The younger Bush's approval rating was fifty per cent, which is low for an incumbent seeking reëlection.
Between them, Roosevelt and Taft secured 7.6 million votes 1.3 million more than Wilson but Roosevelt won only 88 electoral votes, and Taft won only 8. Taft's 8 electoral votes represented the worst performance by an incumbent seeking reelection.
Not if you're looking for a job or running a business or trying to decide whether to save, spend or hire (and certainly not if you're an incumbent seeking re-election in November).
That came in 2009, when he was a rookie, a challenger, and not an incumbent seeking to fend off a steady veteran (David Garrard) and a dynamic draft pick (Smith), as well as the fans' preference that anyone start but him.
But that was the first election when incumbents were affected by the city's term limits law, and more than three dozen seats had no incumbent seeking re-election.
Instead, Governor Pataki put an upbeat cast on every topic he touched, pledging "the same confidence, the same optimism" as in brighter times -- no surprise for an incumbent seeking re-election.
Under the state's limits for gubernatorial races, for example, the challenger may spend no more than $300,000 while an incumbent seeking re-election is limited to 85percentt of what the challenger spends.
The final match-up is the one that all along has seemed likely, between the Democratic incumbent seeking his second permitted term, and a Republican challenger who if truth be told never stopped campaigning for the White House even after he had lost his party's 2008 nomination to John McCain.
At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama's approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove — a dangerous position for any incumbent seeking re-election.
