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Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.

The truth is that for a Democrat to triumph in a presidential election, it needs to come on the heels of 'the dark times' of an unpopular Republican administration. Carter followed the Nixon era, Clinton succeeded after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, and Obama was a direct result of eight years of Bush/Cheney.

Losing the presidency is not like losing any other office. More than any other office, it's a vote about you as a whole human being.

Since the emergence of the Republican Party, only two Democratic presidents, Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy, have been followed by Democrats, and both FDR and JFK died in office, so their successors ran as incumbents.

I don't know how many people run for vice president and president and lose both.

One is that President Clinton, in his first two years of his term, did not govern as he had campaigned.

I worked for a lot of candidates, in tough campaigns that lost. Most of my candidates lost until Bill Clinton. There was always a point where you look in their eyes and they knew it was over. And there was never that point with Clinton. He never quit. He never gave up.

In the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore got more votes than George W. Bush, but still lost the election. The Supreme Court's ruling in Florida gave Bush that pivotal state, and doomed Gore to lose the Electoral College. That odd scenario - where the candidate with the most votes loses - has happened three times in U.S. history.

John Quincy Adams ranks with Jimmy Carter on the roster of ex-presidential redemption. Instead of completing a biography of his father, he let himself be elected to the House, where he spent nine terms in Whiggish opposition to the Democrats, supporting a national bank and a protective tariff and internal improvements.

It's rare when a president wins the campaign without winning independents.