Trump vs. history: Former presidents typically implode on their comeback tours

Grover Cleveland is the historical standard among American presidents who lose or leave office then seek to regain it. The reason is simple: he achieved his goal.

Cleveland, however, is hardly the only commander-in-chief who tried to win back what was lost. The difference is that the historical record for ex-presidents trying for a comeback is pretty terrible.

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And there are some Democrats who, toward the end of Cleveland’s second term in the late 1880s, wished Uncle Jumbo had stayed retired from politics — a cautionary tale for former President Donald Trump and his Republicans.

In the waning days of the Trump Administration, many Americans learned that the then-president wanted to create a “Garden of American Heroes,” replete with 244 statues of a curious variety of figures. They ranged from Christopher Columbus to Hannah Arendt to Muhammad Ali to Barry Goldwater.

Among these proposed statue subjects: Cleveland, the only man to win, then lose then win (again) the White House. Perhaps Trump hoped to channel Cleveland and become the second man to repeat this presidential accomplishment.

If so, Trump should read up on American presidential history.

The first president to be voted out — and then try to reclaim the Oval Office — was Martin Van Buren of the Democratic Party. In 1840, he was badly thumped by William Henry Harrison, a member of the Whig Party, after a single term by an Electoral College vote of 234-60. (Whigs also won majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate, thanks to the disastrous Panic of 1837.)

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Van Buren attempted a comeback in the 1844 nomination battle, where he lost out to James K. Polk. When Lewis Cass won the Democratic nomination in 1848, Van Buren helped form an odd coalition of anti-slavery Democrats, Whigs and the Liberty Party.

Known as the “Free Soil Party,” they got more votes than any other third party to that date but only managed 10.1 percent of the popular vote in the 1848 election and no Electoral College votes. This officially ended the presidential aspirations of Van Buren, who’d go on to endorse presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan — widely held by historians to be two of the nation’s worst presidents — during the following two election cycles.

Another president who fared poorly in his presidency and tried for a comeback was Millard Fillmore.

Taking over for President Zachary Taylor, a Whig who died in 1850, Fillmore was not brought back in 1852 by the Whigs, despite showing some interest in running for reelection.

His nativist views led the American Party to nominate him in 1856, though this anti-immigrant third party was better known as the “Know Nothing” Party. Fillmore managed only eight Electoral College votes in the 1856 election, taking Maryland.

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He finished third behind the new Republican Party’s nominee as well as the winner: Buchanan, a Democrat. Fillmore at least fared better than Van Buren, garnering 21.5 percent of the popular vote. But when you finish third in a three-way race, it’s not a good result.

Then there’s Teddy Roosevelt. After leaving Washington, D.C., in 1908, after more than seven years as president, Roosevelt became dismayed with President William Howard Taft’s inaction on progressive policies and occasional nods toward the conservative faction of the Republican Party.

Having lost the GOP nomination to Taft in 1912, Roosevelt sought to run for president on the Progressive Party ticket — you’ll likely know this party as the “Bull Moose” Party. Though Roosevelt pulled off a rare feat as a third-party candidate who earned second place, his 88 Electoral College votes (with eight for Taft) finished well behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s 435 Electoral College votes in the 1912 election. Roosevelt did get 27.4 percent of the popular vote, ahead of Taft’s 23.2 percent, but well behind Wilson’s total of 41.8 percent.

Two other cases are also worth noting.

In 1880, Ulysses S. Grant sought a third presidential term, four years after voluntarily stepping down after the second of his two previous terms — and decades before a constitutional amendment prohibited presidents from serving three or more of their own terms. But Grant’s Republican Party had lost interest in his politics and instead nominated James A. Garfield, who won the White House but died short of seven months into his term, the victim of an assassin’s bullet.

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Herbert Hoover’s flaccid attempt to win back the White House in 1936 landed stillborn at that year’s Republican National Convention, when he received precisely zero votes despite delivering a rousing speech. Hoover backed that year’s nominee, Kansas Gov. Alf Landon, who President Franklin D. Roosevelt obliterated at the polls that November.

Hoover again found himself in the nomination mix for 1940, but only received a handful of votes across Republican National Convention delegates’ several ballots and became an also-ran behind Wendell Wilkie. (Roosevelt shellacked him, too, come November 1940.)

As noted earlier, Cleveland avenged his surprise loss to Republican Benjamin Harrison four years earlier, with a comeback, and winning the 1892 election. But Cleveland’s second term proved disastrous, thanks largely to the Panic of 1893 and the harsh response to the Pullman Strike that alienated him from many in his Democratic Party. He wasn’t even considered for another term after four years, and his party went on to lose in 1896, 1900, 1904, and 1908; all defeats were by wide margins.

In the table, you can see that despite the name recognition and purported experience with the Executive Branch, few of the ex-presidents performed well in their comeback tours.

The average former president trying to regain old glory earned barely a quarter of the popular vote, and less than 100 Electoral College votes. Only Roosevelt was considered to have had a strong presidential term in office. And these losses in presidential runs don’t even cover the defeats in presidential party nominations suffered by Van Buren in 1844 and Roosevelt in 1912.

That makes Cleveland’s victory all the more improbable, though his awful second term had most Democratic supporters at the time wishing he had stayed retired by the voters in 1888.

John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His X account is @JohnTures2.