It’s time to organize, unify, and sharpen the message. And then watch Joe Biden be shown the door by his party’s young ideological zealots.
It’s time to organize, unify, and sharpen the message. And then watch Joe Biden be shown the door by his party's young ideological zealots.
R epublicans looking for a historical parallel to their present situation may think first of 1976, the last time an incumbent president lost a close election decided by narrow margins in a few states. There is another example, however, that better fits many of the contours of the moment: the 1892 election. The lessons from that election offer some optimism for how quickly things can turn, and some ominous parallels for Democrats.
Begin with a striking number: 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.
Moreover, as of the current vote counts, Joe Biden will have carried just five states that Trump won in 2016, four of them by margins of 0.67 percent or less. Republicans will only need to flip half of those five back in 2024 to capture the White House. Three other times since the 1830s, an incumbent has been voted out of office by a challenger who flipped fewer than ten states. All three times, the incumbent’s party got the presidency back in four years. In five of the eight cases, the incumbent’s party reclaimed at least two-thirds of the states it had lost. In other words, to beat an incumbent and make it stick, it has traditionally required the kind of large-scale collapse that happened to Republicans 1912 (22 states, plus six states going third party), 1932 (34 states), and 1992 (22 states), or to Democrats in 1980 (17 states, and a down-ticket loss of twelve Senate seats). Nothing like that happened in 2020.
Politics at the Margins, 1884–1892
The top two examples on that list, before 2020, are the 1888 and 1892 elections. We can learn from that era. Today’s Republican coalition was originally forged during the Cold War, and many of its leaders are still old men from the era of that struggle, even thirty years after it ended. Similarly, the Republican coalition in the mid 1880s to mid 1890s was still running on the fumes of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The party was aging. One of its chief legislative leaders was John Sherman, brother of William Tecumseh Sherman. General Sherman himself died in 1891, nearly the last major Civil War-era Republican figure left; Frederick Douglass died in 1895. Benjamin Harrison, at 59 when he ran for reelection in 1892, was the first Republican presidential nominee over the age of 55. William McKinley, who enlisted in the Union Army as a teenager, would be the last Civil War veteran to reach the presidency.
The party was intellectually exhausted, its agenda incoherent. Republicans were still in principle the party of black civil rights, which Democrats opposed, but its voters had mostly lost interest in the subject, and its leaders were neither willing to spend political capital on the rights of black Southerners nor able to win elections on the issue. The Republican hold on the White House began splintering when its candidate in 1884, James G. Blaine, lost the election because of his hostility to Catholic immigrants, alienating key voters in a crucial swing state (New York). That gave the Democrats the presidency despite the odor of sex scandal hanging over their nominee, New York governor Grover Cleveland, who was publicly taunted for fathering an illegitimate child.
Republicans had once been a mighty majority party. Now, for three straight elections — 1884, 1888, and 1892 — the parties scrummed between the 45-yard lines, with Grover Cleveland’s Democrats winning a plurality of the national popular vote three elections in a row without ever winning a majority of their own. In 1888, a Republican president was elected while losing the popular vote. Benjamin Harrison flipped just two states that Cleveland had carried against Blaine in 1888 — his own home state of Indiana, and Cleveland’s home state of New York. As was true of Hillary Clinton in 2016, Cleveland in 1888 ran up lopsided margins in the Democratic base (the states of the old Confederacy, which Cleveland carried 61 percent–37 percent), but the loss of New York and Indiana made his coalition too geographically narrow for a national election. Still, the two-party vote shifted by just 0.14 percent nationwide — in the Democrats’ direction — and by two or more points in only five states.
The differences between the parties were not immediately apparent besides the antipathy of their two bases. A 1968 Disney musical would satirize the 1888 campaign for the lengths the parties took to present themselves as in real conflict:
Cleveland in his first term was the last Democrat (until now) to take office without control of the Senate, and vetoed over 400 bills, more than twice the number of his predecessors. With both parties locked in close combat and unable to build sustainable coalitions, they used every bit of power to the hilt. Democrats’ entire electoral base was grounded in the forcible suppression of black voters in the South. When Harrison became president, he retaliated by adding six new Western states in his first two years in office: North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming. Harrison and congressional Republicans went on a notorious spending spree that earned the now-quaint sobriquet “the billion-dollar Congress,” draining the surplus left by Cleveland. Their most lasting legislative accomplishment, however, was passage of Sherman’s landmark antitrust law in 1890. Harrison filled two Supreme Court seats in his first two years, a third in July 1892, and a fourth in the lame-duck session in 1893 after he lost reelection. While he held the Senate, however, a midterm wave in 1890 had decimated Republicans in the House.
Michigan was one of the mainstays of the Republican base — it had not voted for a Democrat since 1852, and would not again until 1932 — but Republican margins were narrow in 1884 and 1888, so in 1892, when Democrats took over the state’s government, they implemented a novel scheme to divide its electoral votes by House districts. Republicans fought it up to the Supreme Court in McPherson v. Blacker, and lost three weeks before the election in October 1892. Cleveland lost the state by four points but took five of its 14 electoral votes. Republicans promptly regained control of Michigan and repealed the plan. McPherson, however, is still with us: It authorizes the vote-by-district systems that now divide Maine and Nebraska, and has received much revived attention in election litigation since 2000.
Harrison was voted out in 1892, in what looked like the end of the line for the Republican coalition. The national two-party vote shifted by just 1.26 percent to the Democrats, but the damage spread across the map. Five Western states, including two of the newly admitted states and three previously Republican states, voted for James Weaver of the Populist Party, and the Weaver vote helped Cleveland flip California, as well. Much as Joe Biden did in 2020, Cleveland reclaimed two swing states (New York and Indiana) and made inroads into long-held Republican territory (winning Wisconsin for the first time in 40 years and Illinois for the first time in 36 years). Democrats also won a narrow majority in the Senate.
1893–1896: Democratic Infighting and Republican Revival
The 1892 election seemed to be the unraveling of a party that had lost its way and would need a fresh start. Instead, it proved to be quite the opposite. Grover Cleveland’s second term turned out to be neither the harbinger of a Democratic dynasty, nor the transition to a new Democratic generation. Cleveland was the leader of the “Bourbon Democrats,” a basically conservative, pro-business, small-government, sound-money, free-trade faction. Unlike the Democrats of Jefferson, Jackson, and Calhoun, they were not particularly ideological, which helped hold together an unwieldy coalition built around big-city immigrants and white Southerners. Cleveland understood the nature of that coalition; as far back as 1866, he had made a name as an attorney in Buffalo offering pro bono representation to Irish radicals who tried to invade and conquer Canada. As leader of the party of the South, he looked the other way at Jim Crow and its many sins.
Cleveland’s misfortune in his second term was the “Panic of 1893,” which began to set in even before he had taken office and led to the worst economic depression in the United States before 1929. Its causes were varied: a cascade of international financial crises that started in France and Argentina, the end of land and railroad booms, American monetary policy that tried to uphold the gold standard during a time of shrinking gold supply while also committing the government to purchase silver, and financial-market mistrust of the Democrats’ free-trade stance. The coming crisis was masked by a bumper harvest in 1891 that coincided with crop failures in Europe, giving the economy a temporary infusion of hard currency that dried up by the end of 1892.
In the hard times that followed the Panic of 1893, the left-wing economic movement of the Populist Party took over the Democrats. Their leader was a young member of Congress, first elected at age 30 during the 1890 midterm wave: William Jennings Bryan. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bryan was a rabble-rousing orator who tormented the party leadership. He endorsed Weaver rather than Cleveland in 1892. He fought Cleveland over the gold standard, and got the first peacetime income tax in American history passed as a legislative amendment (the Supreme Court threw it out a year later). He ran for the Senate two years into Cleveland’s second term and lost, but launched himself on a speaking tour that made him a bigger star out of office than in. In 1896, at age 36, he became the Democratic nominee, the youngest major-party nominee in American history. He would win the nomination again in 1900 and 1908.
Bryan’s economic populism was exciting, and drew in new voters to the Democratic fold, from debt-ridden farmers to silver miners who had a direct stake in adding silver to the national monetary standard. But it was also deeply alarming to many Americans. With the Democrats riven by the Cleveland-Bryan schism, Republicans had a major opportunity. They gained 110 House seats and retook the Senate in the 1894 midterms. In 1896, they nominated McKinley, the governor of Ohio and a prominent former congressman who had passed a major tariff bill as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee before being gerrymandered into a hostile district that kicked him out of the House in the 1890 midterm. McKinley was personally bland but staunchly conservative and deeply Midwestern. He would not seem out of place if you sat him between Mike Pence and Scott Walker.
1896 thus marked not only a Republican revival but a turning point: From then on, Republicans would be the openly pro-business party, and Democrats the party of the economic left. McKinley worked with Mark Hanna, formerly a Harrison adviser, to create a new model of presidential campaigns that greatly increased Republican turnout and fundraising. And they built the conservative Republican coalition that would dominate American politics from 1896 to 1932. Bryan got 17 percent more votes in 1896 than Cleveland in 1892, but McKinley increased the Republican vote by 37 percent, winning the first national popular majority for Republicans since 1880. He flipped eleven battleground states, rolling up big majorities in vote-rich industrial and financial states such as New York, Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Massachusetts. The cost was letting Bryan clean up in smaller states in the West, as well as winning Utah, which voted Democrat in gratitude for being admitted to the Union (after a four-decade struggle) under Cleveland. The trade was worth it:
McKinley even made inroads in the conservative South, although it would be another half-century before Republican gains there would begin to pay off:
Bryan’s radicalism earned him ever-larger shares of the vote in Democratic territory. He won 75 percent or more of the vote in six states, 66 percent or more in twelve states. But he lost the middle of America to the Republicans, and despite the brief interlude of Woodrow Wilson (who never won a popular majority but appointed Bryan as secretary of state), Democrats would not get it back until the Great Depression.
Lessons for 2020
What are the lessons of the 1890s for 2020? Republicans today are already in a much stronger position than they were in 1892. They made significant gains in the House, and are one runoff win in Georgia from controlling the Senate. States that Trump either won, or lost by 0.67 percent or less of the vote, will be worth 300 electoral votes in 2024. Turnout was already up in 2020, with Trump likely finishing with 10 million more votes than in 2016, so an 1896-style surge will be neither necessary nor likely. On the other hand, with a hoped-for vaccine bringing the end of the COVID-19 pandemic in sight, one hopes that the events of a Biden administration will not be as naturally favorable to a change in power as was the Panic of 1893.
On the whole, Republicans have a similar opportunity to the one they had in 1892: Use the time out of the White House to organize, unify, and sharpen their message, then sit back and watch the Democratic president be shown the door by the disaffected ideological zealots of his own party’s young left wing. If Joe Biden is not nearly as conservative as Grover Cleveland, he is also much older, and much more already a figure of his party’s past. If Republicans can reassert themselves as islands of traditional sanity against the radical wing of the Democratic Party, they may find sooner than later that it is 1896 again.