1888 United States presidential election in Kentucky

1888 United States presidential election in Kentucky
← 1884 November 6, 1888 1892 →
 
Nominee Grover Cleveland Benjamin Harrison
Party Democratic Republican
Home state New York Indiana
Running mate Allen Thurman Levi P. Morton
Electoral vote 13 0
Popular vote 183,830 155,138
Percentage 53.30% 44.98%

County Results

President before election

Grover Cleveland
Democratic

Elected President

Benjamin Harrison
Republican

The 1888 United States presidential election in Kentucky took place on November 6, 1888. All contemporary thirty-eight states were part of the 1888 United States presidential election. Kentucky voters chose thirteen electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president. Ever since the Civil War, Kentucky had been shaped politically by divisions created by that war between secessionist, Democratic counties and Unionist, Republican ones,[1] although the state as a whole leaned Democratic throughout this era and the GOP would never carry the state during the Third Party System at either presidential[2] or gubernatorial level.[3] What would become a long-lived partisan system[1] after the state was freed from the direct control of former Confederates would not be seriously affected by the first post-war insurgency movement – that of the Greenback Party at the tail end of the 1870s in the secessionist Jackson Purchase region.[3] Incumbent president Grover Cleveland lost four points on his 1884 performance, but still carried the state comfortably against GOP nominee Benjamin Harrison.

As of the 2020 presidential election, this is the last occasion when a Democratic presidential candidate passed thirty percent in rock-ribbed Unionist and Republican Clinton County.

  1. ^ a b Sullivan, Robert David; ‘How the Red and Blue Map Evolved Over the Past Century’; America Magazine in The National Catholic Review; June 29, 2016
  2. ^ Phillips, Kevin P.; The Emerging Republican Majority, p. 350 ISBN 978-0-691-16324-6
  3. ^ a b Brown, Thomas J.; ‘The Roots of Bluegrass Insurgency: An Analysis of the Populist Movement in Kentucky’; The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Summer 1980), pp. 219-242