The Elections of Grover Cleveland

Heather Cox Richardson

Grover Cleveland, by Anders Zorn, 1899.

On November 4, 1884, voters elected Grover Cleveland, the reform-minded governor of New York, to the White House. Today, people remember Cleveland primarily because he is the only president who served two non-consecutive terms. In fact, there was much more to Cleveland. He was a remarkably progressive and principled president, who tried to stop late 19th-century America from falling under the control of big business. Indeed, his opposition to the growing power of money in politics is the reason his terms were non-consecutive.

While we tend to forget it, Grover Cleveland actually captured the majority of the popular vote in 1884, 1892, and in 1888, the year he lost the election. In that year, despite a majority of about 100,000 votes, he lost to Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. This loss was not a random quirk of the American electoral system. Harrison’s men had been gunning for Cleveland from the day the 1884 election had been decided. Well aware that they could not win the popular vote, they focused on the Electoral College.