June 7, 2006
On Close Elections Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:45 AM EST John Steele Gordon’s post yesterday covers a lot of ground. What I enjoyed most was his recounting of the 1884 election debacle in which James G. Blaine, the “continental liar from the state of Maine,” narrowly lost New York State, and, by extension, the Presidency, because one of his supporters uttered some intemperate anti-Catholic remarks that incensed Irish-American and German-American voters.
In recent years we’ve grown so accustomed to having a sharply divided polity that we run the risk of forgetting how rare razor-thin electoral margins have been in American history. Even so, the existence of swing states is nothing new. Back in the nineteenth century, New York—rather than Florida or Ohio—often found itself in the enviable position of being the coveted, up-for-grabs electoral prize.
Such was the case in 1844, when the Whigs nominated Henry Clay for the Presidency. It was the once-and-future Kentucky senator’s third bid for the White House.
Clay was locked in a tight race with the Democrat James K. Polk, who ultimately won the popular vote by 1.4 percent. As we all know, however, presidential elections are not won by popular votes alone. What cost Clay the big prize was New York State. He lost New York (and its 36 electors) by a mere 5,100 votes, and thus lost in the electoral college by a count of 170 to 105.
Critically, James Birney, the candidate of the anti-slavery Liberty Party, won more than 15,000 votes in New York. Though it remains a matter of counterfactual speculation, many historians believe that had Birney not been in the race, the bulk of his votes would have gone to Clay, the architect of the Missouri Compromise, rather than to Polk, a slaveholding Tennessean with clear designs for southward expansion.
What such a result would have borne out is even more hopelessly a matter of counterfactualism. No Polk, no Mexican-American War? No Mexican-American War, no Texas? No California?
Mr. Gordon and I disagree about a lot of things, and we may very well disagree about the merits of the electoral college system (we’ve never discussed it, so I’m not sure). But we’re both New Yorkers, and I suspect we agree on one thing if on nothing else: Elections were a lot more fun when the Empire State was up for grabs.
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