Close Presidential Elections: Nothing New
We have less than a week until the closest U.S. presidential election in 52 years. At least that’s according to CNN Senior Data Reporter Harry Enten. How did he determine this? He examined the polls from each election and converted the leader’s total to Electoral College votes. The winner of the 2024 contest will receive 276, just 6 more than the 270 needed for victory.
The popular vote follows the same pattern. The RealClearPolitics poll average as of today has Trump up .4%, less than half a percent. If an alien visited the USA and asked for the best proof of political polarization, I’d use these stats.
Ok, it’s one thing to be the closest presidential election in a half century. How does Harris and Trump stack up against the country’s entire history?
In terms of popular vote, the 1880 contest between between James Garfield and Winfield Scot Hancock takes the cake. Garfield won by .09% or 1898 votes. Not even a tenth of a percentage point! The 1960 Kennedy-Nixon race was the closest in modern times, with Kennedy winning 49.72% and Nixon winning 49.55%. That’s .17%, or not even a fifth of a percentage point.
We’ve also had incredibly close elections by electoral vote count. Many of us remember Bush vs. Gore in 2000, in which Bush got 271 and Gore got 266. (There was a faithless elector to get the total to 538). However, that’s the closest in modern times. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency by one over Samuel J. Tilden, 185–184.
Right now, the political world is grappling with a comedian’s joke and President Biden’s response to it. 100 years ago, similar gaffes in the last hours led to a candidate’s defeat. Supreme Court Justice and Republican Presidential candidate Charles Evan Hughes allegedly failed to meet up with Senate candidate Hiriam Johnson when they stayed at the same hotel. Hughes lost the state of California to Woodrow Wilson by 3,420 votes, or a cool .34%.
There’s some other doozies- if you want to find out about the history of politicians accusing each other of electoral fraud, check out the firefight that was 1824. They could really sling it 200 years ago.
I have a few takeaways from this brief history study.
First, the USA has frequent periods of polarization, at least measured by presidential vote. Every generation or two we seem to get a hyper close election which reflects the current level of polarization. This has been the pattern for 250 years. I expect it to continue.
Second, these incredibly close elections indicated partisan times. Garfield-Hancock came before two presidential assassinations in 20 years. Hughes-Wilson happened right before the First Red Scare. Kennedy-Nixon was right before the tumultuous 1960s.
Third, we survived the partisanship. The USA played a pivotal role in WWI, 30 years from Garfield-Scott. The USA became a superpower a generation after Hughes-Wilson. We had another boom in the 1990s, a little more than 30 years after Kennedy-Nixon.
In the starkest example overall, the USA emerged from the Civil War 40 years after Adams-Jackson.
Is there a direct relationship between these close elections and our development? I can’t say for sure, but it’s curious that roughly a generation after them, the USA emerged stronger. Perhaps that’s because we needed 20–30 years to get the nastiness out of our system and once it was out, we put our energies toward working together.
The USA has been through a lot of close presidential elections in its time on Earth. It has survived ones that were even close than Harris-Trump.
It’s reasonable to think it will survive and triumph again.