Watershed Elections

Five presidential contests stand out as “watershed elections” or crucial turning points in American political history. They are the elections of 1800, 1828, 1860, 1896, and 1932. Each led to a long-lasting shift in party power and a fundamental change in national policy.

In 1800 Thomas Jefferson of the democratic-republican party defeated incumbent President John Adams of the federalist party with 53 percent of the vote. This was the first time in the modern world that an incumbent national executive was removed from office by a peaceful revolution at the ballot box. Jefferson's ascension to office confirmed the success of the fledging American political system, and it also set the stage for the two-party system.

With the effective demise of Adams's Federalist Party by 1816, the Democratic-Republican Party evolved into an amorphous organization that incorporated virtually all political viewpoints. The inherent instability of a one-party system became apparent in 1824 when four candidates competed for the presidency, with no one getting a majority of the popular or electoral vote. As a result, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, which chose John Quincy Adams—even though Andrew Jackson had won more popular and electoral votes. (See electoral anomalies.)

Four years later, Jackson and Adams squared off directly in what historians now view as the nation's second watershed election. Jackson crushed Adams with 68 percent of the vote, which led to the emergence of the new democratic party with Jackson as its leader. The party, which dominated [Page 670]politics until 1860, abandoned the nationalism of earlier presidents, and it took staunchly proslavery stands. The rival Democratic-Republican Party coalesced into the whig party, which disintegrated in the 1850s as antislavery advocates in the North formed the new republican party.

The Republicans came of age in 1860, which was the third watershed election. Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won a majority of the electoral college in a highly fractured, four-way contest, even though he received just 39.8 percent of the vote and no support at all in the South. Eleven southern states seceded from the nation in protest of the Republicans' antislavery platform. Lincoln's party lost seats in the 1862 midterm elections, but the party firmly established itself in 1864, thanks to military victories over the secessionist states. Lincoln won reelection in 1864—the first reelected president since Jackson. Republicans, favoring a strong national government and federal protections for the recently emancipated slaves, dominated politics for the next two decades.

The fourth watershed election occurred in 1896, when Democrats nominated the radical midwestern populist William Jennings Bryan. The Democratic platform stressed agrarian reform, and Republicans responded with a well-organized, $4 million campaign that appealed to industry leaders, urban workers, and some new immigrant groups. The Republican candidate, William McKinley, won the election, setting the stage for Republican dominance for most of the next thirty-six years. During most of that time, Republicans generally sided with business leaders in public policy matters.

The collapse of the American economy following the stock market crash of 1929 led to the most successful political alignment in American history. In 1932, running against President Herbert Hoover's failure to come to terms with the Great Depression on either a policy or a psychological level, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt carried forty-two states, and Democrats swept to overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate. The Democrats would hold the White House for twenty-eight of the next thirty-six years, and control one or both chambers of Congress for nearly all of the subsequent six decades. The “Roosevelt coalition” of urban workers, midwestern and southern farmers, Catholics, Jews, eastern and southern European immigrants and their children, Asian Americans, southern whites, northern blacks, and intellectuals seemed invincible until the Vietnam War and the conflicts over desegregation tore it apart.

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