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 Thursday, November 13, 2008
Nebraska

Two of Benzene's loyal readers — which is to say, about 15% of the regular audience — are fans of electoral history. I suppose I may as well embrace the niche. This time, instead of just stating my little bits of trivia, we'll take a long excursion into history to make sense of it.

This one is inspired by Obama's victory in the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska. Nebraska is one of two states (the other is Maine) that allocates its electoral votes by district, rather than giving all the votes to the statewide winner. I'm not sure how the regular news outlets are reporting this, but in a recent email, Brux wrote, "For the first time in its history, Nebraska split its electoral vote." That's not quite true, depending on how you interpret the claim.

Let's jump back to the 19th century. After Lincoln and the Civil War, the presidency was dominated by Republicans, who won six elections in a row. During that period, the Democratic Party generally won the states of the South (which still had no love for the party of Lincoln) and rarely anywhere else. The basic electoral strategy for any Democratic candidate was to win in the South and in New York. In 1884 this was achieved by New York Gov Grover Cleveland. Cleveland's lead in the national popular vote was narrow, and his popular vote lead in New York was narrower still (0.09% of the state's vote), but thanks to New York's 36 electoral votes, his lead in the Electoral College was comfortable. In 1888, he again narrowly won the popular vote nationally but this time fell short in New York, so that Benjamin Harrison became president, winning with a comfortable lead in the electoral vote but barely behind in the popular.

Aside from personal issues, which dominated the campaigns in both years, the main issue separating the candidates was the tariff: Republicans liked it high, Democrats liked it low. The financial issues of the time are hard for us to fathom from our modern perspective, and I won't pretend to offer any thorough analysis, but essentially the tariff is a tax on imports coming into the country. These are assessed at the ports, which is why port collector in a big city is the choicest political appointment to get, in terms of personal enrichment. (Chester Arthur built his political career as the customs collector for the port of New York, in where he distinguished himself from his predecessors by never being found in violation of the law.)

This was in the days before the income tax, so the tariff was the primary income source for the federal government. But the political relevance of the tariff was not how much money it made, but rather the protection it gave to certain domestic industry. Some economic groups benefited from protection, and these tended to vote Republican; others who benefited from less protection tended to vote Democratic. All states had some of each, but the general pattern matched the electoral map, with the more agrarian South preferring the Democrats and the manufacturing North preferring the Republicans.

The high tariff also had the effect of creating a large Treasury surplus. It seems odd to contemplate now, but the federal government didn't spend so much back then, so the high tariffs gave it more income than it knew what to do with. Nowadays we have federal banks that can play with money supply, but in those days money supply was more inflexible. Having a lot of it tied up in the federal treasury took it out of circulation, and the tight money supply disadvantaged certain other economic groups, leading to the next big political economic issue: silver.

The silver movement was essentially a desire to increase the money supply in an age before monetarism. Nowadays we have a floating currency, so putting more money into or out of circulation is just another tool used by central bankers to try to keep our economy healthy. Back then, all U.S. currency was backed by gold. The only way to print more money was to obtain more gold. Earlier in the century there had been various gold rushes which allowed the currency to comfortably expand. By the 1880s the gold had mostly run out, and that, along with the surplus, made the money supply tight. The solution proposed by some was to allow the currency to be backed by silver, which was still being mined in decent quantities. Traditionalists were horrified by this idea, arguing that only gold-backed money was truly sound. Most of them probably genuinely believed that; others possibly only followed their own economic interest, if they were among the classes that benefited from the tight money supply.

President Harrison found a solution to the surplus "problem". He simply found ways to spend the money. For the most part, this was not an expansion of government. Rather, he just had the government give away money, largely in the form of increased veterans pensions and handouts to other political allies.

Harrison was not a very successful president. I'm one of those revisionists who believes that many of the allegedly worst presidents weren't nearly as bad as conventional historian wisdom makes them out to be, so after rehabilitating the likes of Harding, Hoover, and Buchanan, I might well find Harrison remaining at the bottom of my own list.

By 1892 the electorate tended to see Harrison as weak and his administration as corrupt. Leaders in his own party didn't much like him either. Although he still won the nomination by a comfortable margin (which is more than Arthur managed), he got a lot more opposition than an incumbent president usually does. Still, he was an incumbent who looked easy to defeat.

The Democrats nominated former president Grover Cleveland. Cleveland favored "sound money", and in spite of his differences with the Republicans on the tariff, he was in many ways also a candidate of the capitalist status quo. There was a strong sentiment — much like we saw in the 1990s, and no doubt in many other decades — that the two parties were simply two faces of a single establishment party. This sentiment gave rise to the People's Party, better known as the "Populist" party.

The Populists adopted several popular issues embraced by neither Democrats nor Republicans. Most notably they championed silver, but they also endorsed a lot of reform ideas later embraced by the progressive wing of the Republican Party under Roosevelt and his ideological successors. The Populists were especially strong in the West, where the movement had a strong anti-railroad flavor. Most western communities were subject to the railroad corporations' pursuit of monopolistic control over not just transportation but land as well, often with government assistance. (The Republican Party had been the party of the railroads since Lincoln.)

Cleveland won easily in his rematch with Harrison, securing his famously non-consecutive second term, while the Populist candidate, James Weaver, took 8.5% of the popular vote and 22 electoral votes. (This is the election in which, as I noted not long ago, North Dakota split its three electoral votes betweeen three candidates.)

Shortly after the election, the country suffered from a complete financial collapse leading to a depression, which the hapless government was unable to do anything about. Cleveland's Democrats were thoroughly discredited, and the party took huge losses in the 1894 midterm elections. The Republicans saw their prospects rise again, but so did the Populists, who began to believe they could replace the Democrats as the second party.

But such was not to be. There was great upheaval in the grassroots of the Democratic Party. While Cleveland and his allies held firm to the idea of sound money, Silverites and progessives were taking over state and local conventions. Among their leaders was Nebraska's William Jennings Bryan, whose famous "cross of gold" speech at the convention led to his election as the Democratic nominee. As a compromise gesture to the traditional wing of the party, the convention chose as his running mate Arthur Sewall, a wealthy banker and industrialist from New England.

This left the Populists in a quandary. The party faithful still held to the dream of defeating the Democrats and becoming a dominant party. Others were pleased that one of the two main parties had taken up their issues and were ready to endorse the Democratic ticket. The Populists' compromise solution was that they proceeded with their own convention, but they nominated Bryan as their candidate for president. But to distinguish themselves from the Democratic Party they chose a different candidate for vice-president, Thomas E Watson.

Bryan accepted the second nomination. (He got a third from a splinter group of Silver Republicans.) In several states, the ballot offered voters a choice between the Bryan-Sewall and Bryan-Watson tickets. Although Bryan-Watson did not win the popular vote in any state, several Democratic electors cast their votes for Bryan-Watson anyway.

At long last, I'm arriving at the point I set out for. Although it doesn't show on traditional red-blue maps, which consider only the presidential candidate, the populist ticket won 27 electoral votes that year. One of the states where this happened was Bryan's home state of Nebraska, which split its eight electoral votes four each for Sewall and Watson. That's why, although it's true that 2008 is the first year in which Nebraska gave electoral votes to more than one presidential candidate, it's not the first time the state has split its electoral vote.

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