I started looking at the changes in the electoral map (via Wikipedia) this morning (presented after the break below for your viewing pleasure) and discovered some interesting trends in our history. I also discovered some interesting bits about the various elections - and various political parties - we've had. (For one thing, my sense that the anti-third-party arguments are bullshit has been reinforced.)
This graph shows the percentage of voter participation to total eligible voters (sometimes estimated) since our country began. Voter turnout. Unfortunately, it stops at 2014, but reportedly, turnout dropped this year to 58%. I wouldn't have thought that would be the case, but I guess we really are fed up and skeptical.
At any rate, the population was often highly divided on who they wanted to run the country. Rutherford Hayes defeated Samuel Tilden in 1876 by one electoral vote - and the population was armed. And guess what? The country survived!
Of course, there was that little glitch in the mid-1800s called the Civil War. As you can imagine, things were still a little dicey in the years immediately following the War. Some of the states were ineligible to participate in the presidential election after the war ended because they were not immediately returned to the union. And in 1872, Louisiana and Arkansas, even after every state was back in the union, had their electoral votes rejected. (I have more on that incredible time in the details after the break.)
We started out with no political parties. You were either for ratifying the Constitution (Federalists) or you weren't (anti-Federalists). At the beginning, George Washington held the presidential position until he refused a third term in the 1796 elections, and political parties came into play. After a short while, we had Democratic-Republicans and Whigs, in addition to Federalists. We also had some wonderfully named parties such as the 1832 election Nullifier and Anti-Masonic parties. Did you know that Abraham Lincoln ran his second term as a candidate of the National Union party? I didn't.
The electoral college was instituted with Article 2 of the Constitution as a "compromise between those constitutional framers who wanted the Congress to choose the president, and those who preferred a national popular vote." It was later justified as a way to keep more populated states from running roughshod over the rights of less populated ones.
Originally, each elector could cast two votes for two different people, and the Vice President was elected not by party, but by the person who got the second most electoral votes. I rather like that, although it wouldn't work today with our duopoly unless we always wanted a VP from the opposing party as the president. And that might not be a bad idea.
But the electoral system as set up seems to have caused a problem in 1800 when the vote for VP was tied, leading to a duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton which resulted in Hamilton's death. Details are confusing me. Does the musical clear all this up? Because of this, the process was changed by the 12th Amendment so that each elector cast one vote specifically for president and the other vote for VP. I don't know how that prevented ties. Does the musical clear that up?
At any rate, it's still a better deal than taking a vice president by default from a presidential candidate's whim or calculation. I'm looking at you, John McCain. And this is how the Constitution still reads. Are our current elections Constitutional?
Some third parties even made a good showing in not-too-distant elections despite the good efforts of the Democrats and Republicans. And if you think people are up in arms now, think how it must have been when in 1824 there were several candidates, none of whom won the majority of the popular vote. By the Constitutional rules, the House of Representatives had to choose from amongst the top three candidates. Andrew Jackson had won the popular vote, as well as the most electoral votes. However, there were several men in the running - all of whom belonged to the same (Democratic-Republican) party, by the way - and he did not win a majority. He had 41.4% of the vote. Since another candidate, Henry Clay, threw his support in Congress to candidate John Adams, Adams was chosen by the House to be president, with only 30.9% of the popular vote and 5 fewer electoral votes than Jackson. Those must have been fun times. (But at least no duels were fought and no one was killed that I know of. Candidate Bill Crawford seems to have stayed out of the fray.)
BTW, Adams appointed Clay his Secretary of State. A precursor to Obama/Clinton, eh? Deals are made all the time.
Or, consider the aforementioned election of 1876 when the Supreme Court overturned Florida court decisions (yes! a foreshadow of 2000) and Rutherford B. Hayes won by one electoral vote. You think tensions might have been high for that term?
The reason we vote on Tuesday is completely outdated, but nobody seems to be interested in amending the Constitution to make it easier for more people to vote. We have Tuesday because back in the horse and buggy days, people could go to church on Sunday, hitch up the buggy on Monday to mosey to their county seat, vote on Tuesday, and be ready for market day on Wednesday. The reason we have November is because the weather was still amenable, and the harvest was over.
Although we haven't been interested in amending the Constitution's election rules to get more people to vote, we did get a 20th Amendment in 1937 to update the time of inauguration from March to January when we got the technology to count the votes faster.
Following is a pictorial look at the electoral map over time, with a few comments thrown in for diversion.
1788
The US Constitution was ratified in New Hampshire, June 21, 1788. George Washington was elected president of the Union by the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, but come November of '88, he had to submit himself to general public approval. He got it.
1792
1796
Washington refused a third term, or he might still be president until he died.
1800
1804
1808
Here, George Clinton did not actually win any states, per se, but he did get 6 electoral votes in New York. He was actually listed as Madison's running mate, but remember, electoral college members voted separately on president and vice president at this point. Don't ask me why they designated running mates.
1812
Oh, look. Here's another Clinton. DeWitt Clinton. His uncle George, Governor of New York, was vice president from 1805-1812. No idea whether the current Clintons are any relation.
1816
1820
Like our local elections sometimes, James Monroe had no opposition in 1820. One elector in New Hampshire cast a vote for John Q Adams, though.
1824
This was a humdinger. Jackson won both the popular and electoral votes, but by the rules of the game, since he did not win a majority (50+%) of the popular vote, the decision went to the House of Representatives which gave the office to John Q Adams. Tempers ran high.
1828
After that 1824 mess-up in which all candidates were members of the Democratic-Republican party, Jackson was vindicated, winning in 1828. The South liked him a lot. The party split-up turned the Jackson faction into Democrats and the Adams faction into National Republicans.
1832
This year added some fun-sounding parties: Nullifier (John Floyd) and Anti-Masonic (William Wirt). Henry Clay was the National Republican party candidate, but all lost out to Andrew Jackson of the Democratic party, who cleaned up with 54.2% of the popular vote.
1836
The Whigs came on big in 1836, having four candidates in the running. Martin van Buren, the Democratic candidate cleaned up with 50.83% of the popular vote. Crazy Andy Jackson must have left a big impression.
Look how many different candidates got electoral votes. The Union didn't fall apart. On the other hand, the states were probably relatively independent, and who cared who the actual president was?
1840
A Whig wins. And dies one month later. Though there weren't any laws yet setting out succession details, William Henry Harrison's VP, John Tyler, took over the office.
1844
Back to the Democrats.
1848
The map expands into the west, and we get a Free Soil party candidate: Martin Van Buren, who was the Democratic president in the 1837 election, and he gets 10% of the popular vote, but no electoral votes. He didn't have a second term as a Democrat. Apparently making up a new party didn't make people forget.
1852
California is added, and even though it's disconnected from the rest of the voting public, it voted Democratic with the south.
1856
The American Party put up Millard Fillmore and joined the fray with the Democrats and Republicans. Republicans, who are making their first appearance since 1832 when Henry Clay ran as a National Republican, are running anti-slavery candidate John C Frémont from California. The winner, James Buchanan (Democrat), called the Republicans "extremists whose victory would lead to civil war." No doubt you'll have noticed that the Democrats are the pro-slavery party at this point.
In the intervening 14 years since 1832, all we had to vote on were Whigs and Democrats, with the exception of Van Buren's failed run as the Free Soil candidate in 1848.
1860
The Lincoln election saw an addition of a Constitutional Union party (John Bell), and the Democrats were split into Southern Democratic (John Breckinridge) and Northern Democratic (Stephen Douglas).
A large number of electors voted John Breckinridge (72) from ten states, and only one state gave electors to Douglas (12). In my history books from elementary school, I never saw mention of John Breckinridge. Only Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Seems like a great oversight and disservice to Breckinridge. Perhaps it's because Lincoln and Douglas were both from Illinois and major campaigning pitted them against each other. They did get the largest share of the popular vote (Lincoln on top at 39.8%). Even had electoral votes of all three of the others gone to any one of them, Lincoln (Republican) would have still won with 180. So, no "spoilers" here.
Bet you didn't know Lincoln's running mate was named Hannibal Hamlin.
I think this map should have colored the Southern Democrats blue and the Northern Democrats green, because the South played a big part in party politics all through history, and it's colored blue everywhere else, but I'm nitpicking. Is this more Breckinridge bashing?
1864
This year the southern states were not part of the election as they had seceded. Lincoln is now running in the National Union party with Andrew Johnson as a running mate and is opposed by Democrat General George McClellan.
1868
Did you know that all of the southern states were not restored to the union at the same time? I didn't know that. Or if I did, not since third grade.
1872
My favorite quotation comes from Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States:
[...]
[...]
[...]
Elisha Baxter, a pro-Reconstructionist went up against Joseph Brooks, anti-Reconstructionist, for governor. Pro-Reconstructionists controlled the legislature, and the state supreme court pointed out that the state constitution gave authority to resolve disputes to the legislature. Brooks, however, was having no part of it and took his case to a local state judge who conveniently ruled that Brooks won. The chief justice of the state supreme court was a Brooks crony and took the lower court ruling as the go-ahead to swear in Brooks. (Where were the other supreme justices while this was happening?)
The situation turned into an armed conflict, with twenty killed and many more wounded.
The federal government had to intervene. You can imagine how that went over. Pro-Brooks justices resigned or were impeached. The new state supreme court upheld the first decision - that the legislature held the authority. And after all that, the US Congress ultimately decided not to count the votes anyway, no doubt cementing Arkansans as anti-federalists.
Disruptions, indeed.
And, as if that weren't enough, the first woman to ever run in a presidential election ran in 1872. Victoria Woodhull, a very interesting woman indeed, ran on the Equal Rights Party ticket.
And if you think her story is interesting, check out her sister, Tennessee.
1876
They really should have settled how the federal government would deal with state electoral problems in 1872. Alas they did not, and we got 1876.
With electoral votes disputed in three states, a Democrat winning the popular vote, and the Supreme Court stepping in to overrule Florida court decisions, the presidential election of 1876 was an eerie precursor to that of 2000. Rutherford Hayes's defeat of Samuel Tilden has been dubbed the "fraud of the century"
Review of By One Vote: 1876 by Michael F. Holt
One hundred years since American independence. The highest voter turnout in history (82%) and narrowest margin of victory: one electoral vote.
1880
We are firmly into Republic vs. Democrat elections, and the west coast is growing states. Tensions were still very high, and Garfield was assassinated in the summer of '81. It may have had nothing to do with politics, for the man who shot him claimed to have done so because he'd written a speech in support of Garfield and was passed over for an ambassadorship to France.
1884
Grover Cleveland's election in 1884 made Chester A. Arthur, Garfield's VP, out in the cold after three years of the presidency.
The second woman to run for the presidency, Belva Ann Lockwood ran this year and was the first woman to appear on official ballots. No woman would run again until 1964 when Margaret Chase Smith ran in the Republican primaries against Barry Goldwater, who ultimately, of course, was the candidate.
1888
This is one of those elections where the guy who won the popular vote did not win the election. Democrat Grover Cleveland had 48.6% versus Benjamin Harrison's 47.8%, but Republican Harrison got 233 electoral votes to Cleveland's 168.
1892
This year we added a third party candidate: James B. Weaver from Iowa for the Populist party. He got 8.5% of the popular vote and 22 electoral votes, none of which came from Iowa.
North Dakota's electors were evenly split. Harrison ran for a second term, and this time Cleveland beat him. I suspect there were a lot of angry Harrison voters calling Weaver voters "spoilers" (unless people were smarter and more democratic back then), but even with those votes, Harrison would have lost by 110 electoral votes.
1896
1900
McKinley was elected, but he was assassinated in September of 1901, making his the second shortest presidential term in history and leaving Theodore Roosevelt as the youngest president in history at age 42. (Kennedy was 43.)
This is where the Secret Service came into being as a protection for the US President in addition to its founding duty to secure the national financial infrastructure.
1904
Big government Republican Teddy Roosevelt is re-elected, splitting the country in half laterally. Well, more like in two-thirds, but it's a clean line.
1908
Republican Howard Taft loses some ground for the party. Or, vice versa, the Democrats gained ground.
1912
The Democrats really gained ground this year; the Republicans got nearly squeezed off the map, which is now complete on the mainland, all 48 states present and accounted for. Apparently they weren't that crazy about Taft.
Teddy Roosevelt wants back in, but the Republicans are stuck with Taft, so he creates his own party: The Progressive Party (some called it the "Bull Moose Party"). Democrat Woodrow Wilson won, however, and no doubt Republicans called Teddy a "spoiler", even though, again, all the other electoral votes put together fell far short of Wilson's 435.
This is the first time we see the Socialist Party in the US elections, and their candidate is activist Eugene Debs. He got 6% of the popular vote, but no electoral votes. Roosevelt and Debs were the Johnson and Stein of 1912, only more popular.
Debs actually ran for president five times (1900 - 1920), but only in 1912 did he earn enough popular votes to put him on the map (5.99%), and then not enough to get any electoral votes. In the 1920 election, he won 3.41% of the vote from a prison cell. Woodrow Wilson, calling Debs a traitor, had him arrested on charges of sedition due to his calls to resist the WWI draft. He was in prison from April 1919 to December 1921.
Apparently the country was tired of Teddy.
1916
1920
The Republicans rally big. Perhaps the populace doesn't like war.
1924
This year the Progressive Party of Teddy Roosevelt runs Robert M. La Follette Sr, whose hairstyle was ahead of his time. I might have voted for him on that alone. He won a decent third party popular vote of 16.6%
1928
1932
Oh my. Repudiation of Hoover.
1936
1940
1944
Although he began losing ground in his third term, the country apparently loved Franklin Roosevelt. They elected him to an unprecedented fourth term this year (no one had even been elected for three before him). He died in office April 12, 1945, leaving Harry S. Truman of Missouri to drop bombs on the Japanese, and the world has never been the same. I doubt Roosevelt would have done it. Especially if Eleanor had any say, and she usually did.
1948
Woohoo! This year we got Strom Thurmond from South Carolina as a Dixiecrat Party candidate. The Democratic Party had not been holding strict Southern values since Hoover, so a Tea Party of sorts was necessary. Thurmond got 2.4% of the popular vote that delivered a whopping 39 electoral votes.
This is also the election where the Chicago Daily Tribune famously put out its paper too soon.
Harry won the election with a 49.6% popular vote to Dewey's 45.1%, and 303 electoral votes to Dewey's 189.
1952
In 1947, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution was passed by a Republican-held Congress limiting presidential terms to two. In 1951, it was ratified. It did not apply to Truman, who was already in office, but he chose not to run again. He needed time to think about what he'd done, I suspect.
In 1952, the Democrats held onto the deep south, but the rest of the country was beginning to move on.
1956
1960
John F. Kennedy jumbles the map up in a tight (and some say bought) election, and Alaska and Hawaii enter the game.
1964
Kennedy's assassination in 1963 put Lyndon Johnson in the catbird seat, and he held it through the ensuing election, knocking the Republicans into the deep south. What the heck? Kennedy really did jumble up the map. The Democrats who were originally the pro-slavery party have now seemingly turned the racist designation over to the Republicans. What was blue in 1956 is red in 1964.
This was the year Margaret Chase Smith ran in the Republican primaries against Barry Goldwater. We don't know what her chances might have been against Kennedy, Catholics being as unpopular at the time as women. And that's almost a joke.
1968
The South is trying to make a come-back, and for the first time in 20 years, it has gotten a candidate on the ballot. George Wallace made a better showing than 1948's Strom Thurmond. He got 13.5% of the popular vote and 46 electoral votes. Solid South. Lyndon Johnson's vice president Hubert Humphrey got 42.7% of the popular vote to Richard Nixon's 43.4%, but the electoral votes were overwhelmingly Nixon's.
My personal opinion is that Humphrey was a crap candidate. Kind of like putting up Hillary Clinton in 2016. The country was chest deep in a very unpopular war and Nixon was on his way to infamy. Surely the Democrats had a stronger option than Hubert Humphrey. Even his name was a downer. And, in fact, he was perhaps the weakest replacement for the assassinated Bobby Kennedy of anyone in the Democratic Party primary that year, which consisted of Bobby Kennedy, Eugene McCarthy, Stephen Young, Lyndon Johnson (who withdrew) and George Smathers. Although I don't remember even hearing of Smathers, so maybe he would have been worse than HH.
1972
George McGovern thanks lonely Massachusetts for not leaving him with nothing.
History was made this year when Shirley Chisholm, a black woman entered the Democratic primaries. She was the first black to run.
Another woman, Patsy Matsu Takemoto Mink, ran as an anti-war candidate for the Dems. Linda Jenness ran on the Socialist Workers Party ticket.
This was apparently the year for women to run.
In addition to past women who ran (Woodhull in 1872, Lockwood in 1884 and Smith in 1964), two more women ran in the primaries after 1972: Pat Schroder (D) in 1988 and Carol Moseley Braun (D) in 2004. None ever managed to nab the nomination until Hillary Clinton in 2012, and that didn't appear to be entirely on the up and up.
1976
Alas, for Republicans, the American voting public finally got wind that Richard Nixon was, in fact, a crook. He stepped down halfway through his second term before he could be impeached, and his VP, Gerald Ford couldn't hold onto the office.
We could see the beginnings of the Ronald Reagan era this year, as one "faithless" elector in the state of Washington voted for him.
1980
The beginning of the "family values" voter got its start with the victory of Ronald Reagan, as did the rotten financial sector.
John B. Anderson, running on the Independent ticket, garnered 6.6% of the popular vote, but no electoral votes.
1984
Walter Mondale thanks the state of Minnesota for not leaving him with nothing. His running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, is the first woman to run in the general election in US history, and there wouldn't be another until Sarah Palin ran with John McCain in 2012.
A black man entered the presidential race for the first time in US history. Jesse Jackson Sr, ran in the Democratic primary and may well have made a better showing against Ronald Reagan than Walt Mondale did.
1988
1992
Bill Clinton's win marked the solid fusion of the Republican and Democratic parties into the Neoliberal Party. Just kidding. But it should be called that. Or perhaps we could cast a shout-out back to the beginning when we had Democratic-Republicans and call it the Republican-Democrat Party. On the other hand, perhaps we should leave any reference to democracy off. Neoliberal Party it is.
This election saw a decent showing (18.9%) by Independent Party candidate and a wealthy Texan who funded himself, Ross Perot. He nonetheless got no electoral votes.
The duopoly split the map up fairly evenly, but this time, it was in vertical stripes, not horizontal, and it's impossible to pick out the deep South as its own voting block any more.
1996
Ross Perot is back, but he didn't do as well as the previous run. Perhaps he just wasn't a novelty any more. Or, perhaps it was because Clinton brought the country back into the black.
2000
The Supreme Court bought this one for George W. Bush, making the make-up of the bench even more important than ever. So much so that the Republicans in Congress in 2016 won't even vote to replace a judge who died because there is a Democrat president in office. They sorely want a Republican to appoint the ninth judge.
Al Gore won the popular vote, and the state of Florida was in the midst of a recount when the Supreme Court stepped in at the behest of the Republican Party and stopped the count, leaving the Republican state (governed by none other than George Bush's brother Jeb) to call the election for Bush.
Luckily, we had not just fought a civil war.
20004
2008
The country elects its first black president, who is actually only half-black.
2012
The black man is back, losing only Indiana and North Carolina from the previous election.
2016
Hillary Clinton, wife of the president from '92 to 2000, lost her bid to be the first female president of the United States, in what people living at the time call the worst campaign in history. It might not have been, but it's all we knew. She and her opponent were rated as the least popular presidential candidates in history, and that's probably provable.
The Neoliberal duopoly is entrenched, but the people are indicating that they have had enough of it. Socialist-leaning independent candidate Bernie Sanders ran in the primary campaign against Clinton and lost in large part due to a concerted unethical effort on behalf of Clinton by the national Democratic party to block him. And an authoritarian, misogynistic, racist real estate mogul and entertainer took the Republican Party by surprise to win both its primary and the general election.
1 comment:
Thanks for putting this together. Quite an undertaking! Very interesting.
Google still refuses to recognize me. LaBelle
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