Donald Trump's 2020 loss was bad enough that the GOP should tell him he's no Grover Cleveland

And he's no Nixon either

From 1876 to 1892, the GOP went 1-4 in the popular vote in presidential elections. Despite that odious statistic, they controlled the White House for 12 out 20 years.

The above is not lost on the Democratic Party as it looks ahead to 2024. The GOP has lost the popular vote in 5 of the last 6 presidential elections and yet controlled the White House for 12 of the last 20 years.

That is where similarities end. From 1876 to 1896, no president won office with over 50% of the vote. From Hayes in 1876 to Cleveland in 1892, pluralities versus absolute majorities prevailed. Since 2000, three Presidents and 4 presidential terms have been won with more than 50% of the popular vote. A good political trend when trying to assert political legitimacy amid a sharply divided American electorate.

Faced with the prospect of winning the White House without popular vote for the foreseeable future, the GOP (which has prevailed in 4 of the 5 Electoral College victories¹ without winning the popular vote) has abandoned the 3 legged stool of political legitimacy under the Constitution: Electoral College majority, number of states won (which underpins the 12th Amendment process), and winning the popular vote.

Why is winning the popular vote important? Theoretically, because the popular vote, like the House of Representatives, represents the will of the people. In a 12th Amendment scenario², idealists would argue that the a state’s vote should go to the winner of the popular vote nationally. Pragmatists would argue that a state's vote should go to the winner of either the state itself or overall popular vote depending on the partisan advantage.

A combination of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a historically less democratic Senate (made more so by the filibuster, the 17th Amendment notwithstanding) has placed the Republican Party and its nihilists in the political catbird seat. Winning the Electoral College, even through malfeasance, is all the legitimacy the GOP requires.

Why bother with the popular will, if you can game elections to rule without it? This may seem theoretical at this point, but the margins in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016 were narrow enough (3%, 0.8%, 0.5%, and 2.1% respectively) to make it a more than a possibility. It is worth noting that Senator John Kerry, the loser in 2004 presidential election, had he won the State of Ohio would have become President despite losing the popular vote and winning a mere 19 states (plus D.C.). It piques the imagination to contemplate a sitting President George W Bush, who assumed the presidency in a controversial election without the benefit of having the popular majority, being ousted from office after winning both the popular vote and the most states³.

Democrats have shown their obsasiance to the constitutional framework more often and more consistently than the GOP. Nihilists, unlike idealists and pragmatists, seek political power as an end not a means.

The importance of states is often lost on the Left, particularly the leadership of the Democratic Party. For over 40 years, the Democrats have been shocked by the gamesmanship and gerrymandering of the GOP. The shock always comes after odious predictions of Democratic losses due to redistricting. Controlling the statehouses and legislatures precludes the anti-democratic trends of a strong “Blue” vote yielding very “Red” results in House elections. Open Senate elections in Ohio and North Carolina in 2022 may be exhibits 1 and 2 of this dynamic. States are, absent an amended electoral process, the base of political power in America.

Since 2000, only Trump and W have failed to achieve this political trifecta⁴. The last popular vote winner to fail to achieve this was Jimmy Carter. Before that, one needs to look to Benjamin Harrison and the 1892 election.

Benjamin Harrison was an Indiana attorney and a political gadfly. He was more famous for running for political office than actually serving in office. Harrison played on his family name (his grandfather had been president for a whole 30 days in 1841!) and reputation in the legal community as his primary qualifications for office. Harrison puffed up his two failed gubernatorial campaigns and his being a regular speaker on behalf of Indiana political candidates⁵ as basis for being given the GOP presidential nomination in 1888 more than his largely lackluster term in the Senate.

Harrison’s opponent in his two national presidential campaigns (1888 and 1892) was Grover Cleveland, once as the incumbent President and once as the former President.

The last quarter of the 19th century was marked by an economic boom featuring rapid economic growth and expansion coupled with disparate economic results. The so called Gilded Age was remarkedly corrupt and so biased towards the rich that the presidents that governed during this period, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, and Harrison (and then Cleveland again), often had to deal with a public perception that government was the bastion of the rich and it served solely to make them wealthier and more powerful. And that led to public calls for reforms and, fairly often, reforms of the reforms. In 1892, the political battleground, like the preceding four presidential elections, was rife with calls for economic and political reform.

Donald Trump’s faux presidential exploration, should Trump’s hand be forced to make it official, stands on a two-pronged argument: Biden assumed the presidency as the result of massive election fraud in multiple states and that his record as President from 2017-2021 is reason enough to return him to the White House. An official campaign will lead political commentators to yolk Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign to President Grover Cleveland’s campaign in the 1892.

Despite some historical similarities, should Trump actually run, neither Trump, his “presidential” campaign, nor political circumstances will be anything like the 1892 presidential election.

Grover Cleveland was arguably the last pro-business Democrat to run for national office, but he still managed to retain the mantle of populism concomitantly with that. Known for his opposition to what he perceived to be needless spending, Cleveland was known for his use of the veto as both governor of New York and in his two separate terms as President. Cleveland has the second most vetoes of any President (FDR had the most).

Interestingly, it is his presidential vetoes and opposition to corruption that led Cleveland to reseek the White House that separate him from Trump.

The best way to suckle at the government teat after the Civil War and Reconstruction was through private pension bills. Cleveland viewed them as pork barrel spending and sources of corrupt political bargains, so he vetoed such bills aggressively. It was these vetoes plus his opposition to tariffs and silver issuance (both of which would have hurt the economy and disproportionally affected the poor and those in poverty) that led to his defeat to Benjamin Harrison in 1888.

Benjamin Harrison, for his part, was a big promoter of private pension bills so much so that it was a major “highlight” of his Senate record in the 1888 campaign. And the GOP then, as now, seemed to be on board with tariffs and protectionist policies. In fact, the GOP was all-in for tariffs from the Gilded Age to the Great Depression.

A combination of Keynesian and Neo-Classical economic thinking and reliving the political backlash for the economic turmoil tariffs produce led to a GOP pullback from that position after World War II. Until now. No amount of logic can impede Trumpism as the GOP economic model sadly.

And, while accusations of election fraud were in play after the 1888 election, the scandal was not imaginary and had no effect on the Electoral College outcome. Indiana, Harrison’s home state, used the “block of five” voting practice to keep the Hoosier state firmly in Harrison’s column. The scandalous use of the practice (it was outright vote stealing) was largely eliminated by 1892 by having secret ballots in all elections. And even if Indiana went to Cleveland in 1888, it would not have changed the election result. What would have changed the result in the 1888 election was if Cleveland had won his home state of New York.

But that is largely where the similarities cease.

Grover Cleveland, unlike Donald Trump, accepted his defeat. He took solace in his principles rather than focus the second presidential election in 12 years where the popular vote winner lost in the Electoral College. And while Grover Cleveland seemed at ease with retiring from public life, his wife was sure of his return. Frances Cleveland, upon leaving the White House in 1889, went so far as to warn the staff not to change a thing because she and her husband were going to be back in exactly four years.

In time, Grover Cleveland, frustrated by what he perceived were serious blunders by the Harrison Administration, decided to reenter politics shortly after the 1890 midterms.

Today, the political battleground has not been tempered by either time or policy debates. And, it’s been like that since November 3, 2020. After a spending the last two months of his presidency arguing his faux election fraud cases and instigating an insurrection to remain in office, Trump has done little more than fundraise over the “Big Lie” and fume over every Biden triumph. And the GOP has bought in to the point of playing obstructionist even when it makes for good politics (e.g. infrastructure spending) or good policy (e.g. CDC pandemic guidelines).

Trump’s “Big Lie” has trapped him in a weird political holding pattern where he is fighting to get back into White House through fanciful illogic and also running for another presidential term. It’s like trying to book a flight with accrued airline miles and a credit card simultaneously - having one accepted for payment precludes the need for the other.

Furthermore, the Electoral College map that defeated Cleveland was more like 1876 and 2000 than 2020. A flip of single state would have secured victory for Sam Tilden in 1876 and the flip of New Hampshire or Florida would have secured victory for Al Gore (both were extremely close). Had Cleveland won his home state, he would have been reelected. And, had Cleveland won New York (he lost the state by 14,373 votes), he would have been won the Electoral College, won the popular vote, and would have won 19 states tieing the number of states won by Harrison. While not a true political trifecta, a stronger position politically particularly in the Senate.

Trump’s reelection problem in 2020, apart from a recession and the COVID pandemic, was that he could not afford to lose all three of his closest states from 2016 (WI, MI, and PA). Worse still, those states were not the only states in play for Joe Biden. There were 12 states in play in 2016 decided by margins of 5% or less. And 8 of those states were decided by equally close margins in 2020. Additionally, the State of Georgia, which Trump won by just over 5% in 2016, became the closest Biden state in 2020.

And, unlike Nixon who pursued the presidency in 1968 after a razor thin popular vote loss eight years earlier, Trump approached the 2020 election believing he would win by a huge margin (and vaunted only cheating and fraud could cause him to lose). In 1968, the new Nixon (“tanned, tested, and ready” as it was commonly and comically put then) campaigned as if the election would be similarly tight. And Nixon, who had a tendency to be socially awkward, ran in 1968 trying to “be likeable” and alienating no one.

For Donald Trump, having detractors and enemies, is his political cocaine. He revels in it and his narratives are often akin to an NA meeting where addicts boast about how much blow they’ve done.

The 1892 presidential campaign notably featured an electorate suffering from buyer’s remorse. Tariffs, hugely popular in 1888, had gone from being an economic lollipop to an unaffordable financial gruel. Benjamin Harrison’s economic stewardship was one one disaster after another. The Baring Crisis, several mild depressions, and an impending banking crisis loomed over the 1892 election. The uneven economic growth of the Gilded Age, notwithstanding, Cleveland won in 1884 at the tail end a 3 year long Depression and got elected eight year later while another financial panic was starting. Even if it were just dumb luck or good timing, the political perception in 1892 was that Cleveland was a steady economic hand.

Trump, in contrast, took office while the economy had been growing (and bullishly so). The 2020 recession, made worse by misplaying the COVID pandemic, puts Trump in odd position of playing Benjamin Harrison with Obama and Biden bookending the Grover Cleveland role.

Of course, for 2024 to be similar to the 1892 election, there will need to be a James Weaver candidacy. Weaver, a Populist politician from Iowa, ran in 1892 costing Republican Benjamin Harrison 5 states.

1. The Election of 1824 was the other election. John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote and was elected pursuant to the 12th Amendment. The election, which consisted entirely of candidates from the Democratic-Republican Party, was narrowed down to Andrew Jackson (the popular vote winner), leader of the populist and arguably more liberal wing of the Democratic-Republicans, Adams, who represented the more conservative wing (much of this wing would broke off and formed the Whig Party (the precursors of the GOP), and William Crawford, who was allied to the outgoing President Monroe.

2. Under the 12th Amendment, if no presidential candidate win a majority of the Electoral College, the election is thrown to the House of Representatives with each state having just one vote a piece.

3. This proposition becomes even more comical, when one consider the Bush/Cheyney 2000 campaign was concerned they might win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.

4. George W. Bush won 31 states in 2004, Obama won 28 states plus DC in 2008 and 26 states plus DC in 2012, and President Biden won 25 states plus DC.

5. Political candidates in America rarely campaigned publicly themselves in the 19th Century. Local community and political leaders stood in and spoke on their behalf. This practice waned considerably with William Jennings Bryan in 1896.