For the first time since 1956, American voters are facing a presidential rematch.
2020 presidential rivals Joe Biden and Donald Trump on Tuesday night secured enough delegates to clinch their respective party's nominations in the 2024 election. Four years ago, Trump was the incumbent. This year, the scenario is reversed, with Trump on track to become the first president since Grover Cleveland to win non-consecutive terms.
The last time the two candidates faced each other in consecutive presidential elections was in 1952 and 1956, when Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson.
Cleveland achieved this feat in the 1892 election.
Biden and Trump are reviving their presidential rivalry in a rematch for the seventh time in U.S. history. In the first four rematches, the incumbent president lost, but in the last two, the incumbent president remained in the White House for a second term.
[ 2024 election: Biden-Trump rematch official as both secure nominations ]
Here's a look at past presidential candidates facing off in successive election cycles.
John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson
According to the Pew Research Center, the two founding fathers participated in the first actively contested presidential election in the United States in 1796. It was also the first and only time that the president and vice president were from different political parties.
This oddity arose because, pursuant to Article II of the Constitution, each presidential elector cast two ballots. The candidate with the most votes becomes president, and the second-place candidate becomes vice president.
George Washington won the first two presidential elections in U.S. history, in 1788 and 1792, but announced that he would not seek a third term.
According to the website 270 to Win, in 1796, Adams received 71 electoral votes for the Federalists, compared to 68 for Jefferson, representing the Democratic-Republican Party.
However, the framers of the Constitution did not foresee the creation of political parties. And in 1800, a closely contested election “revealed the flaws in the Constitution and ended up being nothing more than chaos,” George Washington University professor and political historian Matt Dallek told WTOP radio. Ta.
In the 1800 election, Jefferson defeated Adams in the Electoral College by a landslide margin of 73 to 65. The problem is that Mr. Jefferson's running mate, Aaron Burr, also received 73 votes, making it a tie.
This brought the election to the outgoing House of Representatives, which was still controlled by the Federalists. The House remained deadlocked for a week before electing Mr. Jefferson on the 36th ballot.
This authorized the passage of the 12th Amendment, which required separate votes for president and vice president.
“The person voted for President shall be listed on the ballot, and the person voted for Vice President shall be listed on a separate ballot,” the proposed amendment states.
John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson
John Adams' son, John Quincy Adams, was involved in the chaotic four-way election decided in the House of Representatives in 1824.
No candidate received a majority of electoral votes. Mr. Jackson received 99 electoral votes and won the popular vote. Mr. Adams, on the other hand, finished as the runner-up with 84 electoral votes and finished second in the popular vote. The candidates were William H. Crawford (41 votes) and Henry Clay (37 votes).
The decision was left to the House of Representatives, The New York Times reported. Mr. Jackson claimed that Mr. Adams made a “fraudulent deal” with Speaker Clay to help him win the election. Mr. Adams then appointed Mr. Clay as secretary of state, adding fuel to the fire of backroom deals, according to the Pew Research Center.
Jackson immediately began a campaign to run again in 1828, and won easily. He won the Electoral College by a landslide 178-83, receiving 56% of the popular vote and becoming the first president from the Appalachian West. Jacksonians banded together to form the Democratic Party.
“Basically, the impression was that Adams was being manipulated and that in fact they were vowing revenge,” Dallek told WTOP.
It led to a particularly egregious personal attack campaign. Mr. Jackson was charged with bloodthirsty adultery, and Mr. Adams was charged with corruption and aiding and abetting prostitution, according to the University of Virginia's Miller Center.
Dallek compared the claims of Jackson and his supporters to those of Trump, who continues to claim the 2020 election was stolen.
“There's a sense that the other side has figuratively stolen power, if not literally, or has been robbed of power in some way,” Dallek told the radio station.
Martin Van Buren vs. William Henry Harrison
Jackson's successor, Martin Van Buren, framed his campaign for the 1836 election as a continuation of Old Hickory's policies. Van Buren was nominated by a unanimous vote on the first ballot of the convention, according to the Miller Center.
His opponent, William Henry Harrison, was a member of the newly established Whig party. The new political party was formed with a wide range of members representing different ideologies and different regions of the country, The Hill reported. Other than their opposition to Jackson, the Whigs were not a unified group.
To emphasize this point, the Whig Party had three candidates for local representation. Hugh White, a Southern senator from Tennessee. and Daniel Webster, representing the East.Sen. Willie P. Mangum (North Carolina) ran as an independent.
Van Buren won easily, winning the Electoral College by a 170-73 margin. He was the last vice president to become president by election (rather than by death) until George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan in 1988.
However, Van Buren's tenure was shattered by the Panic of 1837 and a severe financial crisis, the Times reported.
In 1840, the Whig Party was unified and Harrison was easily elected with a 234-60 electoral majority. Unfortunately for his party, Harrison died on the 32nd day of his term in 1841, making him the first president to die while in office.
Grover Cleveland vs. Benjamin Harrison
Harrison's grandson, Benjamin Harrison, defeated incumbent Grover Cleveland in the 1888 presidential election. Cleveland is the first Democrat to serve in the White House since James Buchanan (1857-61).
Cleveland, who narrowly defeated “Plumed Knight” James G. Blaine in 1884, won the popular vote again in 1888. However, despite winning the popular vote by more than 100,000 votes, Harrison won the electoral vote 233-168. According to the Pew Research Center, tariffs were a key issue, with Mr. Harrison and the Republican Party favoring higher protective tariffs, while Mr. Cleveland supported lower tariffs.
According to C-SPAN, Mr. Cleveland's wife, Frances Folsom Cleveland, famously promised to return to the White House staff within four years.
“I want you to take care of all the furniture and decorations in your home and make sure you don't lose or break them,” she says. “Because if I came back four years from today, I'd want to find everything exactly as it is.”
Her predictions proved correct, and Cleveland won the 1892 election, becoming the only president to defeat the same opponent four years later after losing an election. He won both the popular vote and the electoral vote, the latter by a landslide margin of 277 to 145.
“The desire for revenge is a very human emotion,” Dallek told WTOP.
Cleveland's second-term vice president was Adlai Stevenson, whose grandson would run for president in 1952 and 1956.
William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan
Cleveland was interested in running for a third term in 1896, but the Times reported that the Democratic Party instead turned to William Jennings Bryan, an impassioned orator who agreed with the party's position on free silver. Ta.
Bryan ran for president in 1896, 1900, and 1908 and lost each time, so he was referred to as a “permanent candidate” on the National Archives website.
He moved lawmakers at the Democratic National Convention with his “Cross of Gold” speech, telling delegates, “We must not crucify humanity with a cross of gold.”
Republicans nominated Ohio Gov. William McKinley, a pro-business conservative who supports high tariffs and the gold standard, according to the Pew Research Center. Mr. Bryan's youth (at 36, he is the youngest major candidate to run for president) could not overcome Mr. McKinley's support from big business and a coalition of urban immigrants and industrial workers. Ta. While the Republican candidates preferred a “front porch” campaign strategy, McKinley won the Electoral College by a 271-126 margin, despite Bryan giving more than 600 speeches.
Economic prosperity and victory in the Spanish-American War in 1898 led McKinley to a comfortable victory in the 1900 election, winning 292 electoral votes to Bryan's 155. When McKinley's first term vice president, Garrett Hobart, died in 1899, McKinley made his next decision. About Theodore Roosevelt in the 1900 election. It was a defining moment in history when McKinley was assassinated in September 1901.
Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson
The most recent presidential rematch took place in 1956. In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson II as a Republican.
Eisenhower, the victorious commander of the Allied forces during World War II, seized the White House in 1952 with a 442-89 Electoral College margin against the governor of Illinois. The Times reported that it was a victory. Mr. Ike also won the popular vote, leading Mr. Stevenson by more than 6.4 million votes.
Despite suffering a heart attack in the early morning hours of September 24, 1955, Eisenhower declared himself eligible to run for reelection in 1956.
The results were even more lopsided, with Eisenhower winning the Electoral College by a landslide margin of 457 to 73, winning all but seven states. The incumbent also received 57% of the popular vote and won by nearly 10 million votes. As for Stevenson, one of the states he won, Alabama, had a split electorate. One elector voted for North Carolina Congressman Walter B. Jones.
