How This Year’s Election Mirrors An Earlier Presidential Rematch

Eight American presidents before Donald Trump have lost reelection since the 

beginning of modern popular-vote elections, in the 1830s. In four out of the 

eight, the losing party came back and won four years later, but Democrat Grover

 Cleveland was the only president who returned to office after leaving it. Three

 others ran again as third-party candidates (Theodore Roosevelt, Millard 

Fillmore, and Martin Van Buren). Of those, only Van Buren had been voted out of

 office. So Cleveland’s 1892 defeat of his Republican opponent, Benjamin

 Harrison — the man who beat him in 1888 — is our only real historical parallel

 for 2024.

The miracle of the Democratic Party was that it had survived the Civil War at all. The party did not win a national popular majority between 1852 and 1932. In 1860, Democrats won only four states that didn’t secede, and by 1884, five new states had been admitted to the Union, only one of which (West Virginia) ever voted for Cleveland. Cleveland’s 1884 victory was the first for a Democrat in a presidential election since 1856.

The Confederacy was still a live memory in the 1880s: Jefferson Davis lived until 1889, and Cleveland (who was from Buffalo and had scarcely ever traveled farther south than Albany) put two ex-Confederates in his first cabinet. The eleven ex-Confederate states, voting Democratic as a bloc, provided 107 of the 201 electoral votes needed to win in 1884 and 1888, and 112 out of 222 in 1892. In 1884, Cleveland carried just four states (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Indiana) where slavery had been illegal in 1860, and he lost two of those in 1888.

While Cleveland won the popular vote in 1884, 1888, and 1892, he was always between 48 and 49 percent of the total. His margins depended on the escalating disenfranchisement of black voters in the South.

As always, the Democrats have been throughout history the enemy of Black Americans.  The Democrats use them as their tools, if they can, and like they have since the 1960's, but are more than happy to screw them over if that turns out to be in their interest.

Like Trump, Cleveland was a New Yorker dogged by a sex scandal and he barely defeated a former secretary of state who reeked of crooked politics and opportunism. Only 2000 was closer than 1884, when the allocation of New York’s decisive 36 electoral votes was determined by a margin of 1,149 popular votes. A Republican rally speaker’s branding of the Democrats as the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” was even more costly than calling the other party’s voters “deplorable.”

Controversy over an illegitimate child probably fathered by the then-unmarried Cleveland — which escalated into last-minute charges that he had raped the mother (she denied this) — left Cleveland so embittered toward the press that he wrote privately after the election, “I intend to cultivate the Christian virtue of charity toward all men except the dirty class that defiled themselves with filthy scandal. . . . I don’t believe God will ever forgive them and I am determined not to do so.” His hatred deepened when the papers fabricated charges in 1888 that he was also a wife-beater.

The chant of Cleveland's political enemies over his bastard was, "Ma, ma, where's my pa?  Gone to the White House, haw haw haw!"

Intractably stubborn and immune to advice, Cleveland in office divided his own voters by pursuing tariff reductions that alienated Northerners while adhering to a hard-money stance unpopular with farmers in the West; fired up the Republican base by continually vetoing disability pensions for individual Union veterans; and feuded with state-level Democrats (especially David Hill, his Tammany Hall–backed successor as governor of New York) who objected to his leaving Republicans in coveted federal civil-service jobs. Cleveland left the campaigning in 1888 to his 74-year-old running mate, Allen Thurman, who told a Madison Square Garden crowd that he was there to rebut the charge “that Allen G. Thurman is an old, weak, broken-down man” but regretted that he was “too unwell” to say more that day.

Enter Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, a Civil War brigadier general and former senator whose grandfather had been president, running with Levi Morton of New York. 

Interesting fact: there have been two presidents named Harrison.  And there have also been two named Bush, Johnson, Roosevelt and Adams!  Now if we could just get another Eisenhower!

Scrumming between the 47-yard lines, they flipped just Indiana and New York, but that was enough. Many Democrats, still obsessed with grievance over the contested 1876 election, felt that Harrison’s well-oiled campaign had stolen the election. Cleveland accepted the result. But his glamorous and charismatic 24-year-old wife, Frances — who had become a national fashion icon in the two years since they married — told the White House staff to keep the place in order because they’d be back in four years.

Sounds a bit like Melania, but with attitude!

Harrison and the Republican “billion-dollar Congress” went on a spending spree that blew through the budget surplus, much of it on pensions for their own voters. On party-line votes, they raised tariffs so high that many workers saw the prices of food and other staples increase sharply. They also enacted the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which expanded the money supply — but not enough to please the free-silverites. Labor unrest underlined the fact that wages were not keeping up with the cost of living. In the 1890 midterm wave, House Republicans were massacred, but the president’s party held on to the Senate, ensuring two years of stalemate.

Deadlocked at the polls, the two parties obsessed over every possible edge. In 1884, both parties bankrolled third parties that aimed to erode the other side’s base: a Greenback ticket that appealed to soft-money Democrats and a Prohibition ticket that wooed dry Republicans. In 1891, Harrison scrapped plans for a special session of the House after two Republicans died, leaving the party’s majority so precarious that Democrats often tried to deny them a quorum. He added six new western states in his first two years in office (North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington), while Republican campaign posters warned that Cleveland would add New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah as Democratic states. When Republicans pushed for federal protections for black voters in the South, Cleveland accused them of using expanded voting laws to steal elections in perpetuity. 

Cleveland and Harrison were very different men from Trump and Biden; they lacked charisma rather than character. Henry Adams quoted “the common saying” about Harrison and Cleveland that “one of them had no friends; the other, only enemies.” Both were workaholic, detail-oriented lawyers known for their ramrod integrity; Cleveland was tightfisted and brusque, while Harrison was an earnest and devout Evangelical Christian. Cleveland hated negative campaigning so much that he bought documents damaging to his opponent in 1884 and threw them in the fireplace. In 1892, both men were absent from the campaign trail to an extent unusual even then: Cleveland battled gout, and Harrison was at the bedside of his wife, who died of tuberculosis in late October. While they were not as geriatric as today’s candidates, the white-bearded 59-year-old Harrison was the oldest Republican nominee until Dwight Eisenhower.

Back then, 59 was a lot older than it is today.

The outcome of the election reflects how an electorate responds when a stale, rejected plurality candidate is offered as the only alternative to an unpopular incumbent. Voters ousted Harrison, but without much enthusiasm.

That enervating dénouement, followed by the immediate onset of a depression in 1893, marked the end of an era of political stasis. In 1896, the parties chose fresher faces in McKinley and Bryan.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  We will see how things work out this year, but Americans would be mad to re-elect a failed 80 year old that is sliding fast into senility.