Reagan’s Sixteen Years

The election of 1988 was the 51st quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1988. The competition saw incumbent President and Republican Ronald Reagan run for a third term, as the 22nd Amendment had failed to pass in 1951. He defeated Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts in another landslide victory, winning 498 electoral votes and 58 percent of the popular vote. No one had ever run for a third term since Franklin Roosevelt, and there were doubts about Reagan and his age. However, Reagan was helped by a booming economy and the now rapid decline of the Soviet Union. After an argument with Vice President George H. W. Bush about who would run (Bush was planning to run, but Reagan wanted a third term), Bush resigned and Reagan picked another Texan to be his running mate, Senator Phil Gramm. This would go down as the most lopsided third-term reelection since FDR in 1940. In the coinciding congressional elections, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress, both of which they would not completely lose until the 2002 midterms.