February 16, 2022
"CLEVELAND SYNDROME" IS MODEL FOR 2024 TRUMP COMEBACK

There is a “Cleveland Syndrome.” It’s not named after the working-class Ohio city by Lake Erie.  It’s named after Grover Cleveland, the 22nd and 24th U.S. president. You know where I’m going with this.

Cleveland was elected president in 1884, lost in 1888 – although he won a popular vote majority and then won again in 1892. He is the only president to serve non-consecutive 4-year terms. By the time he left in 1896 he was massively unpopular and William McKinley (R) heralded in a 16-year reign of Republican dominance.

It requires incompetence, stupidity and/or an event of great magnitude for an incumbent president to lose a second term. Power, visibility and money matter, even 140 years ago. America in the 1880s was called the Gilded Age, where enormous wealth among a very few was created by Big Railroad, Big Coal and Big Lumber with the complicity of avaricious politicians. They were Republicans because they were in power.

They could grant the right-of-ways on federal land to get commerce to the West. They could open the floodgate for cheap immigrant labor. They could control the thousands of federal jobs, then called “spoils,” and use those workers to stay in power. They didn’t get campaign donations; they just got bribes and got rich. They also controlled the East Coast newspapers, so political corruption was essentially muffled. Sounds a lot like how Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Labor, academia and the teachers’ unions control the media and Democratic Party today.

The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s on the premise of social justice. They wanted to abolish slavery, or at least not extend it further. These abolitionists Protestants from the North and East who wanted to stop agrarian culture of the South, which relied on slave labor to harvest cotton, tobacco and sugar cane. 

The Civil War abolished both slavery and the South’s economy and Reconstruction eliminated Democratic competition until 1876.  Republicans won the presidential elections of 1860, 1864, 1868, 1872, 1876 and 1880 without any Southern support. During those two decades the party erased its ideological fervor and embraced Big Business and became the Big Government party. Its coalition was that of wealthy Easterners, Protestants and prosperous small-towners, while the Democrats’ were the South, Irish-Catholic urbanites and farmers, who were getting screwed by Big Railroad and manufacturers. They were the conservative party.

By 1884 the prevailing issue was a combination of corporate greed and government incompetence. The incompetence was attributable to the fact that federal employees were mostly political hacks who got their jobs because they delivered votes. The most coveted were Customs House and Indian agent posts, where importers and vendors paid bribes, and postmasters who delivered mail and delivered votes. If Democrats won in 1884 about 10,000 Republicans would be jobless.

It was called “Civil Service Reform,” which meant hiring “on merit” and then locking-in the job permanently, with the occupant non-fireable but for cause. Democrats were for it. They wanted to get their hacks in and get Republican hacks out, especially in the South. Grover Cleveland, governor of New York who controlled a thousand state jobs, proclaimed himself to be a “reformer.”
The Republicans were factionalized between the Stalwarts, led by ex-president Ulysses Grant (1868-76), who wanted to maintain spoils, and the Mugwumps, led by ex-Speaker and Maine senator James G. Blaine, who wanted to lock in the Republicans before Democrats took over. The two fought an epic battle in 1880, with Grant desirous of a third term. A deadlocked convention chose James Garfield, who won but was assassinated in 1881.

1884 was Blaine’s turn. Democrats couldn’t nominate a Southerner, and the only prominent Northerner was Cleveland. The campaign was very acrimonious, with Democrats calling Blaine the “continental liar” and Republican accusing Cleveland of fathering a child out of wedlock.

The vote was 4,911,017-4,848,314, with Cleveland winning the electoral vote 219-188. The key was New York, which Cleveland won by 1,149 votes, largely because some dim-witted preacher called Democrats the party of “Rum, Romanism and Rebellion” and Blaine didn’t disavow that quickly enough. Those Irish-Catholics went for Cleveland.

Cleveland’s first term was unremarkable (except that he married a woman 27 years younger) and conservative. But the country was still majority-Republican and the party nominated another non-descript Civil War general, Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, who went on to lose the election 5,444,337-5,540,050, but he won the electoral vote 233-168 and Cleveland was out. Harrison’s presidency was disastrous, with a recession which gave Democrats a sweeping win in the 1890 congressional election, taking the House 238-86, a gain of 86 seats. Harrison was so inept he made Cleveland look positively spectacular. Does this sound a bit familiar? 2018 was like 1890, and 2022 will be a bigger debacle.

Cleveland staged a 1892 comeback and won 5,554,214-5,190,802, with an EV of 277-145. But the Panic of 1893, an economic collapse of monstrous proportion, made him a lame duck. Cleveland cut spending, constricting the money supply, making it worse. Politicians, ever clever, decided that the monetary system should shift from a gold standard to bimetallism, which included silver coinage. This was wildly popular in the West, which gave rise to William Jennings Bryan, a woke populist, but not with Eastern financiers and Cleveland.

Bryan was the 1896 Democratic candidate, repudiated Cleveland, made a famous speech about not “crucifying mankind on a cross of gold,” and lost to McKinley 7.035,638-6,467,945. The media of the day vilified Bryan. 1896 was a realigning election, moving Democrats from go-along conservative to populist working-class and agrarian, and Republicans firmly to East Coast Big Business and elitist.

That’s what is happening now, but in reverse.

2016 may have been a realigning election. Trump beat the elites, and the elites vilified Trump and beat him – or, more accurately, COVID beat him.

The Left, the woke and the elites just said he was wrong and crazy and being an Old White Guy billionaire didn’t help.

But Trump did what Bryan did. He was transformative. The Republicans are now the working-class, middle-class, law-and-order party.

However, the existential question is this: Does America really want to revisit Trump’s first term? Polls indicate that Biden’s “job approval” is just over 40 percent. And Trump’s ratings are tanking because of the stuff that is coming out about Jan. 6 and the election.

At the first-year mark Trump was at 42 percent and Obama at 48. Biden won 81,268,924-74,216,154 in 2020 with an EV of 306-232 (see chart).  Biden got 15,415,408 more votes than Clinton in 2016, and Trump 11,231,329 more than in 2016. 2020 was a referendum on Trump, as is every election with an incumbent.

2024 will be about Biden.

He won because he flipped GA, AZ, PA and MI. Trump (or any Republican) will likely flip them back. Cleveland’s 2nd term was a disaster. So, too, will be Trump’s, if he’s the nominee.