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444 members of the Electoral College 223 electoral votes needed to win | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Turnout | 75.8%[1]  4.7 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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 Presidential election results map. Blue denotes states won by Cleveland/Stevenson, red denotes those won by Harrison/Reid, green denotes those won by Weaver/Field. Numbers indicate the number of electoral votes allotted to each state. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The 1892 United States presidential election was the 27th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 1892. In the fourth rematch in American history, the Democratic nominee, former president Grover Cleveland, defeated the Republican incumbent, President Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland's victory made him the first president in American history to be elected to a non-consecutive second term, a feat that would not be repeated until Donald Trump was elected again in 2024. This was the first of two occasions when incumbents were defeated in consecutive elections—the second being Gerald Ford's loss in 1976 to Jimmy Carter followed by Carter's loss in 1980 to Ronald Reagan.
This was the first time a Republican president lost reelection. The Democrats did not win another presidential election until 1912, which is the only other election with two candidates who served as president. Harrison's loss was also the second time an elected president lost the popular vote twice, the first being John Quincy Adams in the 1820s. This feat was not repeated until Donald Trump lost the popular vote in 2016 and 2020.[2]
Though some Republicans opposed Harrison's renomination, he defeated James G. Blaine and William McKinley on the first presidential ballot of the 1892 Republican National Convention. Cleveland defeated challenges by David B. Hill and Horace Boies on the first presidential ballot of the 1892 Democratic National Convention, becoming the fourth presidential candidate to be nominated for president in three elections, after Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. Groups from The Grange and the Knights of Labor joined to form a new party called the Populist Party. It had a ticket led by former congressman James B. Weaver of Iowa.
The campaign centered mainly on economic issues, especially the protectionist 1890 McKinley Tariff. Cleveland ran on a platform of lowering the tariff and opposed the Republicans' 1890 voting rights proposal. He was also a proponent of the gold standard, while the Republicans and Populists both supported bimetallism.
Cleveland swept the Solid South and won several important swing states, taking a majority of the electoral vote and a plurality of the popular vote. Weaver won 8.6% of the popular vote and carried several Western states, while John Bidwell of the Prohibition Party won 2.2% of the popular vote.
- ^ "National General Election VEP Turnout Rates, 1789–Present". United States Election Project. CQ Press.
- ^ Enten, Harry (January 10, 2021). "How Trump led Republicans to historic losses". CNN. Retrieved February 3, 2021.