March Madness success for candidates’ alma maters tends to jinx candidates in November
This year’s presidential candidates will no doubt root for their alma maters in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which begins with play-in games tonight, but let them be warned that success on the court in March doesn’t always foretell success on the ballot in November.
In fact, a review of election and tournament records since 1940 (the first election year with a college hoops tournament) shows candidates whose colleges qualify for and perform well in the Big Dance usually fail to win the presidency.
The lone exception is Bill Clinton, who received his undergraduate degree from Georgetown. The Hoyas advanced to the second round in 1992, when Clinton defeated incumbent George H.W. Bush, and they went all the way to the Elite 8 in 1996, when Clinton beat Bob Dole. Yale and Washburn, the schools attended by Bush and Dole, respectively, did not make the tournament in those years.
The list of presidential losers with good basketball teams is much longer and includes John Kerry, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, Thomas Dewey, and Wendell Willkie.
This year, President Barack Obama, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and Texas Congressman Ron Paul have March Madness entries. Paul, who went to Duke Medical School, appears to have the strongest team. His Blue Devils are the No. 2 seed in the South region of the 68-team field.
Obama and Romney, both graduates of Harvard Law School, saw the Crimson earn a tourney berth this season for the first time since 1946. Harvard is the No. 12 seed in the East. Obama, a noted basketball fan who claims to be an early passenger on the Jeremy Lin bandwagon, is sponsoring the “Obama Bracket Challenge’’ on his website, offering voters a chance to out-pick the president.
Obama has not revealed his own picks yet (he has unveiled his predictions on ESPN in each of the last three years), but is widely expected to choose Harvard in an upset of No. 5 Vanderbilt.
He might want to rethink the selection.
Romney has a second team in the tournament, BYU, which meets Iona in a play-in game tonight. The winner will be the No. 14 seed in the West.
The winning team/losing candidate trend is longstanding. Willkie’s Indiana Hoosiers won the national championship in 1940, beating Kansas, 60-42, but the Republican was crushed by Franklin D. Roosevelt that fall.
Eight years later, Dewey boasted degrees from two schools (Columbia and Michigan) in what was then an eight-team field, but he lost to Harry S. Truman, who had no college degree.
During the next election cycle, Stevenson’s Princeton Tigers were among the tournament’s 16 entries, but Dwight D. Eisenhower beat Stevenson that year and again in 1956.
Nixon, a Duke Law School graduate, enjoyed the Blue Devils’ run to the Elite 8 in 1960, but could not defeat John F. Kennedy. During Nixon’s two victorious presidential campaigns, in 1968 and 1972, Duke (pre-Mike Krzyzewski) missed March Madness.
Nixon’s successor, Ford, failed to hold on to the White House in 1976, even as his Michigan Wolverines reached the title game.
And in 2004, Boston College Law School alum Kerry watched the Eagles advance to the second round, but lost a close presidential race against incumbent George W. Bush.
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