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Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Harrison/Reid, blue denotes those won by Cleveland/Stevenson, green denotes those won by Weaver/Field. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state.
Numbers indicate the electoral votes won by each candidate. The 1892 United States elections was held on November 8, electing member to the 53rd United States Congress, taking place during the Third Party System. Democrats retained the House and won control of the presidency and the Senate.
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United States presidential election of 1892, American presidential election, held on November 8, 1892, in which Democrat Grover Cleveland defeated Republican incumbent Benjamin Harrison. In winning, Cleveland became the first former president to be restored to the office.
Harrison’s first term as president provoked widespread discontent. Despite the narrowness of his victory in 1888, the Republican Congress promptly pushed through a series of partisan measures, and resulting legislation such as the McKinley Tariff Act (1890)—which substantially raised duties on most imports—was met with frustrated charges that Harrison was too closely aligned with the country’s wealthy elite. Another congressional act, under which millions of dollars of surplus funds were allocated to pensions for Civil War veterans, was seen as wasteful. By 1892 the Democrats had won back the House of Representatives, and, with dwindling support from Republican political bosses, Harrison’s political future was in doubt. In early June, shortly before the opening of the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, past presidential candidate James G. Blaine resigned as Harrison’s secretary of state in the hopes of securing the party’s nomination once again. Harrison, however, managed to stave off Blaine’s challenge, as well as an unexpected groundswell of support for former Ohio representative William McKinley, in the first round of balloting. Delegates replaced Vice Pres. Levi Morton on the ticket with journalist Whitelaw Reid, who had recently served as U.S. ambassador to France.
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Since leaving the White House in 1889, Cleveland had worked for a New York City law firm. His decision to run for president for a third time was motivated in part by his opposition to the growing Free Silver Movement, which sought to stimulate inflation and thereby alleviate the debts of farmers in the West through the unlimited coinage of silver. (The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, the passage of which had been urged by several Western states, had already required the government to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver each month.) While he personally backed the gold standard, Cleveland mainly desired that the Democratic Party resist the sway of free-silver advocates. With few other promising candidates and the benefit of his prominent stature, he found considerable support at the party’s convention in Chicago in late June, easily winning the nomination over David B. Hill, who had succeeded him as governor of New York, and Iowa Gov. Horace Boies. The Democrats’ vice presidential candidate was Adlai Stevenson, a former congressman from Illinois and an assistant postmaster general during Cleveland’s first term.
Neither Harrison nor Cleveland campaigned much, in part out of respect for Harrison’s wife, who was ill for much of the year and died two weeks before the election. As the Democrats’ primary stump speaker, Stevenson notably emphasized the party’s opposition to the Federal Elections Bill (1890)—a measure that aimed to protect voting rights for African Americans by allowing the federal government to monitor state and local elections—in an attempt to attract support from white Southerners who might otherwise have been drawn to the Populists. In addition, the race was undoubtedly affected by violent labour strikes in July at silver mines in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and at Andrew Carnegie’s steelworks in Homestead, Pennsylvania. (See Coeur d’Alene riots and Homestead Strike.) The incidents, which had been triggered by wage cuts for workers, were viewed by many as evidence that Harrison’s high-tariff policy was unfriendly to labour.
In the end, Cleveland won the popular vote by some 380,000 votes and managed 277 electoral votes to Harrison’s 145—the most decisive win in a presidential contest in two decades. Weaver, for his part, garnered 22 electoral votes, all from states west of the Mississippi River. Cleveland’s victory proved to be somewhat Pyrrhic, though, as the country soon plunged into an economic depression that he struggled to overcome.
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Apr 10, 2023 · In a rematch of the 1888 presidential election, former president Grover Cleveland defeated incumbent Benjamin Harrison in the 1892 election. With his victory in 1892, Cleveland became the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with the ...
The United States presidential election of 1892 was held on November 8, 1892. Former President Grover Cleveland ran for re-election against the incumbent President Benjamin Harrison also running for re-election. Cleveland defeated Harrison, thus becoming the only person in US history to be elected to a second, non-consecutive presidential term.
The 1892 United States elections was held on November 8, electing member to the 53rd United States Congress, taking place during the Third Party System. Democrats retained the House and won control of the presidency and the Senate. Following the election, Democrats controlled the presidency and a majority in both chambers of Congress for the first time since the 1858 elections.
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In the 1892 election, the Populist candidate for president, James B. Weaver, won more than a million popular votes (8.5 percent) and 22 electoral votes the first time since 1860 that a third party had made a mark in the Electoral College.
