Opinion | 2024, I’d Like You to Meet 1892

You could be forgiven — when browsing the Smithsonian’s political history collections, where I work as a curator — for assuming that the chief battle in American political history was fought in 1892, between two great leaders named Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland playing cards and Harrison top hats fill glass cases and steel cabinets. By 1892, a giddily consumerist, venomously partisan Gilded Age society had gotten good at churning out campaign tchotchkes.

Americans were less good at picking leaders. The 1892 election marked Cleveland and Harrison’s second contest against each other. It was an unwanted rematch between unloved combatants. People liked to joke, of the cold Harrison and the cussed Cleveland, “One had no friends; the other, only enemies.”

But as we are seeing again, it is possible for an election to simultaneously make the public fighting mad and bored to tears. The repeated, deadening matchups of Cleveland and Harrison in 1888 and 1892 did just that. They may be the best parallel for what is coming with a second Biden-Trump election this November. There are other rematches in American presidential history, but 1892 was the only time a sitting president lost re-election, ran four years later against his vanquisher, and won. That weird race has a message for all those planning to hit snooze on the coming campaign: Great political change can unfold when the system seems woefully stalled.

Historians gravitate toward big moments of decisive transformation. Few care about 1892. But that neglected race accomplished something of a vibe-shift. Without the competitive fun that usually kept Americans transfixed on their political system, the election offered a race so dismal that it could actually generate change. A dynamic third party emerged, and reformers finally had the breathing space they needed to rethink democracy. For those who were frustrated with the candidates and the parties, with corruption and income inequality, 1892 provided a quiet workshop to assemble what the progressive editor William Allen White would call “the new weapons of democracy.”

Presidential personalities don’t drive the comparison between 1892 and 2024. Certainly the gabby Joe Biden is little like the sour Benjamin Harrison. And though some supporters of Donald Trump invoke Grover Cleveland as a model of a president who served two nonconsecutive terms, the parallel is flimsy. Cleveland won the popular votes in 1884, 1888 and 1892, only losing the Electoral College (and thus the presidency) in 1888. That makes him one of the winningest popular vote presidents in American history — surpassed only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and tied with Andrew Jackson. Donald Trump joins John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren as the only presidents who lost the popular vote twice.