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.