It's the Charisma, Stupid!

At this time of the quadrennial presidential cycle, it's common to start handicapping the prospective nominees' chances against each other. But polls taken this far ahead of the general election are notoriously terrible at making any kind of accurate prediction. So what factors have proven to be reliable predictors in the recent past?

Not intelligence. Unless you care to make the claim that GWB was as intelligent as either of his two opponents.

Not experience. Clinton and GWB both won their first terms against more experienced candidates.

Not the economy. Otherwise, Al Gore would have won in a landslide.

But there is one factor that has been a consistently accurate predictor in every election since television became important in presidential politics - charisma. Since Kennedy vs. Nixon, every election that featured a significant charisma gap between the two candidates ended up in favor of the more charismatic of the two. This includes six of the last seven elections, including both Reagan terms, both Clinton terms, and both GWB terms. Reagan and Clinton were both exceptionally gifted in terms of charisma, whereas GWB was gifted with especially uncharismatic opponents.

When was the last time that a presidential candidate with clearly superior charisma lost in the general election? I believe that would be 1956, when Adlai Stevenson lost to Eisenhower. Not coincidentally, the first televised presidential debate was in the 1960 election. Since then, the only elections that have not been predictable based on charisma have been those without a significant charisma gap, such as George HW Bush vs. Michael Dukakis.

Charisma is not as useful a predictor in primaries. After all, Ford did beat Reagan in the fight for the 1976 nomination. Apparently primary voters are more frequently motivated by other factors than general election voters. This, of course, is why the parties often do a poor job of nominating an electible candidate, and also why Huckabee is not the presumptive nominee for the GOP.

Why is it that charisma is so powerful as a predictor of presidential elections? I believe there are three main reasons:

• Direct persuasion. This is the obvious one. Voters like to vote for the more likeable candidate. This seems to be especially true among those all-important swing voters who remain undecided until the last minute. Those voters are the ones without strong policy convictions; otherwise they would have made up their minds sooner. So they are more prone to vote based on personality. I have distinct memories of the Bush vs. Gore campaign, when swing voters would tell interviewers things like, "I just couldn't take the idea of hearing Gore's voice on the TV news every night for the next four years."
• Vulnerability to mudslinging. Is it any coincidence that Reagan the Great Communicator was also known as the Teflon President? That he could dissolve concerns about his age with a single well-delivered one-liner in a debate? Clinton survived impeachment, whereas John Kerry couldn't fend off the Swift Boat attacks. The fact is, mud doesn't seem to stick well to charismatic candidates. People want to like likeable people.
• Enthusiasm. A charismatic candidate is better able to inspire hordes of dreamy-eyed twenty-somethings to knock on thousands of doors, or to volunteer to ferry senior citizens to and from voting locations on election day.

Regardless of the cause, this reasoning indicates that McCain is in for a tough fight should Obama become the Democratic nominee. The charisma gap between the two men is as large as Reagan-Mondale, and could easily lead to a blowout as big.

Interestingly enough, the most charismatic candidate from this year's GOP field - Mike Huckabee - seems to be setting himself up for a possible 2012 run. Should that happen after an Obama victory in 2008, then we might see the first modern campaign that featured two highly charismatic opponents.

Now that would be interesting.