America’s Close Elections Signal a New Gilded Age

13.12.2024 17:00

Time.com

Donald Trump’s impressive 2024 victory, sweeping in a Republican Congress on his coattails, has prompted much talk about “realignment”—evidence of the arrival of a new, sustainable MAGA coalition in American politics, the triumph of working-class populism, or a widespread “turn to the right.”

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Many of the same commentators touted the 2020 results as a repudiation of Trumpism, a historic Democratic victory that not only brought states like Georgia and Arizona into the party’s column for the first time in a generation, but heralded a new electoral map in American politics. Similar pronouncements accompanied Trump’s initial election in 2016, and Barack Obama’s sweeping victory eight years earlier. In a memorable cover, TIME famously dressed Obama like Franklin D. Roosevelt, proclaiming the onset of a “New New Deal,” a coming era of liberal reform and progressive policymaking.

These mistaken predictions overlook two enduring, historically important patterns in 21st century American national politics. First, it shows volatility and a desire to “throw the bums out.” In four of the last five presidential elections (and five of the past seven), the electorate has not only turned out the party in power but exchanged the sitting president for someone almost totally opposite from his predecessor. Obama replaced George W. Bush. Trump replaced Obama (defeating Clinton). Biden replaced Trump. And now, Trump will return after Biden (defeating Harris).

Second, 21st century elections have been routinely—and unusually—close. In the seven national contests since 2000, only once has the margin of victory exceeded five percentage points (Obama’s seven-point win in 2008 amid the global financial meltdown). By comparison, the final seven contests of the 20th century featured only one nailbiter: Jimmy Carter’s narrow 1976 victory. Richard Nixon won a 23-point landslide in 1972. After that Ronald Reagan (10 points), George H.W. Bush (eight), and Bill Clinton (6.5) won the White House comfortably, with Reagan and Clinton upping their margins in their successful re-election fights.

While some may think of this as new, Americans have certainly experienced this pattern of volatile and close elections before. During the Gilded Age, five consecutive elections between 1876 and 1892 revealed a closely-divided electorate. Two of those elections even saw the victor in the Electoral College lose the popular vote. Another one of those elections found Americans returning to the White House an ex-president, Grover Cleveland, whom they had previously voted out of office.

Understanding four defining features of that earlier era, every one of them familiar to 21st century Americans, helps explain the persistent political instability in today’s divided polity and what narratives about “realignment” today get wrong.

The most obvious defining feature of the late 19th century was intense partisanship. To be a Republican or Democrat during the Gilded Age signaled more than Americans’ voting preferences on the first Tuesday in November; it defined their identity, their circle of friends, and their social life. Working men congregated in party headquarters to smoke, drink beer, and play cards. Family, neighborhood, ethnicity and region all shaped and nurtured partisan affiliations and local political organizations functioned as mutual benefit associations. Party bosses assisted members and their families in times of illness or economic hardship, covering funeral expenses after an untimely death, looking after widows and children.

Second, the two major parties depended on regional voting blocs, so that a small number of swing states decided the outcomes. The Democrats relied on the electoral votes of the “Solid South.” With the end of Republican-sponsored post-Civil War Reconstruction and the re-establishment of white supremacist state governments, Democrats won every southern state throughout the 1880s and 1890s. The Republicans had similarly loyal footholds in New England and upper Midwest states like Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Illinois, New Jersey, and, especially, New York, where the Democrats’ immigrant-fueled city machine vied with the powerful Republican organization controlling the rest of the state, remained the decisive swing states.

Third, Gilded Age partisans had to adjust to a new, rapidly changing media environment. Before the 1880s, readers could buy newspapers very cheaply that were locally printed and distributed. Most of them were also openly partisan. By the 1890s, in need of more revenue, newspapers turned to advertising and reorganized their businesses as joint-stock enterprises with numerous investors. These corporate newspapers found it most profitable to drop their open partisanship and produce news that was politically neutral, if often sensational and salacious. At the same time, new technology allowed magazines—previously aimed at elite audiences—to become less expensive and more focused on cultivating a mass readership. New magazines emerged with revealing titles, such as Everybody’s and Cosmopolitan.

Finally, the Gilded Age witnessed bitter battles over who should vote and how elections would operate. In the South, Democrats used every possible legal strategy as well as economic harassment and widespread violence to disfranchise Black voters. In many northern states, Republicans led efforts to restrict immigrants’ access to the polls. In the 1890s, for example, Minnesota and Michigan enacted state laws that banned non-citizens from voting.

Americans also changed voting procedures. Before the 1880s, local parties (or partisan newspapers) printed the ballots. You went to your polling place, walked up to your local party precinct captain, took a printed ballot that resembled a long, skinny railroad ticket and stuffed it in the ballot box (maybe you tried to stuff in two or three). To do anything other than vote the straight party ticket, you would have to be literate, cross out a name and write in another, and do so all in plain view. There were no curtains, no booths, and no secrecy.

In the 1880s and ’90s, states adopted the so-called Australian ballot (named for where the system originated). Local governments—not the parties—printed the ballots, accepted nominations for candidates, and guaranteed the secret ballot with a list of candidates to choose among for each office. The Australian ballot offered voters secrecy, choice, and the opportunity for ticket splitting.

These changes—restrictions on voting, the Australian ballot, and new media—restructured the electorate and rewrote the playbook for political competition. It ultimately moved the country into a fundamentally different electoral system that weakened partisan loyalties and elevated appeals to issues, advertising in mass media, a stress on candidate personalities, and alliances with interest groups.

Instead of close elections between evenly matched parties, clear majority coalitions governed American politics. From 1896 until 1932, the Republicans remained the majority party, controlling the White House and Capitol Hill for all but eight of those 36 years. For the following half-century, the Democrats dominated. Comfortable presidential majorities defined the entire 20th century. Of the 25 national elections between 1900 and 1996, only four (1916, 1948, 1960, 1968) were decided by fewer than five percentage points.

Over the past two decades, however, intense partisanship, regional political blocs, voter suppression efforts, and new media have produced a quarter-century of close, volatile elections— much like in the Gilded Age. So long as that pattern remains, predictions of realignment and enduring coalitions miss the point: only structural changes in the electorate and the system of political competition, shifts not yet in evidence, will end the pattern of narrow victories and constant upheaval in national politics. Hold on Americans, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

Bruce J. Schulman is the William Huntington professor of history at Boston University and author of The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Politics, and Society.

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