Denied!

The chance that a sitting president will run for reelection is almost a dead certainty.  The chances that he will win reelection, using history as a guide, are better than even.  The chance that a president will seek reelection only to be denied the opportunity to do so by his party is remote.  If history is a guide, a sitting president, regardless of his lack of popularity, can almost always count on his party’s nomination.  Almost.

Note.  Obviously, I’m referring to President Biden’s apparent desire to run for another term in 2024—a move that many in his own party now seem to oppose.  To be fair, I suppose that I should disclose that in the last presidential election, I did not support either of the two dominant parties’ candidates.  The following had nothing to do with President Biden and is just my feeble attempt to provide historical context to current events.

Any president is considered to be the head of his political party, and as such, wields enormous power and influence over the rest of the party membership.  Through political favors, campaign assistance, and most importantly, by control of the party’s sizeable campaign funds, a president can reward his supporters and punish disloyal party members, easily insuring sufficient support to insure his party’s nomination for a second term.   

Sometimes, however, it just doesn’t work.

The exception to all this party nonsense was George Washington, who had the good sense to run for office before the development of political parties.  His successor, John Adams was not quite so fortunate.  When Adams ran for reelection in 1800, the two parties immediately began a campaign so incredibly dirty—claims of insanity, treason, marital infidelity, serial bedwetting, etc., etc.—that it has  become the norm for every campaign since.  Despite the fighting between the parties, Adams wanted the support of the Federal Party for a second term and his party supported him.

The first sitting president to fail to receive his party’s nomination for reelection was Franklin Pierce.  Elected in 1852, Pierce’s presidency literally derailed even before his inauguration.  Traveling from Boston after the election, the railroad car containing the president-elect, his wife, and their 11-year-old son Benny, leapt from the track, rolling down an embankment.  Before his parents’ horrified eyes, the boy was crushed and nearly decapitated.  Pierce, obviously suffering from prolonged depression, never really recovered, and the First Lady publicly wondered if the accident was divine punishment for the sin of hubris.  The four years of the Pierce administration were more of a continual wake than an active presidency. 

Though unpopular with voters, President Pierce still expected to run again in 1856 and sought his party’s nomination.  The other two popular candidates within the Democratic Party, James Buchanan and Stephen Douglas, forged an agreement where Buchanan would get the nomination in 1856 and Douglas would run in 1860.  By pooling their support, Pierce was denied the chance to run for reelection.

In 1868, President Andrew Johnson tried to secure the Democratic nomination, but this was almost impossible.  Johnson had served as Vice-President to Republican Abraham Lincoln, who had selected the Southern Democrat as a measure to unify a nation embroiled in the Civil War.  While Johnson was popular with Southern Whites, he was extremely unpopular in the North.  On the 22^nd ballot, the Democratic Party selected Horatio Seymour, a New Yorker, while Johnson received only four ballots—those of the delegates from his home state of Tennessee. 

Chester A. Arthur became president after the assassination of James Garfield, at a time when the Republican Party had split into two rival camps.  Arthur had been chosen for the post of Vice-President primarily because he was a centrist, a compromise candidate.  As president, Arthur tried to win the support of both camps, and might have been successful had not the news of his medical condition become public knowledge.  Suffering from Bright’s disease (called nephritis today), Arthur appeared weak and his party gave the nomination to James Blaine.  When Blaine lost the election to Grover Cleveland, he blamed the loss on Arthur’s refusal to support his campaign.

The most contentious Party fight was for the Republican candidacy for the 1912 election.  President Theodore Roosevelt had selected William Howard Taft to be his replacement in 1908, and Taft’s victory had been largely been due to Roosevelt’s endorsement and tireless campaigning.  After leaving office, Roosevelt had spent 18 months traveling outside the United States with no communication with the new president.  Upon Roosevelt’s return, he found that Taft had abandoned many of Roosevelt’s Progressive policies.  As Republicans across the country began to urge the former president to run in 1912, Roosevelt announced that the tradition of presidents serving only two terms—a tradition begun by George Washington—only applied to two consecutive terms.

Taft had never really wanted to be president, but he was the president and decided to act like one.  Refusing to step down, he ran against Roosevelt in the party primaries of 1912.  While Roosevelt won the majority of the delegates that were selected by ballot, Taft won the majority of delegates that were selected by the state party committees, giving Taft the nomination after a contentious fight at the 1912 Republican Convention. 

The rift between the two men might have been avoided if Archibald Butt, a Republican leader who had served in the administrations of both Roosevelt and Taft not perished on April 15, 1912, with the sinking of the Titanic.  Without Butt, there was no one to broker a compromise between the two presidents.

Theodore Roosevelt, believing—mostly correctly—that the nomination had been stolen from both him and the voters by deceitful maneuvering of Taft and the convention president, bolted the Republican Party, forming the Progressive Party (informally known as the Bull Moose Party).  The Democrats ran Woodrow Wilson.

Taft never really stood a chance of being reelected, due to party defections to Roosevelt, and the sitting president wasn’t even on the ballots in California and South Dakota.  Taft received 23% of the vote, Roosevelt received 27%, and Wilson won with 42% of the vote.  Without a doubt, had either Taft or Roosevelt bowed out of the election, the remaining Republican candidate would have defeated Woodrow Wilson.

There is no better teacher than witnessing utter failure, so since 1912, both political parties have refrained from allowing party arguments creation of third parties.  (Ross Perot’s Reform Party in 1996 wasn’t really a spinoff from the Republican Party, but it did probably allow Bill Clinton to defeat George Bush.)  While a few party members have wished to steal the nomination from an incumbent president (like Ted Kennedy in 1980), no political party has ever allowed such a challenge to actually prevent a president to run for reelection since 1892.

Will 2024 be the year that breaks that tradition?