything can happen, anything can be done.
Moreover, it is easy for a second-term president to see the judgment of the voters as vox populi, vox dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”). At a minimum, it seems to confer democracy’s seal of approval on a previous term. Even if analysis suggests the crucial factor was rejection or non-acceptance of the opposing candidate, the returning president will see himself as the protagonist and the motivating force in his own story.
Imagine how much more this might be the case when the returning president is not already in office, but instead has suffered rejection by the voters himself. Add to that the indignities of criminal prosecution and even felony convictions. Now imagine how much all this would be true for a personality such as the current president-elect has displayed throughout his career.
Given the extraordinary degree of focus Trump maintains on himself and manages to promote in the media — among critics as well as disciples — it is tempting for those in either camp to say his second term will be unlike those of all his predecessors.
Nonetheless, the lessons of history, and specifically the cautionary tales of second-term presidents and second-term Republicans in particular, are not just the stuff of textbooks or seminars. They can offer guidance and perhaps even temper expectations. That may not be welcome in the Trump world in the moment of triumph, but it might be useful if events lead to frustration down the road.
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