Will 2024 be a Reprise of the disastrous 1876 Presidential Election?
What a question, you might ask. But let’s look at what happened in 1876, and then you can decide.
The political comparisons between 1876 to 2024 are striking.
Let’s set the scene.
In 1876 the Democrats controlled the House, and the Republicans controlled the Senate. Those roles are reversed today: Republicans control the House, and Democrats control the Senate.
In 1876, the nation was in political and economic crisis, still staggering from the disastrous Panic of 1873. Today, we have inflation and a stagnant economy—the result of Joe Biden’s disastrous “Bidenomics,” which has resulted in soaring prices for groceries, gasoline, energy, and housing.
Ulysses S. Grant was the incumbent Republican president in 1876, but at the last minute, he decided not to run for a third term. Of course, the scenario is a little different today. The president is a Democrat, but after one term Joe Biden announced his decision not to seek a second term.
(Historical Note: From George Washington until Harry S Truman, presidents could serve as many terms as they could win. President Franklin D. Roosevelt won four consecutive terms between 1932 and 1944. On Feb. 27, 1951, the 22nd Amendment was ratified, establishing a two-term limit for presidents.)
So, with Grant out of the picture, the Republican who did run in 1876 was a dark horse candidate named Rutherford B. Hayes. His Democrat challenger in the intensely disputed election was New York Gov. Samuel Tilden.
Tilden was widely expected to win the general election against the little-known Hayes, a Civil War hero and Ohio governor.
Now, here is where things get interesting. Some political pundits today say the 2024 election could play out similarly to the 1876 election.
How might that happen? Let’s look back at the 1876 election.
When Election Day came, neither candidate had a majority of the electoral votes. Tilden had easily won the popular vote but needed one more electoral vote to win.
However, in four states, each party claimed that their candidate had won the state, which obviously could not be accurate. If the Democratic reports of the election were accepted, Tilden would be the President. If the Republican reports were accepted, Hayes would be the President.
The Constitution didn’t account for this scenario: There was no provision for settling a dispute involving rival electors. An additional problem was that the Vice President needed to certify the election. However, Vice President Henry Wilson died a year earlier, and there was no sitting Vice President.
Kamala Harris is our current vice president, but she is running for president, so there is no way she would be allowed to certify her election if she beats Trump.
In 1876, Congress appointed a special Electoral Commission of Senators, House members, and Supreme Court justices to settle the dispute and avert a constitutional crisis before a new president was supposed to take office in March.
The commission awarded Hayes all of the electoral votes of the four disputed states in an 8-7 vote. In what is referred to as the Compromise of 1877, Democrats agreed to the decision in exchange for the withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana, marking the end of Reconstruction in the South .
That’s quite a legacy for Hayes, who essentially slinked into the White House via a backroom deal.
Today, a sitting president was forced out of the White House in a backroom deal concocted by Democrat Party leaders who were convinced a cognitively challenged Biden could not beat Donald Trump.
The second part of Hayes’ legacy was the fallout from Reconstruction’s end and the subsequent enactment of Jim Crow laws by Democrats that mandated racial segregation in the South and disenfranchised black voters.
Under the terms of the deal, Hayes removed the last federal troops from the South, and the rest, as they say, is history. Rather than the reconstruction of the South that ensured political and social equality for former slaves, the South entered a period of Jim Crow laws that didn’t end until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s.
Now, here’s another similarity between 1876 and 2024. After his controversial election, Hayes promised not to run for re-election. Does THAT sound familiar? Biden beat Trump in 2020 and promised to be a one-term president.
Okay, the 81-year-old Biden reneged on that promise and announced he would run for a second term. But, after his disastrous debate with Trump, a flurry of public appearances where he appeared to be in cognitive decline, and the loss of support from Democrat Party leaders, Biden relented and announced his decision to drop out of the race. Was it Biden’s decision to end his reelection campaign, or did he get the boot from Democrat Party doyens?
Future historians may discover the truth, but for now, that slurping sound you hear is Kamala Harris licking her political chops in between her ceaseless cackles.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and its network of party bosses have guaranteed Kamala’s coronation. Who cares that she has never won even one primary vote? Who cares that the party that likes to assert it is “saving democracy” has just engineered a major coup of the American presidency and bypassed the democratic process called “primary voting.”
Should we be surprised? Not if you know the political history of America. The Democratic Party has always been the party of bosses—James Pendergast in Kansas City, Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall in New York, and the infamous and corrupt Democratic Machines in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Memphis. As such, the Democratic Party has never cared about embracing or saving democracy. It has always been about power and how to hang onto it.
Before Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901, he explained how New York’s powerful Democratic Party machine operated. He could just as well been talking about the DNC:
“The organization of (the Democratic) party in our city is much like that of an army. There is one great central boss, assisted by some trusted and able lieutenants; these communicate with the different district bosses, whom they alternately bully and assist. The district boss in turn has several half-subordinates, half-allies, under him; these latter choose the captains of the election districts, etc., and come into contact with the common heelers.”
Unlike President Biden, who had to be overthrown by Democrat Party bosses, Hayes kept his promise to be a one-term president. Doing so helped restore the nation’s faith in the office of the presidency. During his time in office, Hayes also attacked runaway patronage in the nation’s corrupt civil service system and triggered the recovery of the American economy–two things Biden did not do.
Nevertheless, the results of the 1876 election remain among the most disputed in American history.
Today, with the disagreement between Republicans and Democrats over the mass mailing of ballots to voters and the genuine potential of voter fraud if Democrat operatives incite millions of illegal migrants to vote, you have to wonder what lies ahead after November 5.
Will the 2024 Presidential election, unlike the 1876 version, come off without a hitch?
Or will we experience, as baseball Hall of Famer Yogi Berra once declared, “Déjà vu all over again?”
–30—
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