It’s not often in life that we get a do-over, and in politics it’s even rarer. Most of the time, once a candidate is associated with defeat, they are never considered for office again. What is even rarer is a president losing reelection and getting a second shot. In fact, that has only happened once before in our long history. There has been a lot of talk about how it happened, and so historically speaking, it seems worthwhile to look at the last time there was a presidential mulligan to see the possibly similarities.The 1884 election has become a favorite of mine since 2016 because of the similarities between the two elections. Republicans ran James Blaine, a powerful senator and past Secretary of State who had tried to destroy evidence of his corruption. (Think Hillary Clinton’s emails.) Democrats ran Grover Cleveland, a reformer who wanted to “clean up Washington” but had a sex scandal in his past. Donald Trump had his “drain the swamp,” and also had a sex scandal. (Who can forget Stormy Daniels and well, fill in the blank for whatever scandal you want?)At the time Republicans completely dominated the presidency, but the party had become divided during the past administration between the reformers and the traditionalists. When Blaine, a traditionalist, decided to run himself, many of the reformers abandoned the GOP and voted for Cleveland. With the Republicans divided, voters overlooked Cleveland’s private misdeeds and elected him over Blaine’s public scandals giving the Democrats their first win since 1856.Once in office, Cleveland’s biggest difficulty was keeping his own party together. It was a makeshift party of Southern segregationists, Northern urban immigrants and reform Republicans called Mugwumps. Between various groups, Cleveland was forced to balance several issues such as the gold standard, growing labor violence and issues with patronage (giving government jobs to supporters. He managed these issues by focusing on the one issue that could unite the party and separate them from the Republicans: the tariff.I honestly can’t make this up. Trump might as well be a Gilded Age president with the way he has used the tariff. The difference between Trump and Cleveland is that Cleveland lowered the tariff in a huge political move while creating a surplus in the Treasury. Yet for all the good Cleveland did during his presidency, he was not able to keep the Mugwumps in the party. They drifted back to ...
