The Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018 beat the Cleveland Cavaliers for the NBA championship (the teams squared off four straight times starting in 2015, with Northern California fans getting a trophy in three of those seasons). The Dallas Cowboys beat the Buffalo Bills in the 1993 and 1994 Super Bowls. The New York Yankees won the 1977 and 1978 World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers.
While championship round rematches are relatively rare in sports — as the stats about professional basketball, football, and Major League Baseball reflect — they happen even less in their political equivalent, presidential campaigns. But eventually, they do happen, and this is the year, with President Joe Biden set to face his vanquished 2020 Republican rival, former President Donald Trump.
This will be only the second time a losing presidential candidate has come back to challenge the White House occupant who beat him, with Democratic President Grover Cleveland in 1892 scoring an easy knockout of Republican President Benjamin Harrison, the 1888 winner. And it’s been 68 years since party nominees even ran against each other again, with GOP President Dwight D. Eisenhower easily defeating Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and 1956.
Here are the presidential rematches, ranging from barnburners to boring.
1796, 1800 — John Adams vs. Thomas Jefferson
This was the first competitive presidential election since the nation’s first commander in chief, Revolutionary War hero George Washington, effectively won the first two by acclamation. This early presidential fight foreshadowed some of the more admirable aspects of political campaigns — high-minded arguments over complex public policy matters. Along with tactics so cynical, craven, and devious that they’re viewed now as low-tech versions of the social media-infused, slash-and-burn style employed by campaigns today.
Vice President John Adams, a Federalist, faced Thomas Jefferson, secretary of state and a Democratic-Republican. The pair had profound disagreements about how close the fledgling country should grow toward monarchical European powers and a range of other matters, which gave the U.S. electorate a real choice.
But the 1796 campaign’s low blows also stand out. An Adams-aligned newspaper accused Jefferson of having an affair with one of his female slaves. While the less-than-svelt Adams was accused of being overweight and given the nickname “His Rotundity.”
Adams won and Jefferson was elected vice president under the rules of the Constitution at the time. Four years later, Jefferson ran against and beat the incumbent Adams. That campaign was also mean and bitter, to the point that Adams refused to attend Jefferson’s inauguration, slipping out of Washington, D.C., on horseback after midnight on March 4, 1801, hours before his term as president ended.
1824, 1828 — John Quincy Adams vs. Andrew Jackson
The day after Trump was inaugurated as president in 2017, he filed paperwork to seek reelection for the next race, 2020 — a technicality that allowed his campaign to raise money. He declared his candidacy for another White House run shortly after the 2018 midterm elections. This seemed like another extension of the already “permanent campaign” by presidential hopefuls. Yet nearly 200 years earlier, America witnessed another long and drawn-out election between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.
John Quincy Adams, son of the former president and, by 1824, secretary of state under President James Monroe, won the White House by prevailing in a four-way race. He beat former Gen. Andrew Jackson, House Speaker Henry Clay, Treasury Secretary William H. Crawford, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun.
Nobody came close to claiming an Electoral College majority, so the race went to the House for a contingent election. In repeat balloting, Clay, who had been eliminated, used his influence to swing the vote in Adams’s favor, handing him the presidency. Once in office, Adams, coincidentally or not, appointed Clay as secretary of state.
That, in turn, touched off furious charges by Jackson and his supporters that the two men had conspired in a “corrupt bargain” and effectively launched Jackson’s 1828 campaign — nearly four years in advance. Jackson and his supporters spent the time attacking Adams and building a new party, the Democrats, to take him on. In 1828, Jackson won clear popular- and electoral-vote victories, and he went on to serve two terms as president.
1836, 1840 — Martin Van Buren vs. William Henry Harrison
Martin Van Buren, an upstate New York political boss, became Jackson’s vice president and one of the main architects of the Democratic Party. Van Buren ran for the top job himself in 1836. But opponents of the Jackson-Van Buren administration were coming together into a new national party: the Whig Party.
The Whigs were still a work in progress in 1836, and Van Buren ended up facing multiple “opposition” candidates who ran in different states. The most successful was retired Gen. William Henry Harrison, a native of Virginia’s gentry and slaveholding class who remade himself as a frontier soldier, as the first governor of the Indiana territory, followed by other offices that led to a stint as senator from Ohio in the late 1820s. In 1836, Harrison lost the presidential race to Van Buren but built up his national profile.
By 1839, the Whigs were organized enough to hold a national convention, which nominated Harrison for the following year’s election. Van Buren’s popularity, meanwhile, had plunged due to the Panic of 1837 and the perception that he was an effete, out-of-touch aristocrat.
“After a campaign marked by such innovations as sloganeering, mass rallies, image-creation and what today we would call PR stunts, Harrison won the popular vote by 6 percentage points and beat Van Buren decisively in the Electoral College,” Pew Research Center noted in a May 2023 report.
Still, the euphoria was short-lived. As presidential scholar Tevi Troy wrote, “Unfortunately for Harrison, he didn’t get much time to enjoy his prize. He died 31 days after being sworn in, serving the shortest tenure in presidential history.”
1888, 1892 — Grover Cleveland vs. Benjamin Harrison
Biden vs. Trump Part II is already shaping up as one of the meanest, toughest presidential campaigns in U.S. history. Biden, 81, faces unrelenting attacks over his age. While Trump, facing four indictments and 85 cumulative charges, is running a split-screen campaign between campaign rallies and various courtrooms.
Yet the closest analog to this president versus former president race, between Democrat Grover Cleveland and Republican Benjamin Harrison in the late 19th century, doesn’t measure up. Benjamin Harrison’s win in 1888 and his loss four years later were relatively docile campaigns. Policy differences weren’t particularly stark between Benjamin Harrison, a classic Midwestern, corporation-friendly Republican, and Cleveland, a conservative-leaning Democrat who often sided with business over labor unions.
Still, Cleveland was a Democrat and, in 1888, was vulnerable, having alienated many important industries by advocating lower tariffs. Republicans, who favored high “protective” tariffs, nominated Benjamin Harrison, grandson of one-month President William Henry Harrison. He had spent a single, six-year term as senator from Indiana, which, at the time, was a key swing state in the Electoral College puzzle. Though Cleveland won the popular vote, Benjamin Harrison prevailed in the Electoral College.
As Cleveland left the White House, his wife reportedly told the staff to “take good care of all the furniture and ornaments in the house … for I want to find everything just as it is now when we come back again four years from today.” Although Cleveland stayed out of politics at first, by 1891, he was openly criticizing the Benjamin Harrison administration and the Republican-controlled Congress for raising tariff rates and increasing the money supply by coining more silver dollars.
Democrats renominated Cleveland in 1892, and President Benjamin Harrison didn’t put up much of a fight in his reelection bid, as the health of first lady Caroline declined. She died from tuberculosis two weeks before the election, on Oct. 25.
A bit over four months later, as Mrs. Cleveland had predicted, she and her husband, the past and present president, returned to the White House.
1896, 1900 — William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryan
One wildcard question in the 2024 presidential race is how much, if at all, the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates. It’s not that most voters are avid watchers of the U.S. central bank. But its decisions very much affect inflation, which ran sky-high during the COVID-19 pandemic and is still sticking voters with higher prices for food and a range of other everyday necessities.
Gilded Age voters grappled with a version of the inflation question in the 1896 election, the first of Republican William McKinley’s two wins over Democratic rival William Jennings Bryan, in the fight about whether U.S. currency should be pegged to silver or gold, a now seemingly obscure monetary battle that seems all the more distant in a time of diminished cash use, with credit and debit cards the norm.
The conflict went back to shortly after Cleveland’s reelection. The economy plunged into a deep depression. That, along with labor unrest, led Democrats to make a leftward turn, the first step toward the progressive coalition Democrats are known as today. In 1896, the Democrats turned to Bryan, 36, a former four-year House member from Nebraska and a forceful opponent of the gold standard. Bryan instead advocated “free and unlimited coinage of silver,” which he said would help debt-ridden farmers and working people by inflating the money supply.
The Republicans nominated William McKinley, a business-oriented conservative and former Ohio governor who favored high tariffs and the gold standard, which he called “sound money.” McKinley’s campaign raised an unprecedented sum from big corporations and used it to forge a coalition of industrial workers and urban dwellers, especially immigrants, in the Northeast and Midwest.
Despite traveling thousands of miles and giving hundreds of speeches, Bryan came up short in both the popular and electoral votes. But he came close enough that he had no real opposition for the Democratic nomination in 1900 when he faced McKinley again.
But by the 1900 presidential race, the free-silver matter had receded somewhat, and the economy was improving. McKinley won easily, with a higher share of the popular vote than four years before. He also flipped six states Bryan had carried four years earlier, while Bryan changed only one.
1952, 1956 — Dwight D. Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson
In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower easily ended 20 years of Democratic White House rule. Eisenhower had a lot going for him in his defeat of Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson, a favorite of the Democratic intelligentsia but hardly a candidate with broad appeal. Eisenhower had led the Allied armies to victory in Europe during World War II and was popular with members of both parties.
Eisenhower, though a political newcomer, proved to be a formidable campaigner, attacking the Democrats over “Korea, Communism and corruption.” He ended up taking 55% of the popular vote in 1952, winning all but nine states.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Four years later, with the Korean War over and the economy booming, Eisenhower had even greater success against Democratic nominee Stevenson. The incumbent president rolled to victory with 57% of the popular vote and the electoral votes of all but seven states.
Though one state, oddly, flipped from red to blue. Missouri backed Stevenson, marking the only time in the century from 1904 to 2004 that it didn’t support the presidential race winner, long making it the premiere presidential bellwether.
David Mark is managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.