By Chris White

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who celebrated his 91st birthday in September, is the longest serving current member of the U.S. Senate, and the sixth-longest-serving senator in history just behind the late Ted Kennedy. He assumed office over 43 years ago only a couple of weeks before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the nation’s 40th president in January 1981. Grassley has certainly seen multiple chief executives come and go during his tenure in the Senate and will be in attendance for yet another presidential inauguration when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in a few months as the 47th president. With the coming leadership change in 2025, it is worth reflecting on the notion of presidential legacies and what kind of lasting impact those who have held the nation’s top political post over the past several decades have had after they left office. 

So much is made of an individual president’s actions (and personality) while in office and the perceived impact those actions will continue to have on the American political system in general and their political parties in particular, but these perceptions are exaggerated and overstated. Grassley had already been in the Senate for a few years when Reagan won his re-election bid in 1984 with a jaw-dropping electoral vote margin of 525 to 13. Reagan won 49 states, as lackluster Democratic Party candidate Walter Mondale only won his home state of Minnesota and Washington, D.C. 

In today’s political climate, winning candidates from both parties have an annoying habit of claiming a “mandate” regardless of the actual vote tally, which is typically much closer than they like to admit. But there’s no doubt Reagan had one, and his dominant victory left the Democrats searching for answers and paved the way for George H. W. Bush to win the next election and continue Republican control of the executive branch. Bush’s victory in 1988 is the only time the pendulum swing between the major parties was broken since the Second World War. If history is any guide, the smart bet would be that the Democrats will retake the House in the 2026 midterm elections and then win the presidency in 2028. In this respect, no matter how popular a president might seem during his tenure, we expect a shift to the other party, especially for two-term presidents coming to the end of eight years in office.

After 12 years of Republican control, and the significant impact of independent candidate Ross Perot in the 1992 election, who ended up with 19 percent of all votes cast that year, Bill Clinton won the presidency and led the country into the post-Cold War era. His victory would have been hard to imagine just eight years earlier when Reagan triumphed in his re-election landslide. However, as Clinton himself posted on social media recently, “There are no permanent victories or defeats in politics or human affairs.”  

Clinton came into office on the promise of a “Third Way” brand of politics, with a strong centrist orientation and a more fiscally conservative economic policy than we might expect to see from the modern political left, especially the most progressive wing of the party. The campaign slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” coined by James Carville was relevant in 1992 and the recent election showed it’s obviously still relevant today. The pendulum swung to George W. Bush in 2000, albeit narrowly over Al Gore, and ushered in an era of so-called compassionate conservatism, which seems a far cry from the current Trump-rebranded Republican Party. As many observers noted this summer during the Republican Convention in Milwaukee, former President Bush was nowhere to be seen and chose not to endorse Trump. 

Barack Obama, like Trump, was described as transformative and revolutionary. His fans thought the Democratic Party had changed dramatically, and the future of the party would be the younger, multi-racial, multi-ethnic coalition that brought him into office. But it wouldn’t last. One of the most interesting aspects of both the 2016 and 2024 elections was the substantial number of people who had previously voted for Obama, and later Biden, but then switched to Trump. Again, popularity is fleeting. 

Donald Trump will finish his second term in January 2029, and it is difficult to pinpoint a clear successor like George H. W. Bush was to Reagan in 1988. Trump excels at being Trump, while other Republicans tend to fail miserably in their efforts to imitate him. J. D. Vance, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz and others simply don’t have the same “it” factor Trump does. While Vance might be the odds-on favorite to win the next Republican nomination, the pendulum will probably swing back to the Democrats in the general election. Chuck Grassley will finish his seventh term and finally get to enjoy retirement at age 95 as Trump leaves office. Or maybe he’ll run again.

Chris White is a professor of political science at Livingstone College.