The Cleveland Cavaliers faced off four straight against the Golden State Warriors for the NBA championship in 2017 and 2018, with Northern California viewers receiving a trophy in three of those victories. The Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills in the 1993 and 1994 Super Bowls. The New York Yankees won the 1977 and 1978 World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
While tournament round rematches are somewhat unique in sports — as the stats about professional hockey, football, and Major League Baseball reflect — they happen even less in their social equivalent, political campaigns. But gradually, they do occur, and this is the time, with President Joe Biden set to face his vanquished 2020 Democratic rival, former President Donald Trump.
This will be the next day a losing political candidate has returned to face the White House holder who defeated him, with Republican President Benjamin Harrison, the 1888 champion, being easily defeated by Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1892. And it’s been 68 times since gathering nominees last faced off again, with Democratic Party nominee Adlai Stevenson winning favor with ease in 1952 and 1956.
Here are the political rematches, ranging from barnburners to depressing.
1796, 1800— John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson
This was the first competitive national vote since the government’s first commander in chief, Revolutionary War hero George Washington, successfully won the first two by acclamation. High-minded debates over sophisticated public policy issues were the subject of this first presidential debate, which foreshadowed some of the more excellent aspects of political campaigns. Along with tactics but cynical, craven, and crafty that they’re viewed then as low- digital versions of the social media- infused, slash- and- burn style employed by campaigns today.
Vice President John Adams, a Federalist, faced Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state and a Political- Democrat. The set had significant disagreements about how close the young nation should become to the autocratic Western powers, as well as a number of other issues, which made the U.S. electorate a true choice.
But the 1796 party’s small blows even stand out. Jefferson was accused of having an encounter with one of his female slaves by an Adams-aligned paper. Adams was accused of being fat and given the moniker” His Rotundity” while being the less-than-svelt.
Under the terms of the Constitution at the time, Adams won, and Jefferson was elected vice leader. Four years later, Jefferson defeated and faced off against Adams. That plan was even mean and terrible, to the point that Adams refused to attend Jefferson’s opening, slipping out of Washington, D. C., on horseback after nightfall on March 4, 1801, days before his term as president ended.
1824, 1828— John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson
Trump filed documents to run for president again on January 1, 2017, a complexity that allowed his campaign to raise money the day after his election as president. Soon after the 2018 midterm elections, he announced his nomination for another White House. This seemed like another improvement of the already “permanent strategy” by presidential candidates. America was the site of yet another long and drawn-out vote between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson almost 200 years prior.
John Quincy Adams, son of the former senator and, by 1824, secretary of state under President James Monroe, won the White House by prevailing in a four- means competition. He beat original Gen. Andrew Jackson, House Speaker Henry Clay, Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun.
No one managed to acquiesce to an Electoral College lot, but the election was held in the House for a regiment vote. In follow elections, Clay, who had been eliminated, used his control to jump the ballot in Adams’s pursuit, handing him the president. When in business, Adams, unexpectedly or no, appointed Clay as secretary of state.
That, in turn, touched off angry claims by Jackson and his followers that the two men had conspired in a” crooked deal” and successfully launched Jackson’s 1828 plan — nearly four years in advance. Adams and his supporters spent the time launching a new party, the Democrats, to support him. In 1828, Jackson won clear popular- and electoral- vote victories, and he went on to serve two terms as president.
1836, 1840— Martin Van Buren vs. William Henry Harrison
One of the principal architects of the Democratic Party was Martin Van Buren, an upstate New York political boss, who became Jackson’s vice president. Van Buren fought for the top position on his own in 1836. However, Jackson- Van Buren’s supporters were forming a new national party, the Whig Party.
In 1836, Van Buren faced several “opposition” candidates who ran in various states. The Whigs were still in the works. The most prosperous was Virginia’s gentry and slaveholding class’s former governor William Henry Harrison, who reinvented himself as a frontier soldier after taking the first governor of the Indiana region. Other positions led to a stint as Ohio’s senator in the late 1820s. Harrison lost the election in 1836 to Van Buren, but he soared to national prominence.
By 1839, the Whigs were organized enough to hold a national convention, which nominated Harrison for the following year’s election. Van Buren’s popularity, meanwhile, had plunged due to the Panic of 1837 , and the perception that he was an effete, out- of- touch aristocrat.
” After a campaign marked by such innovations as sloganeering, mass rallies, image- creation and what today we would call PR stunts, Harrison won the popular vote by 6 percentage points and beat Van Buren decisively in the Electoral College”, Pew Research Center noted in a May 2023 report.
Still, the euphoria was short- lived. As presidential scholar Tevi Troy wrote,” Unfortunately for Harrison, he did n’t get much time to enjoy his prize. He was sworn in on December 31st, which was his shortest presidency ever.
1888, 1892 — Grover Cleveland vs. Benjamin Harrison
Biden vs. Trump Part II is already shaping up as one of the meanest, toughest presidential campaigns in U. S. history. Biden, 81, faces unrelenting attacks over his age. While Trump, facing four indictments and 85 cumulative charges, is running a split- screen campaign between campaign rallies and various courtrooms.
However, the comparison between Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison in the late 19th century, which is the closest to this president versus former president, falls short. Benjamin Harrison’s win in 1888 and his loss four years later were relatively docile campaigns. Policy differences were n’t particularly stark between Benjamin Harrison, a classic Midwestern, corporation- friendly Republican, and Cleveland, a conservative- leaning Democrat who often sided with business over labor unions.
Still, Cleveland was a Democrat and, in 1888, was vulnerable, having alienated many important industries by advocating lower tariffs. Republicans, who favored high “protective” tariffs, nominated Benjamin Harrison, grandson of one- month President William Henry Harrison. He had spent a single, six- year term as senator from Indiana, which, at the time, was a key swing state in the Electoral College puzzle. Despite Cleveland’s popular vote, Benjamin Harrison won the Electoral College.
Cleveland’s wife reportedly told the staff to “take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house” as he left the White House,” for I want to find everything just as it is now when we come back again four years from today.” Cleveland initially avoided politics, but by 1891 he had publicly criticised the Republican-controlled Congress and the Benjamin Harrison administration for raising tariffs and increasing the money supply by issuing more silver dollars.
In 1892, Democrats won the election to Cleveland, and President Benjamin Harrison’s health declined significantly in the process. She died from tuberculosis two weeks before the election, on Oct. 25.
A bit over four months later, as Mrs. Cleveland had predicted, she and her husband, the past and present president, returned to the White House.
1896, 1900 — William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan
How much, if at all, will the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in the presidential election of 2024? Not that the majority of voters are devoted to the U.S. central bank. However, its decisions have a significant impact on inflation, which was soars high during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to stymie voters with higher food and other daily costs.
In the 1896 election, the first of Republican William McKinley’s two victories over Democratic rival William Jennings Bryan, the nation’s citizens engaged in a version of the inflation debate, which appeared to be far away in a time of reduced cash use, with credit and debit cards the norm.
The conflict went back to shortly after Cleveland’s reelection. The economy plunged into a deep depression. That led Democrats to make a leftward turn, the first step in the progressive coalition Democrats are known as today, along with labor unrest. In 1896, the Democrats turned to Bryan, 36, a former four- year House member from Nebraska and a forceful opponent of the gold standard. Instead, Bryanton favored “free and unlimited coinage of silver,” which he claimed would increase the money supply and reduce the debt-ridden farmers and workers.
William McKinley, a business-oriented conservative and former governor of Ohio, was nominated by the Republicans for the role he played in supporting high tariffs and the gold standard, which he described as” sound money.” McKinley’s campaign forge a coalition of industrial workers and urban dwellers, especially immigrants, in the Northeast and Midwest by raising an unprecedented sum from large corporations.
Bryan lost both the popular and electoral votes despite traveling thousands of miles and giving hundreds of speeches. But when he faced McKinley again in 1900, he was so close that he had no real opposition to the Democratic nomination.
But by the 1900 presidential race, the free- silver matter had receded somewhat, and the economy was improving. McKinley won decisively, with a larger share of the vote in the hands of the electorate than it did four years prior. Additionally, he altered six states that Bryan had carried four years prior, while changing just one.
1952, 1956 — Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson
In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower easily ended 20 years of Democratic White House rule. In his defeat of Illinois Governor, Eisenhower had a lot going for him. Adlai Stevenson is a favorite of the Democratic elite, but hardly a candidate with a broad appeal. In World War II, Eisenhower had led the Allied armies to victory in Europe and was well-known to both parties.
Eisenhower, though a political newcomer, proved to be a formidable campaigner, attacking the Democrats over” Korea, Communism and corruption”. He ended up taking 55 % of the popular vote in 1952, winning all but nine states.
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Eisenhower had even greater success against Democratic nominee Stevenson four years later, with the Korean War over and the economy in full swing. With 57 % of the popular vote and the electoral victories of all but seven states, the current president won.
Though one state, oddly, flipped from red to blue. Missouri backed Stevenson, marking the only time in the century from 1904 to 2004 that it did n’t support the presidential race winner, long making it the premiere presidential bellwether.
The Washington Examiner magazine’s managing editor is David Mark.
