The 1896 and 1996 US Elections: A Re-emerging ‘Problem’ of the South and West?

Abstract

ONE OF THE MORE INTERESTING ASPECTS OF THE 1996 US presidential election was the evident inverse relationship between the results that year and those of the election contested exactly one hundred years earlier. Most of the states won by Bill Clinton were carried by the Republican William McKinley in 1896, while nearly all the states won by Bob Dole were those carried by William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic candidate. In 1896 there were 45 states, and of them 28 were won by the Democrats and 17 by the Republicans in the 1996 presidential election. Twenty-one of the 28 Democratic states in 1996 (or 75 per cent of the total) had been Republican a hundred years earlier; 15 of the 17 Republican states in 1996 (or 88 per cent of the total) went for the Democrats in 1896. This impression of the two election years being mirror images of each other, at least so far as the pattern of presidential results is concerned, is even more evident when looking at the distribution of Electoral College (EC) votes. (The five states created since 1896 are omitted from the entire discussion.) Of the 358 EC votes the 282 that went to the Democrats were from ‘McKinley states’, and they constitute 78 per cent of the Democrat total. In the case of the Republicans, 133 out of 148 EC votes were from ‘Bryanite states’ - that is 90 per cent of the 1996 Republican EC vote.