No modern president has lost re-election without grieving privately. The morning after the 1980 election, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in a landslide, Carter’s communications director, Gerald Rafshoon, went to visit the president, who was sitting with bloodshot eyes in the Oval Office. “Forty-one million, six hundred thousand people don’t like me,” Carter lamented. That number was actually larger, Reagan won 44 million votes to Carter’s 35.5 million votes.