The Official Winning Presidential Campaigns Tier List

How the winning national candidates of the modern era stack up against each other.

(Credit for the voiceover for this article goes to the great Samuel Lipson)

Back at the end of 2023, when I took a look at the modern history of presidential elections in anticipation of the then-upcoming 2024 contest, I decided to do something different. Instead of looking at presidential election winners, as most do, I went over presidential losers with the idea that it would be more informative for an election where both candidates seemed set to face major hurdles. Now, with the election over, it’s time to look at the other side of the coin. Like before, this list will go through each winning presidential campaign from 1960 to the present day—2024 included—to judge which White House-winning efforts were the best and the worst of their class. For as monumental as Trump’s comeback this year was, can it be said to be a truly good campaign? Have effective national candidacies become a lost art? What efforts have been overlooked, and which have been overrated? All of these questions and more will be answered below, starting with an entry with somewhat unfortunate timing.

F Tier

Jimmy Carter, 1976

Starting off the list, we have the greatest missed opportunity you’ve never heard of. On its face, there is nothing all that objectionable about Jimmy Carter’s victory in 1976. Although his winning margin—2.1 points nationally, enough for just shy of 300 votes in the electoral college—was relatively narrow, it came while he took down an incumbent and was very nearly much larger. Historically speaking, his win stood as the sole Democratic victory between 1968 and 1992, and his 50.1% share of the national vote made him the only Democrat between 1964 and 2008 to win a popular vote majority. And not only did Carter do this right at the beginning of America’s conservative turn, he did so after starting as a complete outsider and running as the first major national candidate from the Deep South since the Civil War. How could such a result be so low, much less dead last?

The answer is that it could have been so, so, so much more. By the time that Carter secured the Democratic nomination in the summer of 1976, it appeared as if American conservatism was entering a terminal crisis. After being demolished in the 1974 midterms, in which Democrats carried the national House vote by the largest margin in their history, Republicans were coming into their first post-Watergate election divided, distrusted, and deeply unpopular. Gerald Ford, an incumbent (if unelected) President, was forced to actively fight to the convention for his nomination, all while being the first peacetime president of the postwar era to hold an approval rating consistently below 50%. The party’s brand was so toxic that the state party in Minnesota chose to change its name because of how little voters wanted to back someone with “Republican” next to their name. And in the face of all of this, Jimmy Carter—a true outsider, perfectly positioned to harness pervasive disgust towards Washington—held a thirty five point lead in the polls.

Then he completely blew it.

The most generous thing you can say about Carter’s post-primary effort in 1976 is that Ford himself deserves a lot of credit for pulling off his near-comeback. I put him at the very top of my loser’s list for a reason: he did a masterful job in turning Carter’s framework against him and was very successful in the risks he did take. But even the best incumbent campaign in the world doesn’t fully account for how much Carter choked during the home stretch of the election. Practically all of the political aptitude and shrewdness he displayed during the primary disappeared in the fall as he rapidly diluted his once-historically-potent appeal. Against the advice of his advisors, he entered the immediate post-convention period in attack mode, diluting his own brand as a new kind of politician. He inexplicably decided to do an interview with fucking Playboy (???) where he talked about how he emotionally cheated on Rosalynn. He agreed to the first debates since 1960—something he absolutely could have avoided—and got crushed in spite of Ford making one of the most infamous gaffes of all time. On and on and on these mistakes went, until he would up white-knuckling it against an unelected caveman who had accomplished nothing other than giving his crook boss a get-out-of-jail-free card.

To put such an effort in F Tier feels generous. Even if you include presidential losers, there are still precious few major candidates in living memory who did as much as Carter to change the very nature of their election into something substantially worse for himself. The difference between how much Carter won by and how much he could have won by was also hardly academic—during the height of his leads during the summer, things looked so dire for Republicans that Ronald Reagan himself began to hint that he would support the creation of an entirely new conservative party while also reportedly accepting that he would never be able to run for office again. By allowing Ford to credibly contend, Carter kept the GOP intact, gave people like Reagan an entirely new lease on life, and snuffed out a possibly devastating intra-GOP civil war in the cradle. Few victories have ever been as devastating.

Donald Trump, 2024