Teaching contested elections
Because tight polling leading up to yesterday’s vote heightened the possibility that the outcome could be contested, the Daily Briefing spoke with Sarah Purcell, chair of the history department at Grinnell College, in Iowa. This semester Purcell taught 21 students in an eight-week course on the history of contested U.S. presidential elections.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
What did the class cover?
There have been more presidential elections whose results were contested than most people think.
The course covered occasions when either there was a tie or a lack of majority in the electoral college, when electoral votes themselves were contested, and when the results were contested. So we looked at the elections of 1800, 1824, 1860, 1876, 2000, and 2020.
Even those of us who remember the 2000 election and the Brooks Brothers Riot may need a refresher on some of the details. But your students weren’t alive then, were they?
They definitely were not alive during the 2000 election. In some ways, to them, 2000 seemed similar to 1876 or 1824, because it was before they were born, and so they did not have the same level of context.
You mentioned the Brooks Brothers Riot. They were very interested in that specific event. And they grasped that there were many precedents for the 2020 election in the year 2000.
Can you highlight a contested election from further in the past that has particular resonance today?
I think 1824 was the one that captured the students’ imagination and made them have to think hard about different factors that go into politics.
The 1824 election is when Andrew Jackson won the Electoral College, but there were four candidates, and so he did not win a majority of the Electoral College, as the Constitution stipulates must happen. He also won the popular vote, such as it was in 1824.
The House of Representatives then picked the president.
John Quincy Adams won the vote in the House of Representatives, became the president, and then appointed Henry Clay, one of Jackson’s rival candidates and speaker of the House, as secretary of state. Jackson claimed this was a corrupt deal that the two had made to keep him out of the presidency.
Then Jackson came roaring back in 1828 to defeat John Quincy Adams, using a lot of techniques of more modern campaigning and more populist-style rhetoric.
More states shifted to choosing the presidential electors through the popular vote between 1824 and 1828. It did a lot to sanction both Jackson’s politics and, in general, people valuing the popular vote as the thing that would decide the Electoral College vote, rather than state legislatures choosing the electors.
