Second-term curse

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The second-term curse is the perceived tendency of second term U.S. presidents to be less successful than their first terms. According to the curse, the second terms of U.S. presidents have usually been plagued by a major scandal, policy inertia, some sort of catastrophe, or other problems. There have been twenty-two U.S. presidents who have served a second term, each of whom has faced difficulties attributed to the curse. The legend behind the second-term curse is that after Franklin D. Roosevelt broke the de facto second term limit by running for third and fourth terms, the ghost of George Washington might have put a curse on any president who seeks a second term. This legend notwithstanding, several presidents who served prior to this, including Washington and Roosevelt themselves, were plagued by problems in their second term more serious than in their first. Whether this perceived tendency is real is a subject of dispute: for example, political statistician Nate Silver, after analyzing...

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