Written by Peter Reichard
October 16, 2024
- Four one-term ex-presidents (all New Yorkers) have attempted comeback runs.
- There has been only one “Comeback Kid” – so far – in presidential history: Grover Cleveland.
- Cleveland ran on a “drain the swamp” platform, causing disruption even within his own party, but took heat for improprieties in his personal life.
- The Gilded Age was a time of deep distrust in government, political polarization and wide economic gaps.
- Cleveland used allegations of a stolen election to stage his comeback.
Ever since Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in 1800, defeated incumbent presidents have generally decided that enough was enough. Up through George H.W. Bush, most one-termers have resigned themselves to the idea that the people had spoken and a comeback after losing the presidency was out of the question.
Only four men have ever cast off this fatalism. All four have been from New York.
And only one, so far, has been successful. A self-styled enemy of the political machine in Washington, D.C., this upstart ran on a drain-the-swamp platform in one of the most acrimonious elections in presidential history. With solid support across the South, he was elected president despite strident attacks on him as a carousing womanizer and misgivings within his own party. His first lady was decades younger – and famed for being stylish. In foreign affairs, he leaned toward a noninterventionist stance and an emphasis on national self-defense. After his first term, he was defeated amid charges that the winning side had committed voter fraud. Four years later, he made another run at the presidency, beating the drums of election integrity.
We’re speaking of none other than Grover Cleveland, who went on in 1892 to win that second, nonconsecutive term. Today, 132 years later, Donald Trump is attempting the same feat.
Van Buren: Again and again
Martin Van Buren was the first to try (and fail). Elected president in 1836 on the strength of his vice presidency under the towering Andrew Jackson, the Democrat Van Buren defeated three Whig candidates. Running from three different regions, the Whigs hoped to deprive Van Buren of an electoral vote majority. But suffice it to say that was the last time a political party tried such a ploy.
Unfortunately for Van Buren, the Panic of 1837 and the subsequent depression shadowed his entire term. He was defeated in 1840 by a Whig party unified behind “Old Tippecanoe” Gen. William Henry Harrison.
Van Buren lost the Democratic Party nomination to James K. Polk in 1844. Four years later, he seized on the growing tension around slavery in 1848 and mounted a third-party run as the standard-bearer of the new “Free-Soil Party.” This helped to hand the victory to the Whig party’s Gen. Zachary Taylor, hero of the newly won Mexican-American War (which had gained the U.S. the territory of what would become Utah).
Roosevelt: Handing victory to Wilson
Similarly, Teddy Roosevelt destroyed his former party’s chances in a failed comeback attempt on a third-party ticket. Having become vice president upon William McKinley’s re-election and then president just months later upon McKinley’s assassination, Roosevelt won election in his own right in 1904. He left the field in 1908 to his friend William Howard Taft – who by 1912 had become his political enemy. At a contested GOP convention in Chicago, the rivalry between the incumbent Taft and resurgent Roosevelt turned ugly. Roosevelt broke off and formed the progressive Bull Moose Party, which effectively handed the presidency to the Democratic progressive Woodrow Wilson. The ex-friends’ combined votes far exceeded Wilson’s, but Roosevelt won only six states and Taft just two – Utah and Vermont.
‘Rum, Romanism, rebellion’ and rich guys
Which brings us back to Cleveland. Like Van Buren and Roosevelt, he was something of a disrupter. He took fire from his own party’s establishment for his anti-corruption efforts (which hit their pocketbooks). But with public trust plummeting, it was these very efforts that won him election in 1884 against the Republican James G. Blaine.
After 24 years of uninterrupted corruption-tinged Republican rule, the GOP had the audacity to advance as its candidate one of the leading swamp creatures of the day. In the post-Civil War orgy of graft, Blaine had gotten rich from public service and was seen as uncomfortably close to the Credit Mobilier bribery scandal. The Democrats jeered, “Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine / Continental Liar from the State of Maine!”
The Republicans, revealing that Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child during his free-wheeling bachelor days, jeered back: “Ma, Ma, Where’s My Pa?” It wasn’t enough to stop a narrow Cleveland victory.
The so-called “Mugwumps” – Republicans who were fed up with the GOP’s Gilded Age skulduggery – were defecting to Cleveland. A well-publicized Blaine fundraiser in Manhattan with the era’s big-business puppet masters (at a time of massive wealth gaps in the population) only heightened the perception that Washington would remain a pig trough under Blaine.
The dagger in the heart of the Blaine camp was an attack by a speaker at a campaign stop pledging the Republicans would never be the party of “rum, Romanism and rebellion” – apparently an attack on the Catholics and the South. Historians suggest this delivered Cleveland New York’s 36 electoral college votes – and thereby the election – by a margin of only about 1,000 votes.
In the White House, Cleveland sought to keep his promises to take on the swamp. He went to battle with the tycoons and labor unions, though it cost him politically. Of his willingness to ruffle feathers, he declared: “What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?” In 1888, after some political missteps by Cleveland and electoral shenanigans by the GOP, the Republicans reclaimed the presidency on the pro-tariff platform of Benjamin Harrison (grandson of William Henry Harrison).
Election 1892: Running against ‘debauched suffrage’
Seizing on perceptions that election fraud in Indiana and New York helped to swing the election to Harrison, Cleveland focused his anti-corruption rhetoric against the nation’s “debauched suffrage.”
“The condition annexed to the founding of our government upon the suffrage of the people was that the suffrage should be free and pure,” he declared in a December 1889 speech, “but we did not consent that a free vote, expressing the intelligent and thoughtful sentiment of the voter, should be balanced by a vote of intimidation and fear, or by an unclean, corrupt vote disgracefully bought and treacherously sold.”
He also bemoaned the political drift: “Political selfishness cheapens in the minds of the people their apprehension of the character and functions of the government; it distorts every conception of the duty of good citizenship, and creates an atmosphere in which iniquitous purposes and designs lose their odious features.” Cleveland again campaigned on low tariffs, which in those pre-income-tax days amounted to low taxes.
In 1892, Cleveland sent off the half-hearted Harrison handily, with a third-party candidate winning several states in the West and Great Plains. In his victories, Cleveland not only accomplished a unique nonsequential presidential reelection, he also became the sole Democratic president during a half-century span from 1860 to 1912. Twice, he interrupted what otherwise would have been five decades of GOP occupants in the White House. Cleveland was the last president elected before Utah gained statehood (and electoral college votes).
Today, Trump is trying to pull a “Cleveland.” His chances are clearly better than those of Van Buren and Teddy Roosevelt, both of whom ran third-party campaigns rather than a (de facto) head-to-head contest. Democratic contender Kamala Harris, meanwhile, is attempting an unusual gambit of her own: Replacing an unpopular incumbent at the convention – after he had won the primaries – and winning.
This article is the fourth in a series on past presidential elections.

Insights: analysis, research, and informed commentary from Sutherland experts. For elected officials and public policy professionals.

- Four one-term ex-presidents (all New Yorkers) have attempted comeback runs.
- There has been only one “Comeback Kid” – so far – in presidential history: Grover Cleveland.
- Cleveland ran on a “drain the swamp” platform, causing disruption even within his own party, but took heat for improprieties in his personal life.
- The Gilded Age was a time of deep distrust in government, political polarization and wide economic gaps.
- Cleveland used allegations of a stolen election to stage his comeback.
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