I’m almost as tired of hearing about this election as I am hearing about that dude's high wire walk the other day. Luckily, we’ve been spared the popular “This is the most important election of our lifetime” trope that we usually hear around Election Day. Still, it’s all rather tiresome.So instead I’ve been thinking about past elections. We have to wait four years between presidential elections, but we have congressional elections every couple of years in the United States, and those can also be quite entertaining. And since it’s likely you haven’t given much thought to these old elections, I’m here to remind you that we don’t have a lock on crazy politicians in the present day.The following election stories—some presidential, some not—all actually happened, and remind us again that we have a far-from-perfect system.1800: Any time someone spouts off about how perfect the Constitution is, you can remind them of this little gem. Before the Twelfth Amendment, Presidential electors cast two votes for president. The person who got the most votes was president. The person with the second most votes was vice president. In 1796, John Adams bested Thomas Jefferson, so Adams was president, Jefferson VP.Then, in 1800 the two men ran against each other again. This time, Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, each received the same number of votes. An electoral tie. It had always been understood that TJ was the main man, and Burr would play second fiddle, but Burr was a bit of a scoundrel, and refused to concede the presidency.Instead it went to the House of Representatives, where it took 36 votes for Jefferson to prevail. Burr became Vice President, where he went on to shoot and kill Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but that’s a story for another day.1824: You probably know that winning the popular vote in the United States doesn’t mean you’ll be president. (Just ask Al Gore.) What a candidate really needs to do is win the electoral vote, right? Not quite. In 1824, Andrew Jackson won the electoral vote and the popular vote, but he didn’t win the presidency. Four major candidates ran for president that year (imagine that!), and none of them won a majority of electoral votes, which is actually what’s required for the presidency.So under the Twelfth Amendment the election goes to the House of Representatives, where each representative votes for one of the top three candidates, and the candidate who receives the most representative votes in that state wins the state, and whoever wins the most states wins the presidency. John Quincy Adams won thirteen states, Andrew Jackson seven states, and William Crawford four states. John Quincy Adams is president.1836: Richard Johnson was elected to be Martin Van Buren’s vice president. However, some of Virginia’s presidential electors had heard rumors that Johnson had a relationship with a black slave. God forbid the vice president have a relationship with a black slave (the irony of Virginian Thomas Jefferson’s long-term relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings, is awesome). So the electors didn’t vote for Johnson, which left MVB without a VP. The Twelfth Amendment kicked in, and the vote went to the Senate and Johnson was chosen as VP.And somehow the country didn’t collapse.1874: Holy cow this was a bad mid-term election for the sitting president, Ulysses S. Grant! The country was in the middle of an economic depression, Grant’s administration was mired in scandal, and a good portion of the country was tired of Reconstruction, which was the effort to rebuild the defeated South after the Civil War. All of that meant bad news for President Grant’s party, the Republicans. How bad? The Republicans lost 93 seats in the House of Representatives. Before the election they had a 203-88 majority. After the election they were a 181-107 minority!1876: I mentioned the popular “This is the most important election of our lifetime” claim earlier. However, the presidential election in 1876 actually was important, and changed the history of the country.Democrat Samuel Tilden kicked Rutherford B. Hayes’s butt in the popular vote, and was one vote shy of winning the electoral vote, with twenty electoral votes in dispute. The two parties came together and devised the short-sighted Compromise of 1877. In the compromise, all twenty electoral votes, and thus the presidency, were given to Hayes, the Republican. In exchange, the Republicans agreed to end Reconstruction, which allowed the Southern Democrats to return the south to the political economy that existed prior to the Civil War, and helped subjugate and disenfranchise black Americans for decades.1894: American voters are extremely fickle, and often can’t remember any further back than the current election cycle. This time an even worse economic depression hit, but unlike 1874, the Democrats suffered. They lost 107 seats and went from a 220-126 majority, to a 246-104 minority.1946: First-time Congressman often don’t go on to do too much. They’re happy just to have been elected, and usually have a hard enough time just holding on to their own seats in the future. However, two freshman Congressman from the 1946 mid-term elections did rather well for themselves: John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.We’ll see if this year’s election is as interesting as any of these previous elections. At least in the elections above we didn’t have to watch any campaign ads!+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Vote for me and like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes.
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